cts until a month and a half
after  they've  gone  and  done  whatever  they  were  going  to  do,  the
opportunity for a negotiated settlement. "What I'm trying to say," I said,
"is that this is really big. Too big for us to be divided. They won't fuck
around with us, Bover. They'll just go ahead and expropriate us."
   He  didn't  stop  chewing,  just listened, and then when he had nothing
more  to  chew he took a sip from his demitasse and said, "We really don't
have anything to discuss, Mr. Broadhead."
   "Of course we do!"
   "Not  unless  we both think so," he pointed out, "and I don't. You're a
little  mistaken in some of the things you say. I don't have an injunction
any more. I have a judgment."
   "Which I can get reversed in a hot..."
   "Yes,  maybe  you can. But not in a hot anything. The law will take its
course,  and  it  will  take  time.  I  won't make any deal Trish paid for
whatever comes out of this. Since she isn't around to protect her rights I
guess I have to."
   "But it's going to cost both of us!"
   "That's  as  may  be.  As  my  lawyer  says. He advised me against this
meeting."
   "Then why did you come?"
   He looked at the remains of his lunch, then out at the fountains in the
courtyard.  Three returned Gateway prospectors were sitting on the edge of
a  reflecting  pool  with  a  slightly drunk Varig stewardess, singing and
tossing  crumbs of French pastry to the goldfish. They had struck it rich.
"It makes a nice change for me, Mr. Broadhead," he said.
   Out of the window of my suite, high up in the new Palace Tower, I could
see  the  crown-of-thorns  of  the  cathedral  glinting in the sun. It was
better  than  looking  at  my  legal  program on the full-service monitor,
because  he  was  eating  me out. "You may have prejudiced our whole case,
Robin. I don't think you understand how big this is getting."
   "That's what I told Bover."
   "No,  really,  Robin. Not just Robin Broadhead, Inc., not even just the
Gateway  Corporation.  Government's  getting  into  it.  And  not just the
signatories  to  the  Gateway  Convention either. This may wind up a U. N.
matter."
   "Oh, come on, Morton! Can they do that?"
   "Of  course  they  can,  Robin. Eminent domain. Your friend Bover isn't
helping  things  any,  either.  He's petitioning for a conservator to take
over  your  personal  and  corporate  holdings in this matter, in order to
administer the exploration properly."
   The son of a bitch. He must have known that was happening while we were
eating  the  lunch  I  bought him. "What's this word 'proper'? What have I
done that was improper?"
   "Short list, Robin?" He ticked off his fingers. "One, you exceeded your
authority  by giving the Hester-Hall party more freedom of action than was
contemplated,  which,  two, led to their expedition to Heechee Heaven with
all  of  its  potential  consequences  and  thus,  three,  brought about a
situation of grave national peril. Strike that. Grave human peril."
   "That's crap, Morton!"
   "That's  the  way  he put it in the petition," he nodded, "and, yes, we
may persuade somebody it's crap. Sooner or later. But right now it's up to
the Gateway Corp to act or not."
   "Which  means I better see the Senator." I got rid of Morton and called
Harriet to ask about my appointment.
   "I can give you the Senator's secretarial program now," she smiled, and
faded  to  show a rather sketchy animation of a handsome young black girl.
It  was  quite poor simulation, nothing like the programs Essie writes for
me. But then Praggler was only a United States senator.
   "Good afternoon," she greeted me. "The Senator asks me to say that he's
in Rio de Janeiro on committee business this evening, but will be happy to
see you whenever convenient tomorrow morning. Shall we say ten o'clock?"
   "Let's  say  nine,"  I told her, somewhat relieved. I had been a little
worried  about  Praggler's failure to get back to me right away. But now I
perceived  he had a good reason: the fleshpots of Ipanema. "Harriet?" When
she came back I asked, "How's Mrs. Broadhead?"
   "No  change,  Robin,"  she  smiled.  "She's awake and available now, if
you'd like to speak to her."
   "Bet  your sweet little electronic tooshy I do," I told her. She nodded
and  drifted  away.  Harriet  is a really good program; she doesn't always
understand  the words, but she can make a yes-no decision from the tone of
my  voice,  and  so  when Essie appeared I said, "S. Ya. Lavorovna, you do
nice work."
   "To  be  sure,  dear Robin," she agreed, preening herself. She stood up
and turned slowly around. "As do our doctors, you will observe."
   It  took  a  moment for it to hit me. There were no life-support tubes!
She  wore  flesh-form  casts  on  her  left  side, but she was free of the
machines! "My God, woman, what happened?"
   "Perhaps healing has happened," she said serenely. "Although it is only
an  experiment.  The  doctors have just left, and I am to try this for six
hours. Then they will examine me again."
