The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

  His name was Beaupre Heimat, and once he had been a two-star general on the High Pentagon.

  It was Heimat who had persuaded Klara’s new husband that the only way to achieve peace and justice was to blow a lot of people up. That was one of the least of his crimes.

  Among other bad things, he once tried to kill me personally.

  It may have been twice, because not everything came out at his trial. With me he failed. With several hundred others, though—at least several hundred—he was more efficient. Heimat refused to plead guilty to murder at his trial. He wouldn’t call it murder. He called it revolutionary justice, because he was a terrorist. The court, on the other hand, had no trouble calling it murder—calling each individual case of it murder—and they gave him a life sentence for each one of the deaths. And as Heimat had been not just any mixed-up moke but a trusted general in the American space forces, they made the sentences consecutive. Altogether, Heimat’s sentences added up to an aggregate minimum stay in jail of 8,750 years, but time had passed and now Heimat had only 8,683 yet to serve.

  He had every reason to believe that he would serve every day of those years, too, because even felons were entitled to machine storage. His prison term would not automatically end with his death.

  Actually, I rather enjoy talking about General Beaupre Heimat now. It makes a welcome relief. After Albert’s soul-numbing display of immensity and eternity, it is relaxing to think about a mere person, who is merely despicable.

  One day for Heimat was much like every other. This is how he started his days:

  When he woke up, the bedthing was still and curled beside him, but he knew she wasn’t asleep. He also knew she was not a she but an it, but as Heimat had almost nothing but its for company anymore, he had stopped recognizing the difference.

  As Heimat threw his legs over the side of the bed, she started to get up, too. He pushed her back down. Gently enough, after the violence of the night before. Not all that gently, because (disappointingly) she was very strong.

  She watched him dress for a moment before she asked, “Where are you going?”

  “Why,” said Heimat, “I think I will walk down to the beach, then swim across the channel and catch a plane to Los Angeles, where I propose to blow up a few buildings.” He waited a moment for a response, and got none. He hadn’t expected any. Typically, she had no sense of humor. It was a chronic disappointment. Heimat would have enjoyed his life a great deal more if he could have made some of his bedthings laugh—though not, of course, as much as if he had been able to make them weep in pain. The authorities gave him female constructions that looked and felt and smelled and tasted like humans, why couldn’t they be considerate enough to make them feel?

  It did not occur to Heimat that he had not earned much consideration from the authorities, or from anyone else.

  Outside the door his guardthing winked and whispered, “What do you say, Heimat? Was she all right?”

  “Not really.” Heimat kept walking and finished the conversation without turning his head: “I told you I like blondes. Little young ones. Fragile.”

  The guard called after him, “I’ll see what I can do tonight,” but Heimat didn’t answer. He was thinking of the word he had just used—“fragile”—and the way it made him feel. Fragile. A tiny fragile blonde. A live one! A real female human one, with her fragile little limbs twisted and broken and her mouth screaming and her face contorted in pain—

  He stopped the thought at that point. He didn’t stop because what he was thinking shamed him, because Heimat was long past shame. He stopped because he was enjoying it so much, with such desperate yearning, that he was afraid his face might give away something of what he was feeling; and the only victory Heimat ever had anymore was to keep some secrets to himself.

  Heimat’s island prison was very far from any continent or any major city. It had been built to hold thirty-eight hundred desperate convicts and keep them inside no matter what they planned or did.

  Now all that construction was overkill, because the only active survivor in the prison was Heimat himself. There weren’t thirty-eight hundred desperate prisoners left in his prison. There weren’t that many in the whole world. Recruitment had fallen off greatly since the bad old days of terrorism and famine. Oh, sociopaths turned up every now and then, of course, but what Albert (when he and I discussed such matters) called “the preconditions for opportunistic crime” were scarce.

