All this was awful for Janine, but worst of all was Wan himself. The squabbling made him confused and indignant. He stopped following her around. And after one sleep, when she sat up and looked around for him, he was gone.
Fortunately for Janine’s pride, everyone else was gone, too—Paul and Lurvy outside the ship to reorient the antennae; her father asleep, so that she had time to deal with her jealousy. Let him be a pig! she thought. It was stupid of him not to realize that she had many friends, while he had only her; but he would find out! She was busy writing long letters to her neglected correspondents when she heard Paul and her sister returning; and when she told them that Wan had been gone for at least an hour she was unprepared for their reaction. “Pa!” Lurvy cried, rattling at the curtain of her father’s private. “Wake up! Wan’s gone!”
As the old man came blinking out, Janine said disagreeably, “Now, what’s the matter with all of you?”
“You don’t understand, do you?” Paul asked coldly. “What if he’s taken the ship?”
It was a possibility that had never occurred to Janine, and it was like a blow in the face. “He wouldn’t!”
“Would he not?” snarled her father. “And how do you know that, little minx? And if he does, what of us?” He finished zipping his coverall and stood up, glowering at them. “I have told you all,” he said—but looking at Lurvy and Paul, so that Janine understood she was not a part of their “all”—“I have told you that we must find a definite solution. If we are to go with him in his ship, we must do it. If not, we cannot take the risk that he will take it into his foolish little mind to go back without warning. That is assuredly certain.”
“And how do we do that?” Lurvy demanded. “You’re preposterous, Pa. We can’t guard the ship day and night.”
“And your sister cannot guard the boy, yes,” the old man nodded. “So we must either immobilize the ship, or immobilize the boy.”
Janine flew at him. “You monsters!” she choked. “You’ve been planning this all out when we weren’t around!” Her sister caught and held her.
“Calm down, Janine,” she ordered. “Yes, it’s true we’ve talked about it—we had to! But nothing’s settled, certainly not that we will hurt Wan.”
“Then settle it!” Janine flared. “I vote we go with Wan!”
“If he hasn’t gone already, by himself,” Paul put in.
“He hasn’t!”
Lurvy said practically, “If he has, it’s too late for us to do anything about it. Outside of that, I’m with Janine. We go! What do you say, Paul?”
He hesitated. “I—guess so,” he conceded. “Peter?”
The old man said with dignity, “If you are all agreed, then what does it matter how I vote? There is only the question remaining who is to go and who is to stay. I propose—”
Lurvy stopped him. “Pa,” she said, “I know what you are going to say, but it won’t work. We need to leave at least one person here, to keep in contact with Earth. Janine’s too young. It can’t be me, because I’m the best pilot and this is a chance to learn something about piloting a Heechee ship. I don’t want to go without Paul, and that leaves you.”
They took Vera apart, component by component, and redistributed her around the Food Factory. Fast memory, inputs, and displays went into the dreaming chamber, slow memory lining the passageway outside, transmission still in their old ship. Peter helped, silent and taciturn; the meaning of what they were doing was that further communications of interest would come from the exploring party, via the radio system of the Dead Men. Peter was helping to write himself off, and knew it. There was plenty of food in the ship, Wan told them; but Paul would not be satisfied with the automatic replenishment of God knew what product of the Food Factory, and he made them carry aboard rations of their own, as much as they could stow. Whereupon Wan insisted that they stock up with water, and so they depleted the recycling stocks in the ship to fill his plastic bags and loaded them, too. Wan’s ship had no beds. None were needed, Wan pointed out, because the acceleration cocoons were enough to protect them during maneuvers, and to keep them from floating around while they slept in the rest of the voyage—a suggestion vetoed by both Lurvy and Paul, who dismantled the sleeping pouches from their private and reinstalled them in the ship. Personal possessions: Janine wanted her secret stash of perfume and books, Lurvy her personal locked bag, Paul his cards for solitaire. It was long and hard work, though they discovered they could ease it by sailing the plastic waterbags and the softer, solider other stores along the corridors in a game of slow-motion catch; but at last it was done. Peter sat sourly propped against a corridor wall, watching the others mill about, and tried to think of what had been forgotten. To Janine it seemed as though they were already treating him as though he were absent, if not dead, and she said, “Pop? Don’t take it so hard. We’ll all be back as soon as we can.”
He nodded. “Which comes to,” he said, “let me see, forty-nine days each way, plus as long as you decide to stay in this place.” But then he pushed himself up, and allowed Lurvy and Janine to kiss him. Almost cheerfully, he said, “Bon voyage. Are you sure you have forgotten nothing?”
Lurvy looked around, considering. “I think not—unless you think we should tell your friends we are coming, Wan?”
“The Dead Men?” he shrilled, grinning. “They will not know. They are not alive, you know, they have no sense of time.”
“Then why do you like them so much?” Janine demanded.
Wan caught the note of jealousy and scowled at her. “They are my friends,” he said. “They cannot be taken seriously all the time, and they often lie. But they do not ever make me feel afraid of them.”
Lurvy caught her breath. “Oh, Wan,” she said, touching him. “I know we haven’t been as nice as we might. We’ve all been under a great strain. We’re really better people than we must seem to you.”
