Heechee Rendezvous

by Frederik Pohl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “A terrorist? Here?”

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

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

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

  “When you were what?”

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

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

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

  “There’s no better time than the present, Robin.” He smiled, preening himself. He did have more solidity to him. The old holograms showed him in a dozen or so characteristic poses, with baggy sweater or tee shirt, socks on or off, sneakers or slippers, pipe or pencil. Today he wore a tee shirt, to be sure, but over it was one of those baggy European sweaters that button up the front and have pockets and might as well be a jacket, really, except that they’re loosely knitted wool. There was a button on the sweater that read Two Percent, and a faint pale stubble around the chin that suggested he hadn’t shaved that morning. Well, of course he hadn’t shaved! He never would, either, being nothing more than a holographic projection of a computer construct—but so convincing and jazzy that I almost offered to lend him my razor!

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

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

  “Do you believe that now?”

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

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

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

  “The what?”

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

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

  “Ah, Robin, I perceive you are joking with me,” he said in gentle reproof. “Of course, nothing so vast just yet. But there is a physicist in Laguna Beach—Beckfurt? You know his work? The one who proposed a system for achieving flat space?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Exactly, my dear boy!”

  “And this makes you happy?”

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

  I sat back, staring at him. This new Albert was going to take some getting used to. He did not seem to notice anything amiss; he was babbling on happily about all the half-baked notions that had been pouring in on him ever since the awards were announced, and what interesting notions he had thought of because of them.

  Robin did not quite understand Davies’s Paradox, but then he didn’t even understand the more famous Olbers’s Paradox, which bothered astronomers way back in the nineteenth century. Olbers said: If the universe is infinite, there should be an infinite number of stars. That means that we should see not individual stars in a black sky, but a solid dome of starlight, blinding white. And he proved it mathematically. (What he didn’t know was that the stars were grouped into galaxies, which changed the mathematics.) So a century later Paul Davies said: If it’s true that the universe is cyclical, expanding and contracting over and over, then if it is possible for a little bit of matter or energy to stay out of the crunch and cross over to the next universe, then in infinite time that leftover light would increase infinitely and we’d have an Olbers sky again. What he didn’t know was that the number of oscillations in which a little bit of the energy was left out was not infinite. We happened to be in the very first of them.

  Thought of?

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

  “When what, Robin?”

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

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

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

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

  She looked at him in a puzzled way, then shook her head. “Dear Robin,” she said, “I have something I must tell you. One moment.” She turned to Albert and shot three or four fast Russian sentences at him. He nodded, looking grave.

  It takes me a long time to see what is before me sometimes, but by now it was evident. Something was going on that I should know about. “Come on, Essie,” I said, alarmed, and even more alarmed because I didn’t know what I was alarmed about. “What’s happening? Has Wan done something?”

  She said soberly, “Wan has left Gateway, and not a moment too soon, to be sure, since is in trouble with Gateway Corp and with many others as well. But is not of Wan I wish to speak. Is of woman I observed in my shop. She did closely resemble, dear Robin, woman whom you loved before me named Gelle-Klara Moynlin. So close that I thought perhaps a daughter.”

  I stared at her. “What—How do you know what Klara looked like, anyway?”

  “Oh, Robin,” she said impatiently. “Twenty-five years and I a specialist in data retrieval. You think I would not arrange to know? Know her exactly, Robin. Every datum on record.”

  “Yes, but—she never had a daughter, you know.” I stopped, suddenly wondering if indeed I would know. I had loved Klara very much, but not for very long. It was quite possible there were things in her history she had not got around to telling me.

  “Actually,” said Essie apologetically, “first guess was maybe she was your own daughter. Only theory, you know. But was possible. Could have knocked lady up, you know. But now—” She turned to Albert questioningly. “Albert? Have completed search?”

  “I have, Mrs. Broadhead.” He nodded, looking grave. “There is nothing in Gelle-Klara Moynlin’s record to suggest she ever bore a child.”

  “And?”

  He reached for his pipe and fumbled with it. “There is no question about the identity, Mrs. Broadhead. She checked in two days ago, with Wan.”

  Essie sighed. “Then,” she said bravely, “is no doubt at all. Woman in shop was Klara herself, no impostor.”