  The thing was, conditions had got a lot better. Nowhere in the human galaxy were there places where whole generations grew up to mug or murder or destroy because they had no easier way to ease their miseries. Most of the worst of the prisoners still somewhere jailed were veterans of the days of terrorism and mass crime, and there weren’t many of those left. Many of the malcontents had long since let themselves be plea-bargained into a different kind of imprisonment in one of the hard-service colonies. Most of the others had finally become either sufficiently rehabilitated or sufficiently dead. Heimat himself was quite an old man—older than I, a hundred and thirty at least. Of course, he got Full Medical. He might go on another fifty years in the flesh, because the prisoners were repaired and reconditioned as often as necessary; it wasn’t usually age, sickness, or accident that they died of when they died. It was almost always simple, terminal boredom. On one morning just like every other morning they would wake up and look around and decide that enough was at last enough and machine storage could be no worse. Then they would find the right chance and kill themselves.

  But not Heimat.

  The only other living meat inmate of the prison was a former Soviet marshal named Pernetsky. Like Heimat, he had been a mole for the terrorists, using his military position to help them kill and wreck. The two had been colleagues in the secret underground, then fellow prisoners for hell’s own years. Not friends, exactly. Neither of them had any real friends. But close enough as inmates that Heimat had been really surprised when he heard one day that Pernetsky had eaten out his entire digestive system with cleaning fluids.

  It was not an efficient suicide attempt. The guardthings had spotted it at once, and now Pernetsky was in intensive care in the prison hospital.

  One destination is as good as any other for a man who has none, and Heimat decided to look in on Pernetsky.

  The prison hospital was on the same scale as the great penitentiary complex itself. The hospital had a hundred and thirty beds, each one capable of being isolated with partitions of shatterproof glass and steel. Pernetsky was the only patient.

  Heimat crossed the warm, wide lawn with its hibiscus and palm trees to the hospital, ignoring the workthings that picked the blossoms for his table and tidied up the fallen fronds. He could not ignore the medic in the reception room, though. As he entered she peered out at him and called, with a smile of professional cheer, “Good morning, General Heimat! You’re looking a little flushed. Would you like me to check your blood pressure?”

  “No chance,” sneered Heimat, but he stopped within conversational range of her. He was always more courteous to the medics than to any other prison personnel—it was his theory, which he never chose to put to the test, that some of them, sometimes, were living humans. It was also his habit, because in the presence of the medical staff he could think of himself as hospital patient rather than jailbird. Role playing was important to Heimat. He had acted well in consecutive roles as West Point cadet, grunt lieutenant, company commander, division G-2, two-star general—secret soldier in the liberation forces!—convict. “I don’t want you to take my blood pressure,” he said, “because you already know perfectly well what it is and you just want to give me some medication I don’t want. But I’ll tell you. If you were about six centimeters shorter and ten years younger I’d let you raise it a little. Especially if you were blond.” (And fragile.)

  The nurse’s professional smile stayed professional. “You want a lot from me,” she murmured.

  “You’re supposed to give me everything I need,” he said. The conver
sation had begun to bore him. He decided this one wasn’t really human anyway, and moved on.

  No one stopped him. What was the point? The shatterproof walls were not up around Pernetsky’s bed, either. There was even less point in that, because Pernetsky’s transplants were a long way from healed and he was tied to his life-support systems more firmly than by any chains.

  Heimat looked down on his last living companion, trussed in his bed with the tubes in his nose and the tiny pumps whirring away. “Well, Pyotr,” he said, “are you going to get up from there? Or is your next stop the Dead File?”

  The Russian didn’t respond. He hadn’t responded to anything for weeks. It was only the traitorous CRT at the foot of his bed, with its telltale sine waves billowing and sometimes erupting, that showed he was not only alive but sometimes even awake. “I almost miss you,” Heimat said meditatively, and lit a cigarette, heedless of the signs that warned of oxygen and risks of fire. A wardthing moved unobtrusively closer but did not interfere.

  Once this had been the military ward of the prison. Beyond the glass doors of the wardrobes Heimat could see the racks of uniforms, American blue and khaki, Russian white and drab, that would never be worn again. “If you get up,” Heimat wheedled, “I’ll take off this stupid hospital robe and put on my Class As. You can too. We’ll have a war game or something; remember how you used to nuke New York and Washington, and I’d wipe out your whole missile complex?”