   "You look bloody marvelous." We chatted fill-in talk for a few minutes;
she  told me about the doctors, I told her about Brasilia, while I studied
her  as  carefully  as  I  could  in  a  PV  tank. She kept getting up and
stretching, delighting in her freedom, until she worried me. "Are you sure
you're supposed to do all that?"
   "I  have been told that I must not think of water skiing or dancing for
a while. But perhaps not everything that is fun is prohibited."
   "Essie,  you  lewd  lady, is that a lustful look I see in your eye? Are
you feeling well enough for that?"
   "Quite  well,  yes.  Well.  Not  well,"  she amplified, "but perhaps as
though  you  and I had enjoyed a hard night's drinking a day or two ago. A
little fragile. But I do not think I would be harmed by a gentle lover."
   "I'll be back tomorrow morning."
   "You  will not be back tomorrow morning," she said firmly. "You will be
back  when you are entirely through with your business in Brasilia and not
one  moment  before or else, my boy, you will not find any willing partner
for your debauched intentions here."
   I said good-bye in a rosy glow.
   Which  lasted  all  of  twenty-five  minutes,  until  I  got  around to
double-checking with the doctor.
   It  took  a little while, because she was just getting back to Columbia
Medical  when  I  called.  "I'm  sorry  to  be rushed, Mr. Broadhead," she
apologized,  shrugging  out of her gray tweed suit-coat. "I've got to show
students how to suture nerve tissue in about ten minutes."
   "You usually call me Robin, Dr. Liederman," I said, cooling off quickly.
   "Yes,  I do-Robin. Don't get worried. I don't have bad news." While she
was  talking  she was continuing to strip down, as far as brassiere level,
before putting on a turtleneck and an operating-room gown. Wilma Liederman
is  a good-looking woman of a certain age, but I was not there to ogle her
charms.
   "But you don't have good news, either?"
   "Not  yet.  You've  talked  to  Essie, so you know we're trying her out
without  the  machines. We have to know how far she can go on her own, and
we won't know that for twenty-four hours. At least I hope we won't."
   "Essie said six."
   "Six  hours  to  readouts, twenty-four to full workup. Unless she shows
bad  signs before that and has to go back on the machines right away." She
was talking to me over her shoulder, scrubbing up at her little washstand.
Holding  her  dripping  hands  in the air she came back closer to the comm
set.  "I  don't want you worrying, Robin," she said. "All this is routine.
She's  got  about a hundred transplants in her, and we have to find out if
they've  taken  hold. I wouldn't let her go this far if I didn't think the
chances were at least reasonable, Robin."
   "'Reasonable' doesn't sound real good to me, Wilma!"
   "Better  than  reasonable,  but don't push me. And don't worry, either.
You're getting regular bulletins, and you can call my program any time you
want  more-me  too, if you have to. You want odds? Two to one everything's
going  to work. A hundred to one that if something fails it's something we
can  fix.  Now I've got to transplant a complete lower genital for a young
lady who wants to be sure she still has fun afterwards."
   "I think I ought to get back there," I said.
   "For  what?  There's  nothing  you  can do but get in the way. Robin, I
promise I won't let her die before you get back." In the background the P.
A. system was chiming gently. "They're playing my song, Robin, talk to you
later."

   There  are times when I sit at the center of the world, and when I know
that  I  can reach out to any of the programs my good wife has written for
me and pull back any fact, absorb any explanation or command any event.
   There  are also times when I sit with a full console and a head full of
burning questions and learn nothing, because I do not know what to ask.
   And  there  are times when I am so full of learning and being and doing
that  the moments zip past and the days are packed, and other times when I
am  floating  in  slack  water  beside a current, and the world is sliding
speedily  by.  There was plenty to do. I didn't feel like doing it. Albert
was bursting with news from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory. I let him
purge  himself.  But  the synoptics plopped into my mind without raising a
question   or   even  a  ripple;  when  he  was  through  reporting  about
architectural  deductions  and  interpretations of maunderings of the Dead
Men  I turned him off. It was intensely interesting, but for some reason I
was not interested by it. I ordered Harriet to let my simulacrum deal with
everything routine and tell everyone who was not urgent to call me another
time.  I  stretched out on the three-meter watercouch looking out over the
weird  Brasilia  skyline,  and  wished that it were that couch in the Food
Factory, connected to someone I loved.
   Wouldn't that be great? To be able to reach out to someone far away, as
Wan  had reached out to the whole Earth, and feel with them what they were
feeling,  let  them  feel  the  inside  of you? What a wonderful thing for
lovers!
   And  to  that  thought I reacted by calling up Morton on my console and
telling  him to look into the possibility of patenting that application of
the couch.
   It  was  not a very romantic response to a pretty romantic thought. The
difficulty  was  that  I  was not quite sure which someone I wished I were
connected  to.  My dear wife, so loved, so needful right now? Or someone a
lot farther away and much harder to reach?