  At that moment, trying to take in what I had been told, what I wished for most in the world, or at that moment most urgently at any rate, was the soothing, healing presence of my old analysis program, Sigfrid von Shrink. I needed help.

  Klara? Alive? Here? And if this impossibility was true, what should I do about it?

  It was easy enough for me to tell myself I owed Klara nothing I had not already paid. The coin I paid in was a long time of mourning, a deep and abiding love, a sense of loss that even three decades had not entirely cured. She had been taken away from me, across a gulf I could not span, and the only thing that made that bearable to me was that I had finally come to believe that it was Not My Fault.

  But the gulf had somehow spanned itself. Here she was! And here was I, with a well-established wife and a well-ordered life, and no room in it for the woman I had promised to love exclusively and always.

  “Is more,” said Essie, watching my face.

  I was not keeping up with the conversation very well. “Yes?”

  “Is more. Wan arrived with two women, not one. Second woman was Dolly Walthers, unfaithful wife of person we saw in Rotterdam, you know? Young person. Weeping, eye makeup smeared—pretty young woman, but not in pretty frame of mind. U.S. military police arrested her when Wan left without clearance, so I went to talk to her.”

  “Dolly Walthers?”

  “Oh, Robin, listen to me, please! Yes, Dolly Walthers. Could tell me very little, though, because MPs had other plans for her. Americans wanted to take her to High Pentagon. Brazilian MPs tried to stop them. Big argument, but Americans finally won.”

  I nodded to show I was comprehending. “I see. The Americans have arrested Dolly Walthers.”

  Essie studied me sharply. “Are you all right, Robin?”

  “Certainly I’m all right. I’m only a little worried, because if there’s friction between the Americans and the Brazilians I hope it doesn’t keep them from putting their data together.”

  “Au,” said Essie, nodding, “now is clear. Could tell you were worried about something, was not sure what it was.” And then she bit her lip. “Excuse me please, dear Robin. I am a little upset, too, I think.”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed, twitching irritably as the anisokinetic mattress poked at her. “Practical matters first,” she said, frowning. “What do we do now? These are alternatives. One, go off to investigate object Walthers detected, as planned. Two, attempt to discover more information about Gelle-Klara Moynlin. Three, eat something and get good night’s sleep before doing anything else—for,” she added reprovingly, “must not forget, Robin, you are still somewhat convalescent from major abdominal surgery. I personally lean toward third alternative, what do you think?”

  As I was mulling over this difficult question Albert cleared his throat. “Mrs. Broadhead? It has occurred to me that it would not be very expensive, a few hundred thousand dollars perhaps, to charter a One for a few days and send it on a photoreconnaissance mission.” I peered at him, trying to follow his meaning. “That is,” he explained, “we could have it seek the object you a
re interested in, locate it, observe it, and report to us. Single-passenger ships are not in great demand now, I believe, and at any rate there are several available here on Gateway.”

  “What a good idea!” Essie cried. “Settled then, all right? Arrange same, Albert, and at same time cook us up something delicious for first meal on, ah, on new ship True Love.”

  Myself interposing no objection, that is what we did. Myself interposed no objection because myself was in shock. The worst thing about being in shock is that you don’t know it while you’re in it. I thought I was quite lucid and aware. So I ate whatever it was they put in front of me, and did not notice anything strange until Essie was tucking me into the big bouncy bed. “You haven’t been saying anything,” I said.

  “Is because last ten times I spoke to you, dear Robin, you did not respond,” she said, not accusingly at all. “Will see you in morning.”

  I figured the implications of that out pretty quickly. “You’re going to sleep in the guest cabin, then?”

  “Yes. Not in anger, dear, or even in sorrow. Just to let you be by yourself for a bit, all right?”

  “I guess so. I mean, yes, sure, honey, that’s probably a good idea,” I said, beginning to register the notion that Essie really was upset and even to think that I should concern myself about it. I took her hand and kissed the wrist before letting it go, and bestirred myself to offer some conversation. “Essie? Should I have consulted you before naming the ship?”

  She pursed her lips. “True Love is good name,” she said judiciously.

  But she did seem to have reservations, and I didn’t know why. “I would have asked you,” I explained, “but it seemed tacky to do that. I mean, to ask the person you’re naming it after, like asking you what you want for your birthday instead of thinking up something by myself.”