The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

  And if they left at once—and if, for some reason, they failed to kill the possible witnesses they would leave behind—and if they did not decide to take the children somehow with them—and if—

  There were too many ifs.

  But then none of the ifs mattered. Sneezy saw the beginning glow in the PV tank. So did Basingstoke, and he cried, “We need not accuse each other any longer, Beau! Look, it is coming on at last.”

  So it was.

  So it did; but the face that looked out of the PV at them was not the smiling Polynesian girl with the hibiscus in her hair. It was a man’s face. A man of indeterminate age, rather handsome (or so I would like to think), smiling out at them in a friendly way. Sneezy didn’t recognize it. One human looked much like another to any Heechee, except for the few they happened to have spent a fair amount of time with.

  Cyril Basingstoke and Beaupre Heimat, however, knew the face at once. “Robinette Broadhead!” Basingstoke cried, and Heimat snarled, “What the hell is that son of a bitch doing here?”

  Watching it all in gigabit space, Essie chuckled nervously. “Are quite famous, Robin,” she said. “Even wicked old terrorists recognize you at once.”

  Albert said, “That is not astonishing, Mrs. Broadhead. General Heimat on at least two occasions tried to assassinate Robinette. And probably every terrorist on Earth would have done the same if they had the chance.”

  “Do not give them chance at anything bad now, Robin,” Essie begged. “Go on. Do thing. And, dear Robin, be very careful! Wicked old terrorists are nothing compared to other dangers you insist on encountering now!”

  14

  Stowaways

  I think I should review a little at this point.

  When word of the transmission to the kugelblitz reached JAWS, they sprang into action. Programs and people in gigabit time tracked down the source of the message and located it on an island called Moorea in the Pacific Ocean, and that happened fast enough to suit even me.

  Then they put the brakes on, because meat people had to make the next decision.

  They did it as fast as meat people possibly could, I’ll give them that, but meat people just aren’t in the running when you want real speed. It took many, many milliseconds before they took the next step, and a lot longer than that before they could put it into effect. They isolated Moorea from the power grid. They cut off every kind of electromagnetic energy anywhere on the island. Moorea was in quarantine. No further messages could get out.

  That was the right thing to do, and I agreed with them. But it took them so long! And then it took long, long, longer for the next step. Not to know what to do, because Albert and Essie and I figured that out for them in no time at all, but interminably long to convince the meat people we were right, and to get them to do the right thing about it.

  It was clear from the beginning that there were Foe loose on Earth. Albert and I went round and round that for thousands of milliseconds, and there simply was no other explanation. Those “false alarms” on the Watch Wheel had not been false at all. We managed to spell that out, millisecond by millisecond, for the meat people. Damn their souls, they argued. “You don’t know that,” General Halverssen objected, and I yelled (as much as I can yell in meat-people time), “Of course we do!” and Albert put in reasonably (and oh! how slowly), “It is true, General Halverssen, that we do not know it for a certainty. But science is not built on certainties; it is only a question of probabilities, and the probability that this is an accurate statement of reality is overwhelming. Really, there is no more convincing competing hypothesis.”

  Can you image how much time just that kind of thing took?

  And then we had to convince them of the next statement: That the Foe had human beings working for them. There we got into a long hassle because the generals of JAWS got bogged down on whether any human being, however vile or insane, would cooperate with the enemies of all organic life everywhere. It took forever to explain to them that we didn’t mean voluntary cooperation. Well, what did we mean, then? Well, we didn’t know what we meant, only that the fact that the transmission had been in the English language, however speeded up, was an unarguable bit of evidence that some human being somewhere had interfaced between the Foe and the transmission. And of course the contents of the transmission further supported the theory that it was Foe-generated and Foe-aimed. “If you were a scout for the Foe on Earth,” Albert inquired politely, “what would you do? Your first mission would be to learn everything you could about what human beings, and Heechee, were like; about what sort of technology they had and where it was deployed; about everything that could be useful in the event of a conflict. That is precisely what the transmission contained, Generals. There can really be no doubt.”

  The arguments didn’t just take milliseconds. They took minutes, and the minutes stretched into hours, because the meat generals were not spending all their time talking to us. They had other things on their minds. They were acting. Moorea was isolated so no message traffic could go in either direction; so their only way of establishing any sort of control there was to insert new warm bodies with instructions to take over. Take over what? we asked in vain. Take over the island, of course, was all the answer we got.

  So long-range aircraft on Nandu and Oahu were loaded with parachute soldiers and launched for Moorea. They were brave men and women in those aircraft—a lot braver than I would have been, since their status as “soldiers” had been purely honorary for at least as long as most of them had been alive. But they flew over the island and dropped in in the darkness—onto the slopes of that great central mountain, some of them, others into the waters of the lagoon, a few lucky ones onto taro patches or beaches. Their mission was to arrest everybody they could find and, when that was done, to signal by mirror to the watch satellites overhead so that Moorea could be put back into the power grid and the serious investigators could land there.

  Can you imagine how much time all that took?