  There was no response from the patient. This was beginning to be boring, too, Heimat decided. “Ah, well,” he said, blowing smoke in Pernetsky’s face, “we knew all along that the winners always put the losers on trial. Foolish of us to lose.”

  As Heimat turned to leave, the Soviet marshal’s head moved ever so slightly and one eye winked. “Ah, Pyotr!” cried Heimat. “You’ve been fooling them!”

  The marshal’s lips opened. “Last night,” he whispered. “The hover-trucks. Find out why.”

  And then he closed lips and eyes and would not open either again.

  Naturally none of the prisonthings would answer Heimat’s questions. He had to go and find out what Pernetsky had been talking about for himself.

  He roamed the prison compound, all the three square kilometers of it on the side of the mountain, with its heartbreaking view of the sea no prisoner could ever reach. Most of the cell blocks were empty and sealed. The engineering buildings—the power sources and the disposal units and the laundries—weren’t empty because they had to keep on chugging away at their tasks. But they were sealed to Heimat anyway.

  Everything else was open, but there wasn’t much of everything else. The prison had a farm; it had been work for the inmates when there were enough inmates to matter, and it was kept going by the workthings even now because it produced a number of valuable, if sometimes peculiar, crops. But there was nothing there that hadn’t always been there. Nor around the pool, nor in the gymnasium, nor in the vast, empty recreation hall, with its games and books and screens.

  So what had Pernetsky meant about trucks?

  Heimat wondered if it would be worth the trouble to look at the Dead File. It was trouble, because the building was off all by itself, upslope, near the outer barriers of the prison, and it was quite a climb. It had been some time since Heimat had made the effort.

  When he realized this, he decided promptly to do it now. It was always a good idea to keep checking the prison perimeters. One day, just for a moment, someone might slip up, and then there would be a chance of—

  Of what?

  Heimat grinned sourly to himself as he climbed the flower-bordered walk to the Dead File. Of escape, of course. Even after all these years, that hope was what kept him going.

  “Hope” was too strong a word. Heimat had no real hope of escaping, or at least not of staying escaped even if somehow he were able to get out of the prison itself. With all the wise and watching computer programs in the world, it would not be long before one or another of them penetrated any disguise.

  On the other hand…

  On the other hand, thought Heimat, careful not to show any expression on his face lest some nearby workthing catch a glimpse of it—on the other hand a man who was sufficiently courageous and daring, a natural leader gifted with charisma and power—a man like himself, in fact—might easily overturn the odds! Think of Napoleon back from Elba! The people flocking to him! Armies springing out of nowhere! Once free he would find followers, and then the hell with their machines and spies, the people would shield him. Of this Heimat had no doubt. He was certain in his heart that, whatever people pretended to themselves, most of the human race was as greedy and arrogant as himself, and what they really wanted most was a leader to tell them that greed and arrogance were permissible, even admirable, behavior.

  But first one had to escape.

  Heimat stopped at the fork in the walk, panting slightly. It was a hard climb for a man a hundred and some years old, even with so many new parts that he had long lost count, and the sun was hot. He surveyed the perimeter walls of the prison resignedly. They had not changed. They weren’t even walls; there was a barrier of bushes, handsomely ornamental but filled with sensors, then a space and another barrier, equally beautiful to the eye but this time filled with paralyzing circuits—and, just to make sure, a third line behind them, and this one was lethal. The late Major Adrian Winterkoop had proven that for all of them, because that was the way he had chosen for his own suicide. The experiment had worked well. (Or as well as dying ever worked, when all that happened was that they put you into machine storage in the Dead File.)

  And, in any case, those industrious gardenerthings that were never out of sight somewhere in the area could quickly become guardthings. Because you were never out of their sight, either.

  Heimat sighed and took the left-hand fork, toward the Dead File.

  Heimat didn’t go there often. It was not a place a living prisoner enjoyed visiting, because a living prisoner knew that sooner or later he would be a dead one, and there he then would be. No well person enjoys looking at his own grave.

