Heechee Rendezvous

by Frederik Pohl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And there I bogged down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Fading? Or fuguing? “Sigfrid,” I cried, “please! Tell us what scared Albert into running away! Or if you can’t do that, just get him here so we can talk to him!”

  More fuzz. I couldn’t even tell if he was looking at me anymore. “Tell me!” I commanded, and from that fuzzy holographic shadow came an answer:

  “The kugelblitz.”

  “What? What’s a kugelblitz?” I stared around in frustration. “Damn it, get him here so he can tell us for himself.”

  “Is here, Robin,” whispered Essie in my ear.

  And the image sharpened again, but it wasn’t Sigfrid anymore. The neat Freud face had softened and widened into the gentle, pouchy German band leader, and the white hair crowned the sad eyes of my best and closest friend.

  “I am here, Robin,” said Albert Einstein sorrowfully. “I thank you for your help. I don’t know if you’ll thank me, though.”

  Albert was right about that. I didn’t thank him.

  Albert was also wrong about that, or right for wrong reasons, because the reason I didn’t thank him was not merely that what he said was so grisly unpleasant, so scary incomprehensible, but also that I was in no position to when he had finished.

  My position wasn’t much better when he began, because the letdown when he came back let me down all the way. I was drained. Exhausted. It was perfectly expectable that I should be exhausted, I told myself, because God knew it had been about as stressful a strain as I had ever been through, but it felt worse than simple exhaustion. It felt terminal. It wasn’t just my b
elly or my arms or my head; it was as though all the power were draining out of all my batteries at once, and it took all the concentration I could get together to pay attention to what he was saying.

  “I was not precisely in fugue, as you call it,” he said, turning the unlit pipe over in his fingers. He had not bothered to be comical. He was wearing sweatshirt and slacks, but his feet were in shoes and the shoelaces were tied. “It is true that the dichotomy existed, and that it rendered me vulnerable—you will understand, Mrs. Broadhead, a contradiction in my programing; I found myself looping. Since you made me homeostatic there was another imperative: to repair the malfunction.”

  Essie nodded regretfully. “Homeostasis, yes. But self-repair implies self-diagnosis. Should have consulted me for check!”

  “I thought not, Mrs. Broadhead,” he said. “With all respect, the difficulties were in areas in which I am better equipped to function than you.”

  “Cosmology, ha!”

  I stirred myself to speak—it wasn’t easy, because the lethargy was strong. “Would you mind, please, just saying what you did, Albert?”

  He said slowly, “What I did is easy, Robin. I decided to try to resolve these conflicts. I know they seem more important to me than to you; you can be quite happy without settling cosmological questions, but I cannot. I devoted more and more of my capacity to study. As you may not know, I included a great many Heechee fans in the datastores for this ship, some of which had never been analyzed properly. It was a very difficult task, and at the same time I was making observations of my own.”

  “What you did, Albert!” I begged.

  “But that is what I did. In the Heechee datastores I found many references to what we have called the missing mass. You remember, Robin. That mass which the universe should have to account for its gravitational behavior, but which no astronomer has been able to find—”

  “I remember!”

  “Yes. Well, I may have found it.” He sat brooding for a moment. “I’m afraid that this did not solve my problem, though. It made it worse. If you had not been able to reach me through your clever little trick of talking through my subset Sigfrid I might be looping yet—”

  “Found what?” I cried. The flowing adrenaline almost, but not quite, took my mind off the way my body was notifying me of its troubles.

  He waved a hand at the viewscreen, and I saw there was something on it.

  In that first quick glance, what I saw on the screen did not make sense. And when I did give it a second look, and a more careful one, what stopped me cold and staring was not what was important.

  The screen showed mostly nothing at all. There was a corner of a whirlpool of light at one edge of it—a galaxy, of course; I thought it looked like M-31 in Andromeda as much as anything, but I am no expert in galaxies. Especially when I see them without any spattering of stars around them, and there was no such spattering here.

  There was something like stars. Little points of light, here and there. But they weren’t stars, because they were winking and flickering like Christmas-tree lights. Think of a couple dozen fireflies, on a cold night so they aren’t flashing their little passionate pleas very often, quite far away so that they aren’t easy to see. That was what they looked like. The most conspicuous object among them, still not very conspicuous, was something that looked a little like the nonrotating black hole I had once lost Klara in, but not as large and not as threatening. And all of this was queer, but it was not what shocked a gasp out of me. I heard noises from the others, too. “It’s a ship!” Dolly whispered, shakily. And so it was.

  Albert said so. He turned around gravely. “That is a ship, yes, Mrs. Walthers,” he said. “It is, in fact, the Heechee ship we saw before, I am nearly certain. I have been wondering if I could establish communication with it.”

  “Communication! With the Heechee! Albert,” I shouted, “I know you’re crazy, but don’t you realize how dangerous that is?”

  “As to danger,” he said somberly, “I am much more afraid of the kugelblitz.”