Old Peter had had enough. “Go you now,” he snarled. “Prove this to him, do not stand talking forever. And then come back and prove it to me!”
6
After the Fever
Less than two hours—the fever had never been so short before. Nor had it ever been as intense. The most susceptible one percent of the population had simply been out of it for four hours, and nearly everyone had been severely affected.
I was one of the lucky ones, because after the fever I was only stuck in my room, with nothing more than a bump on the head from falling over. I wasn’t trapped in a wrecked bus, crashed out of a jet-liner, struck by a runaway car, or bleeding to death on an operating table while surgeons and nurses writhed helplessly on the floor. All I had was one hour, fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds of delirious misery, and that diluted because it was shared with eleven billion other people.
Of course, everybody in all those eleven billion was trying to get in touch with everybody else, all at once, and so communications were jammed for fair. Harriet formed herself in the tank to tell me that at least twenty-five calls were coming in for me—my science program, my legal program, three or four accountancy programs from my holdings, and quite a few real, live people. None of them, she told me apologetically when I asked, was Essie; the circuits to Tucson were out entirely at the moment, and I couldn’t place a call from my end either. None of the machines had been affected by the madness. They never were. The only time something went wrong with them was when some live person had injected himself into the circuit, for maintenance or redesign. But, as statistically that was happening a million times a minute, somewhere in the world, with some machine or another, it was not surprising that some things took a little while to get going again.
First order of business was business; I had to pick up the pieces. I gave Harriet a hierarchy of priorities, and she began feeding me reports. Quick bulletin from the food mines: no significant damage. Real estate: some minor incidents of fire and flooding, nothing that mattered. Someone had left a barrier open in the fish factories and six hundred million fingerlings swam out to lose
themselves in the open sea; but I was only a minority stockholder in them anyway. Taken all in all, I had come out of the fever smelling of roses, I thought, or anyway a lot better than a lot of others. The fever had struck the Indian subcontinent after midnight of a day that already had seen one of the worst hurricanes the Bay of Bengal had produced in fifty years. The death toll was immense. Rescue efforts had simply stopped for two hours. Tens, maybe even hundreds, of millions of people had been simply unable to drag themselves to high ground, and southern Bangladesh was a swamp of corpses. Add in a refinery explosion in California, a train wreck in Wales, and a few as yet uncatalogued disasters—the computers did not yet have an estimate of deaths, but the news reports were calling it the worst ever.
By the time I had taken all the urgent-urgent calls the elevators were running again. I wasn’t a captive any more. Looking out the window, I could see the Washington streets were normal enough. My trip to Tucson, on the other hand, was well bollixed. Since half the jets in the air had been on automatic pilot for two hours, seriously depleting their fuel, they had been landing where they could, and the lines had equipment in all sorts of wrong places. The schedules were scrambled. Harriet booked me the best she could, but the first space she could confirm was not until noon the next day. I couldn’t even call Essie, because the circuits were still jammed. That was only an annoyance, not a problem. If I really wanted to get through, there were priorities at my disposal—the rich have their perks. But the rich have their pleasures, too, and I decided it would be fun to surprise Essie by dropping in on her.
And meanwhile I had time to spare.
And all this time my science program had been bursting with things to tell me. That was the dessert after the spinach and liver. I had put it off until I had a chance for a good, long natter; and that time had arrived, “Harriet,” I said, “put him on.” And Albert Einstein took form in the tank, leaning forward and twitching with excitement. “What is it, Al,” I asked, “something good?”
“Sure thing, Robin! We’ve found out where the fever comes from—it’s the Food Factory!”
It was my own fault. If I had let Albert tell me what was on his mind at once, I wouldn’t have been just about the last person on Earth to find out that I owned the place all the trouble came from. That was the first thing that hit me, and I was thinking about possible liability and sniffing for advantages all the time he was explaining the evidence to me. First and conclusive, of course, was the on-the-spot pickup from the Food Factory itself. But we should have known all along. “If I had only timed the onsets carefully,” Albert berated himself, “we could have located the source years ago. And there were plenty of other clues, consistent with their photonic nature.”
“Their what nature?”
“They are electromagnetic, Robin,” he explained. He tamped tobacco into his pipe and reached for a match. “You realize, of course, that this is established by transmission time—we received whatever signal caused the madness at the same time as the transmission showing it happening.”
“Wait a minute. If the Heechee have faster-than-light radio, why isn’t this the same?”
“Ah, Robin! If we only knew that!” he twinkled, lighting his pipe. “I can only conjecture—” puff, puff, “that this particular effect is not compatible with their other mode of transmission, but the reasons for that I cannot even speculate on at this time. And, of course,” he went on, “there are certain questions raised at once to which we do not as yet have any answers.”
“Of course,” I said, but I didn’t ask him what they were. I was on the track of something else. “Albert? Display the ships and stations you drew information from in space.”