  Can you imagine how much trouble it was? Two hundred soldiers dropped on Moorea, and nearly seventy of them broke arms, legs, or heads when they came down. It was a miracle that none of them died of it, and all for nothing.

  Because while that was going on, the faster ones among us, like Albert and me, were doing the homework that would have saved all the effort. It took a lot longer than it should have, because we couldn’t go to the records on the island of Moorea itself, due to the blackout. We had to reconstitute the information from other sources. So we did. We accessed every datum we could find about traffic to and from the island of Moorea. We studied the census reports on everyone who lived there. We looked for some clue, some linkage to something somehow related to the Foe…

  And the names of Oniko, Sneezy, and Harold popped out of the files.

  As soon as we saw who they were and where they’d been, we knew it was the answer. Who else had been on the Watch Wheel during the latest “false alarm”?

  When we had explained all that to the meatheads, they agreed it was important. It was also pretty useless, because they had no good way of communicating with the paratroops that were even then flopping down all over the island, to tell them where to concentrate their efforts. But they did the next best thing. They made the satellite watch records available to us, and when we played these tapes we saw the little glass-bottomed boat slipping out of the lagoon on its way across the strait.

  Unfortunately, by the time we saw it, it was history. But there they were. The three children, scrambling up onto the floating dock of the beach house belonging to a Mr. and Mrs. Henri Becquerel, now visiting grandchildren on Peggys Planet. And when we took the next step, monitoring all communications that had gone in or out of the beach house, we had no trouble identifying the two old loonies who had been with the children on the boat.

  Then we stored the images and thought it over. “Ah-ha,” said Albert wisely, puffing on his pipe. “Look at the children.”

  “Two of them are wearing pods,” Julio Cassata announce
d, a moment before I would have.

  “Exactly.” Albert beamed. “And what better place for an energy being like the Foe to hide away than in a pod?”

  I said, “But could they? I mean, how could they?”

  Puff, puff. “It might be difficult for them, yes, Robin,” said Albert thoughtfully, “because surely the storage systems are not anything they would be used to. But neither were Heechee Ancestor-storage and our own gigabit net compatible at first. We simply had to devise ways of transcribing one to the other. Do you think the Foe are stupider than we, Robin?” And, before I could answer, “In any case, there is no better hypothesis. We dare not assume anything else. The Foe are in the pods.”

  “And pods are on children,” said Essie, “and children are captives of two known murderers. Robin! Whatever do, must be absolutely sure children are not harmed!”

  “Of course, my dear,” I said, wondering just how to do that. The data file on Basingstoke and Heimat had not been comforting, even if we overlooked Heimat’s known obsession with young and helpless girls. I made an effort. “The first thing to do,” I said, “is to persuade JAWS to isolate the house. We don’t want Foe getting into gigabit space and wandering around.”

  “They’ve had plenty of time to do that already,” Albert pointed out. “But perhaps they haven’t. Maybe they can’t leave the pods—or didn’t think they needed to?” I shook my head. “Your trouble, Albert, is that you’re a machine construct. You don’t know how natural beings behave. If I were one of the Foe, in what is surely a strange and bewildering place, I would find a nice hole to hide in and stay there until I was sure I knew what was safe.”

  Albert sighed and rolled his eyes upward. “You have never been a natural energy creature, so you know nothing about their behavior,” he reminded me.

  “But if I’m wrong, nothing’s lost, is it? So let’s cut them out.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I have already suggested this to the organic leaders of JAWS. The house will be totally isolated in a few thousand milliseconds. Then what?”

  “Oh,” I said easily, “then I pay them a call.”

  It took a lot of milliseconds, actually. I not only had to persuade the JAWS meatheads that I was the best person to negotiate, I had to satisfy them, and Albert, that I could negotiate in some way that wouldn’t give either the old men or the Foe any chance to escape.

  “Fine,” Cassata’s doppel said forcefully. “I agree.” I braced myself for the next part. It came. “Somebody must do that, but not you, Broadhead. You’re a civilian.”

  I yelled, “Now, listen, stupid—” But Albert raised a hand.

  “General Cassata,” he said patiently, “the situation in that house is unstable. We can’t wait for some meat person to get there and negotiate.”

  “Of course not,” he said tightly, “but that doesn’t mean it has to be Broadhead!”

  “Oh?” said Albert. “Then who? It must be someone like ourselves, must it not? Someone who is familiar with what is going on? Really, one of us here, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Cassata, stalling, but Albert wouldn’t let him. “I think it must be,” he said gently, “because time is of the essence, and the only question is which. I don’t think I should be the one; I’m only a rude mechanical, after all.”

  Essie cut in, “Certainly not me!”

  “And you yourself, General,” said Albert politely, “are simply not good enough for the job. Which leaves only Robinette, I’m afraid.”

  He was afraid!

  Cassata gave in. “But not in his own person,” he ordered. “Something expendable, and that’s final.”

  So it was not precisely “I” who was grinning out of the commset at the two old monsters and their captive kids. It was only a doppel of me, because that was all Albert and the JAWS people would allow, but they also had to allow me one tightly constrained channel of contact with my doppel. They had no choice about that, because otherwise none of us could either know or affect what happened in that little house by the beach on the island of Tahiti.