  “Kugelblitz?” I had lost my temper completely. “Albert, you horse’s ass, I don’t know what a kugelblitz is and I don’t much care. What I care about is that you’ve damn near killed us all, and—”

  I stopped, because Essie’s hand on my mouth stopped me. “Shut up, Robin!” she hissed. “You want drive him to fugue again? Now, Albert,” she said, quite calmly, “yes, please tell us what is kugelblitz. That thing looks to me like black hole, actually.”

  He passed a hand over his forehead. “The central object, you mean. Yes, it is a kind of black hole. But there is not one black hole there; there are many. I have not been able to count how many, since they cannot be detected except when there is some infall of matter to produce radiation, and there is not much matter out here between galaxies—”

  “Between galaxies?” cried Walthers, and then stopped with Essie’s eyes on him.

  “Yes, Albert, please go on,” she encouraged.

  “I do not know how many black holes are present. In excess of ten. Probably in excess of ten squared, all in all.” He glanced at me beseechingly. “Robin, do you have any idea how strange that is? How can one account for this?”

  “I not only can’t account for it; I don’t even know what a kugelblitz is.”

  “Oh, good heavens, Robin,” he said impatiently, “we have discussed this sort of thing before. A black hole results from the collapse of matter to an extraordinary density. John Wheeler was the first person to predict the existence of another form of black hole, containing not matter but energy—so much energy, so densely packed, that its own mass pulled space around it. That is called a kugelblitz!”

  He sighed, then said, “I have two speculations. The first is that this entire construct is an artifact. The kugelblitz is surrounded by black holes; I think to attract any loose matter—of which there is not much here in the first place—to keep it from falling into the kugelblitz itself. The second speculation is that I think we may be looking at the missing mass.”

  I jumped up. “Albert,” I cried, “do you know what you’re saying? You mean somebody made that thing? You mean—” I jumped up and did not finish the sentence.

  I did not finish the sentence, because I couldn’t. Part of the reason was that there were too many scary notions floating around in my head; for if someone had made the kugelblitz, and if the kugelblitz was part of this “missing mass,” then the obvious conclusion was that somebody was tampering with the laws of the universe itself, trying to reverse the expansion, for reasons that I could not (then) guess.

  The other reason was that I fell over.

  I fell over because for some reason my legs would not support me. There was a blinding pain in the side of my head, just about the ear. Everything went all gray and swimmy.

  I heard Albert’s voice cry out, “Oh, Robin! I haven’t been paying attention to your physical state!”

  I did tell Robin several times what a kugelblitz was—a black hole caused by the collapse of a large quantity of energy, rather than a large quantity of matter—but as nobody had ever seen one he didn’t really listen. I also told him about the general state of intergalactic space—very little free matter or energy, barring scanty photon flux from distant galaxies, and, of course, the universal 3.7K radiation—which is what made it such a good place to put a kugelblitz, when you didn’t want anything else to fall into it.

  “My what?” I asked. Or tried to ask. It didn’t come out well. My lips did not seem to want to form the words properly, and I felt suddenly very sleepy. That first quick explosion of localized pain had come and gone, but there was a distant awareness of pain, oh, yes, big pain, not very far away and rapidly coming closer.

  They say that there is a selective amnesia for pain. You don’t remember that root-canal job except, almost fondly, as a humorously rotten experience; if it were not for this, they say, no woman would have more than one child. That is true for most of you, I suppose. I’m sure it was true for me for a goo
d many years, but not now.

  Now I remember very clearly indeed and, yes, it is with almost humorous affection. What had happened in my head had provided its own anesthesia, and what I experienced was unclear. But I remember that unclearness with great clarity. I remember the panicky talk, and being hauled to a couch; I remember long dialogues and the tiny bite of needles as Albert fed me medication and took samples of me. And I remember Essie sobbing.

  She was cradling my head in her lap. Though she was talking past me to Albert, and mostly in Russian, I heard my name often enough to know she was talking about me. I tried to reach up to pat her cheek. “I’m dying,” I said—or tried to say.

  She understood me. She leaned over me, her long hair drifting across my face. “Very dear Robin,” she crooned, “is true, yes, you are dying. Or your body is. But that does not mean an end to you.”

  Now, we had discussed religion from time to time over the decades we’d been together. I knew her beliefs. I even knew my own. Essie, I wanted to say, you’ve never lied to me before, you don’t have to do it now to try to ease dying for me. It’s all right. But all that came out was something like:

  “Does so!”

  Tears dripped over my face as she rocked me, crooning, “No. Truly no, dearest Robin. Is a chance, a very good chance—”

  I made a tremendous effort. “There…is…no…hereafter,” I said, strongly, spacing the words out with the best articulation I could manage. It may not have been clear, but she understood me. She bent and kissed my forehead. I felt her lips move against my skin as she whispered:

  “Yes. Is a hereafter now.”

  Or maybe she said “a Here After.”

  22

  Is There Life after Death?

  And the stars sailed on. They didn’t care what was happening to one biped mammalian intelligent—well, semiintelligent—living thing, simply because it happened to be me. I have always subscribed to the egocentric view of cosmology. I’m in the middle and everything ranges itself on one side of me or another; “normal” is what I am; “important” is what is near to me; “significant” is what I perceive as important. That was the view I subscribed to, but the universe didn’t. It went right on as though I didn’t matter at all.