“Sure thing, Robin.” The flyaway hair and the seamed, cheerful face melted away, and at once the holographic tank filled with a representation of circumsolar space. Nine planets. A girdle of dust that was the asteroid belt, and a powdery shell far out that was the Oort cloud. And about forty points of colored light. The representation was in logarithmic scale, to get it all in, and the size of the planets and artifacts immensely enlarged. Albert’s voice explained, “The four green ships are ours, Robin. The eleven blue objects are Heechee installations; the round ones are only detected, the star-shaped ones have been visited and are mostly manned. All the others are ships that belong to other commercial interests, or to governments.”
I studied the plot. Not very many of the sparks were anywhere near the green ship and blue star that marked the Food Factory. “Albert? If somebody had to get another ship out to the Food Factory, which one could get there fastest?”
He appeared in the lower corner of the projection, frowning and sucking his pipe stem. A golden point near Saturn’s rings began to flash on and off. “There’s a Brazilian cruiser just departing Tethys that could make it in eighteen months,” he said. “I have displayed only the ships that were involved in my radio-location. There are several others—” new lights winked on in a scatter around the tank, “that could do better, provided they have adequate fuel and supplies. But none in less than a year.”
I sighed. “Turn it off, Albert,” I said. “The thing is, we’re into something I didn’t expect.”
“What’s that, Robin?” he asked, filling the tank again and folding his hands over his belly in a comfortable way.
“That cocoon. I don’t know how to handle it. I don’t even see the point of it. What’s it for, Albert? Have you got any conjectures?”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he said, nodding cheerfully. “My best conjectures are a pretty low order of probability, but that’s just because there are so many unknowns. Let’s put it this way. Suppose you were a Heechee—something like an anthropologist, say—interested in keeping an eye on a developing civilization. Evolution takes a long time, so you don’t want to just sit there and watch. What you’d like to do is get a quick estimate, maybe every thousand years or so, sort of a spot check. Well, given something like the cocoon, you could just send somebody over to the Food Factory every once in a while, maybe every thousand years or more; climb in the couch, get an instant feel for what was happening. It would take only minutes.” He paused consideringly for a moment, before going on. “Then—but this is a speculation on top of a conjecture; I wouldn’t even assign a probability rating to it at all—then, if you found anything interesting, you could explore further. You could even do something else. This is really far out, Robin. You might even suggest things. The cocoon transmits as well as receives, that’s what the fevers came from. Perhaps it can also transmit concepts. We know that in human history many of the great inventions sprang up all over the world, apparently independently, maybe simultaneously. Are they Heechee suggestions, via the couch?”
He sat there, puffing his pipe and smiling at me, while I thought about that.
All the thinking in the world didn’t make it good, clean fun. Thrilling, maybe. But nothing you could relax to. The world had changed in fundamental ways since the first astronauts discovered Heechee diggings on Venus, and the more we explored the bigger the changes got. A lost kid, playing with something he didn’t understand, had plunged the whole human race into recurring madness for more than a decade. If we kept on playing with things we didn’t understand, what were the Heechee going to give us for an encore?
To say nothing of the queasiness of Albert’s suggestion that these creatures had been spying on us for hundreds of thousands of years—maybe even throwing us a crumb, now and then, to see what we would make of it.
I told Albert to bring me up to date on everything else he knew about what was going on in the Food Factory, and while he was running through the physical facts I called up Harriet. She appeared in one corner of the tank, looking questioning, and took my order for dinner while Albert kept right on with his show and tell. He was continuously monitoring all the transmissions even as he was reporting on them, and he showed me selected scenes of the boy, the Herter-Hall party, the interiors of the artifact. The damn thing was still determined to go its own wa
y. Best course estimates suggested that it was moving toward a new cluster of comets, several million miles away—at present rates, it would get there in a few months. “Then what?” I demanded.
Albert shrugged apologetically. “Presumably it will then stay there until it has mined them of all the CHON ingredients, Robin.”
“Then can we move it?”
“No evidence, Robin. But it’s possible. Speaking of which, I have a theory about the controls of the Heechee ships. When one of them reaches an operating artifact—the Food Factory, Gateway, whatever—its controls unlock and it can then be redirected. At any rate, I think that may be what happened to Ms. Patricia Bover—and that, too, has certain obvious implications,” he twinkled.
I don’t like to let a computer program think it’s smarter than I am. “You mean that there may be a lot of stranded Gateway astronauts all over the Galaxy, because their controls unlocked and they didn’t know how to get back?”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he said approvingly. “That may account for what Wan calls the ‘Dead Men.’ We’ve received some conversations with them, by the way. Their responses are sometimes quite nonrational, and of course we’re handicapped by not being able to interact. But it does appear that they are, or were, human beings.”
“Are you telling me they were alive?”
“Sure thing, Robin, or at least in the sense that Enrico Caruso’s voice on a tape was once the voice of a living Neapolitan tenor. Whether they are ‘alive’ now is a matter of definition. You might ask the same question—” puff, puff, “about me.”
“Huh.” I thought for a minute. “Why are they so crazy?”
“Imperfect transcription, I would say. But that is not the important thing.” I waited until he drew on his pipe to get ready to tell me the important thing. “It seems rather sure, Robin, that the transcription occurred by some sort of chemical readout of the actual brains of the prospectors.”
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon Page 9