   So I stagnated through the long Brazilian afternoon, with a soak in the
pool,  and  a  lounge  in the setting sun, and a lavish dinner in my suite
with  a  bottle  of  wine, and then I called Albert back to ask him what I
really wanted to know. "Albert? Where, exactly, is Kiara now?"
   He  paused,  tamping  tobacco  into his pipe and frowning. "Gelle-Kiara
Moynlin," he said at last, "is in a black hole."
   "Yes. And what does that mean?"
   He said apologetically, "That's hard to say. I mean it's hard to put in
simple terms, and also hard to say because I really don't know. Not enough
data."
   "Do your best,"
   "Sure  thing,  Robin.  I  would  say  that she is in the section of the
exploration craft which remained in orbit, just under the event horizon of
the   singularity  you  encountered-which,"  he  waved  carelessly  and  a
blackboard  appeared  behind  him, "is of course just at the Schwarzschild
radius."
   He  stood  up,  jamming the unlit pipe into the hip pocket of his baggy
cotton slacks, picked up a piece of chalk and wrote:

2GM
C2

   "At  that  boundary,  light  can't go any farther. It is what you might
think  of  as  a standing wave-front where light has gone as far as it can
go.  You  can't  see into the black hole past it. Nothing can come up from
behind  it. The symbols, of course, stand for gravity and mass-and I don't
have  to  tell  an old faster-than-light person like you what c2 is, do I?
From  the  instrumentation  you  brought  back,  it would appear that this
particular  hole  was maybe sixty kilometers in diameter, which would give
it  a mass of maybe ten times the sun. Am I telling you more than you want
to know?"
   "A   little  bit,  Albert,"  I  said,  shifting  uncomfortably  on  the
Watercouch. I wasn't really sure just what I was asking for.
   "Perhaps what you want to know is whether she is dead, Bobby," he said.
"Oh,  no.  I  don't  think  so. There's a lot of radiation around, and God
knows  what  shear  forces.  But  she hasn't had much time to be dead yet.
Depends  on her angular velocity. She might not yet even know you're gone.
Time dilation, you see. That is a consequence of..."
   "I understand about time dilation," I interrupted. And I did, because I
was  feeling  almost as though I were living through some of it. "Is there
any way we can find that out."
   "'A  black  hole has no hair,' Bobby," he quoted solemnly. "That's what
we  call the Carter-Werner-Robinson-Hawking Law, and what it means is that
the  only  information  you  get  out  of a black hole is mass, charge and
angular momentum. Nothing else."
   "Unless you get inside it, the way she did."
   "Well,  yes,  Robby,"  he  admitted,  sitting down and attending to his
pipe. Long pause. Puff, puff. Then, "Robin?"
   "Yes, Albert?"
   He  looked  abashed,  or  as abashed as a holographic construct can. "I
haven't  been entirely fair with you," he said. "There is some information
that  comes  out  of black holes. But that gets us into quantum mechanics.
And it doesn't do you any good, either. Not for your purposes."
   I  didn't  really  like  having  a  computer  program  tell  me what my
"purposes"  were. Especially since I wasn't all that sure myself. "Tell me
about it!" I ordered.
   "Well-we  don't really know a lot. Goes back to Stephen Hawking's first
principles.  He  pointed out that, in a sense, a black hole can be said to
have  a  'temperature'-which implies some kind of radiation. Some kinds of
particles  do  escape. But not from the kinds of black holes that interest
you, Robby."
   "What kind do they escape from?"
   "Well, mostly from the tiny ones, the ones with the mass of, say, Mount
Everest.  Submicroscopic ones. No bigger than a nuclear particle. They get
real  hot,  a  hundred  billion  Kelvin  and up. The smaller they get, the
faster  the quantum tunneling goes on, the hotter they get-so they keep on
getting  smaller and hotter until they just blow up. Big ones, no. It goes
the  other way. The bigger they are, the more infall they get to replenish
their  mass,  and  the harder it is for a particle to tunnel out. One like
Kiara's  has  a  temperature probably down around a hundred millionth of a
Kelvin, which is really cold, Robin. And getting colder all the time."
   "So you don't get out of one of those."
   "Not any way I know about, no, Robin. Does that answer your questions?"
   "For  now," I said, dismissing him. And it did, all but one: Why was it
that when he was talking to me about Kiara he called me "Robby"?
   Essie wrote good programs, but it seemed to me that they were beginning
to  overlap. I used to have a program that addressed me by childhood names
from  time to time. But it was a psychiatric program. I reminded myself to
speak  to  Essie  about  straightening  out  her  programming,  because  I
certainly  did  not  feel  I  had any need for the services of Sigfrid von
Shrink now.