  So I peered out of the PV at the old monsters. I said at once—or my duplicate did—“General Heimat, Mr. Basingstoke, you’re caught again. Don’t do anything ridiculous. We’ll let you go free—under certain conditions—provided you cooperate. Start by untying the children.” And at the same time the other I, safe a hundred thousand kilometers away on the True Love, was complaining bitterly, “But it takes so long.”

  Essie said, “Can’t be helped, dear Robin,” and Albert cleared his throat and offered:

  “Do be careful. General Heimat will try some violent act, no doubt, but Basingstoke is more subtle. Watch him closely, please.”

  “Do I have a choice?” I grumbled. I did not. They were meat people, and I was I. While my doppel was delivering that interminably long first speech—six thousand milliseconds it took!—I was observing and displaying every person, item of furniture, wall hanging, window, particle of sand, and fluff of dust in that pleasant little room. It took an eternity for me to activate my image and say my words of greeting, and then for Heimat to respond took forever.

  See, I didn’t have the zippy perceptors and actuators that were part of the real me, back on the True Love. I had a simple piezovision commset, the kind people put in their living rooms. They’re designed to be used by meat people. Therefore they are meat-people slow. They don’t have to be fast, because meat people aren’t. The commset’s scanning system takes a look at what is before it, point by point. One by one it examines each of those points and registers its properties—so much luminance, at such-and-such a wavelength—and then, one by one, it plots them in its memory store for transmission.

  We were not about to let the set transmit, of course. The only transmissions from that room went from doppel-me to real-me 100,000 kilometers out in space.

  The set’s scanners were quick enough for the purpose, by meat-person standards. They looked at every point twenty-four times a second, and meat persistence of vision filled in the gaps. What meat people saw was the illusion of real-time presence.

  I did not. What both doppel-me and real-me saw was this painful building-up of images, point by point. We were on gigabit time, orders of magnitude faster. We could see each individual data point come in. It looked as though someone were filling in a paint-by-number canvas in each one-twenty-fourth of a second, a dot of red here, a darker scarlet next to it, another scarlet, and so, painstakingly, point by point, we saw displayed a single line of Oniko’s red skirt. Then there were a thousand points for the next line, and the next, and the next, while I and doppel-I sat fidgeting and metaphorically gnawing our metaphorical thumbnails, waiting for the whole picture to show.

  Sound was no better. The median frequency of human speech, say the middle A, is 440 hertz. So what I “heard” (perceived as pressure pulses, actually) was a putt…putt…putt of sound, each individual putt coming a couple of milliseconds after the last. Whereupon I had to take note of the amplitude of each pulse and the elapsed time between them, less or more as the tone was raised or lowered, and identify them as frequencies, and constitute them as sound spectrograms, and translate them into syllables and finally words. Oh, I could interpret them, all right. But, my God, it was tedious.

  It was frustrating in all the ways there were to be frustrating, because it was urgent.

  The urgency was the Foe, to be sure, but I had some private urgencies of my own. Curiosity, for instance. This crazy old man named Heimat, I well knew, had tried very hard to murder both me and my wife. I really wanted to talk to him about that. Then there were the kids. They were a very special urgency, because I had a clear picture of what they had been through and how terrified, worn out, and demoralized they had to be. I wanted to rescue them from that ordeal within the next millisecond, no time for meat-person haggling and deal-making with the old killers; and I couldn’t.

  I also couldn’t wait, so while Heimat and Basingstoke were still opening their mouths, expressio
ns shattered in astonishment, I cut in to say directly to the kids: “Oniko, Sneezy, Harold: You’re safe now. These two men can’t hurt you.”

  And where we all sat in the control room of the True Love, Albert sucked his pipe meditatively and said, “I don’t blame you for that, Robin, but please don’t forget that the Foe are the first order of business.”

  I didn’t get a chance to answer. Essie was in there before me, crying indignantly, “Albert! Are just a machine, after all? These poor children are scared out of wits!”

  “He’s right, though,” argued Cassata. “The children will be all right. The Papeete police are on their way—”

  “And will arrive when?” demanded Essie. It was a rhetorical question; we all knew the answer. She furnished it: “About one million milliseconds, is not right? How much can happen, even in meat-person time?”

  My doppel was just finishing saying, “—o-u-’-r-e s-a-f-e,” so there was plenty of time for debate. I said to Albert: “What do you think Heimat will do?”

  “He has that gun,” said Albert judiciously. “He will think, perhaps, of using Oniko as a hostage.”

  “That we can take care of,” Cassata said grimly.

  “No way, Julio!” I said. “You crazy? If you go throwing beam weapons around in that little room somebody could get hurt.”

  “Only the somebody we aim at!”

  Albert coughed deprecatingly. “The accuracy of your weapons is undoubted, General. However, there is also the question of the integrity of the Faraday cage. We have that space completely isolated except for the single channel between Mr. Broadhead and his doppel. If you puncture it, what will happen with the stowaways?”

  Cassata hesitated. We all hesitated, because that was, really, where the ultimate worry was. The stowaways. The Foe!