  Of course, the five or six thousand true incorrigibles stored in the Dead File weren’t really dead, they were only “dead.” Major Winterkoop was still there, for instance, or at least the machine-stored analog of him was there, because the guardthings had recovered his body in time. Not in time to revive it, no. But before the quick processes of decay had made the contents of that angry brain unrecoverable. Being dead had not changed Winterkoop; he was still the same reckless, heedless person who had been Heimat’s adjutant in the glory days, when they used their position to bomb and kill and destroy for the sake of the glorious new world to come.

  And this, thought Heimat sourly, was the new world, and neither he nor Major Winterkoop had any part in it.

  As he walked toward the low pastel building that held the Dead File, he thought briefly of accessing Winterkoop, or one of the other Dead Men, just for the sake of a chat and a change. But they were all so damned dull! Imprisonment didn’t stop with death. None of them would ever leave the Dead File, and none of them had changed a bit since their deaths…

  Heimat stopped short, gaping at the Dead File.

  Around the corner, just out of sight from the path, was the main cargo entrance that he had never once seen used. It was being used now. Two huge trucks sat on their bellies outside it, their fans silent, as a dozen workthings busily carried racks of datafans and coils inside.

  “Please, General Heimat,” said a gardenerthing from behind him, “don’t go any closer. It is not allowed.”

  “They came in last night while I was asleep!” said Heimat, staring. “But what is it?”

  “Consolidation,” the gardenerthing said apologetically. “The Pensacola facility is being closed and all the inmates moved here.”

  Heimat recovered himself. It was the first rule of his prison existence that he never let any of the watchthings know what he was thinking or feeling, so he simply said with a pleasant smile, “Not enough of
us enemies of society left to keep you all busy, I suppose. Do you fear for your job?”

  “Oh, no, General Heimat,” said the workthing seriously. “We will simply be assigned to other tasks as needed, of course. But it is only Pensacola that is being terminated. Here, as you see, we are accepting their cases.”

  “Ah, yes, their cases,” said Heimat, beaming at the workthing as he wondered if it would be worth the trouble to try to destroy it. It had been given the form of a young Polynesian male, even to the beads of sweat on the hairless chest. “So I suppose all of the Pensacola cases are now in our Dead File.”

  “Oh, no, General. There is one live one. According to your records you know him. Cyril Basingstoke.”

  Heimat lost his calm for a moment. “Basingstoke?” He gaped at the workthing. Cyril Basingstoke had been one of the major terrorist leaders, the only one, perhaps, who commanded a network as big as, and almost as deadly as, Heimat’s own. “But Basingstoke was paroled a year ago,” he said. “It was on the news.”

  “He was, General Heimat, yes.” The workthing nodded. “But he is a recidivist. While he was on parole he killed thirty-five people.”

  To understand, they tell me, is to forgive, but I don’t believe it.

  I think I do pretty nearly understand people like Heimat and Basingstoke. Like every other terrorist from the Stone Age on, they killed and destroyed for a principle, and convinced themselves that the principle they killed for justified the bloodshed and agony they caused.

  They never convinced me, though. I saw some of the casualties. Essie and I barely missed being two of them ourselves, when Heimat’s hit squads blew up a Lofstrom loop they thought we were on. And, because we were witnesses to that one, we were there for Heimat’s trial, and I heard all about the others. Most of all I heard Heimat, and saw him, erect and military in the prisoner’s dock, looking the very model of a modern major general in his dress whites and strong, right-stuff face. He listened with polite attention as the witnesses detailed how, in his proper person as a major general in the United States Defense Forces, he had secretly organized the bands that blew up launch loops, struck down satellites, poisoned water supplies, and even managed to steal a Dream Couch to sicken the entire world with mad fantasies. Of course, he had been caught in the end. But he had fooled them all for nearly ten years, sitting straight-faced in staff meetings discussing antiterrorist measures, before people like Eskladar had come to their senses and through them the world’s police forces at last succeeded in linking Heimat with the massacres and bombings. None of these were crimes to him. They were simple strategies.