   Senator Praggler's temporary office wasn't in the Gateway tower, but on
the  96th  floor  of the legislators' office building. A courtesy from the
Brazilian  Congress  to  a colleague, and a flattering one, because it was
only  two  stories  below the top. In spite of the fact that I got up with
the  dawn,  I  got  there  a  couple  minutes  late.  I had spent the time
wandering  around  the  early  morning  city,  ducking  under the overhead
roadways,  coming out in the parking lot. Strolling. I was still in a sort
of temporary stasis of time.
   But  Praggler  shook  me  out  of it, all charged-up and beaming. "It's
wonderful  news, Robin!" he cried, pulling me into his office and ordering
coffee. "Jesus! How stupid we've all been!"
   For  a  moment I thought he meant that Bover had dropped his suit. That
only  showed how stupid I was still being; what he was talking about was a
late  flash from the Food Factory relay. The long-sought Heechee books had
turned  out  to  be  the  prayer fans that we had all seen for decades. "I
thought  you'd  have  known  all  about  it,"  he  apologized, when he had
finished filling me in.
   "I've been out walking," I said. It was pretty disconcerting for him to
be  telling  me  about  something  as big as that on my own project. But I
recover  fast.  "Seems  to  me,  Senator,"  I said, "that's a big plus for
vacating that injunction."
   He  grinned.  "You  know, I could have guessed it would strike you that
way. Anything would. Mind telling me how you figure that?"
   "Well,  it  looks  clear  to  me.  What's  the  biggest  purpose of the
expedition?  Knowledge about the Heechee. And now we find out that there's
a lot of it lying around, just waiting for us to pick it up."
   He frowned. "We don't know how to decode the damn things."
   "We  will.  Now  that  we know what they are, we'll figure out a way to
make  them work. We've got the revelation. All we need is the engineering.
We  ought to..." I stopped myself in the middle of a sentence. I was going
to  say that it was a good idea to start buying up every prayer fan on the
market,  but  that  was too good an idea to give even a friend. I switched
to,  "We  ought  to get results pretty fast. The point is, the Herter-Hall
expedition isn't our only iron in the fire any more, so any argument about
national interests loses a lot of weight."
   He  accepted a cup of coffee from his secretary, the real-live one that
didn't  look a bit like his program, and then shrugged. "It's an argument.
I'll tell it to the committee."
   "I was hoping you'd do more than that, Senator."
   "If you mean you want the whole thing dropped, Robin, I don't have that
authority. I'm only here to oversee the committee. For one month. I can go
home  and raise hell in the Senate, and maybe I will, but that's the limit
of it."
   "And what's the committee going to do? Will they uphold Bover's claim?"
   He hesitated. "I think it's worse than that. I think the sentiment's to
expropriate  you  all. Then it's a Gateway Corporation matter, which means
it sticks there until the signatories to the treaty unstick it. Of course,
in the long run, you'll all get reimbursed..."
   I slammed the cup back into its saucer. "Fuck the reimbursement! Do you
think I'm in this for the money?"
   Praggler is a pretty close friend. I know he likes me, and I even think
he trusts me, but there wasn't any friendly look on his face when he said,
"Sometimes  I wonder just why you are in it, Robin." He looked at me for a
moment  without  expression. I knew he knew about me and Kiara, and I also
knew  he'd  been a guest at Essie's table at Tappan. "I'm sorry about your
wife's illness," he said at last. "I hope she's all better real soon."

   I stopped in his outer office to make a quick coded call to Harriet, to
tell  her  to get my people started buying every prayer fan they could get
their  hands  on.  She had about a million messages, but I would only take
one-and all that said was that Essie had passed a quiet night and would be
seeing  the  doctors  in  about  an hour. I didn't have time for the rest,
because I had somewhere to go.
   It  is  not  easy to get a taxi in front of the Brazilian Congress; the
doormen  have  their  orders,  and  they know who rates priority. I had to
climb  up  on  the roadway and flag one down. Then, when I gave the driver
the  address,  he made me repeat it twice, and then show it to him written
down.  It  wasn't  my  bad Portuguese. He didn't really want to go to Free
Town.
   So  we  drove  out  past  the  old cathedral, under the immense Gateway
tower,  along  the congested boulevard and out into the open planalto. Two
kilometers  of  it.  That  was  the  green space, the cordon sanitaire the
Brazilians  defended around their capital city; but just beyond it was the
shantytown.  As soon as we entered it I rolled the window up. I grew up in
the  Wyoming  food mines and I am used to twenty-four-hour stink, but this
was  a  different  stink.  Not  just  the stench of oil. This was open-air
toilets  and  rotting  garbage-two million people without running water in
their  homes.  The  shanties  had  sprung  up  in  the first place to give
construction  workers a place to live while they built the beautiful dream
city.  They  were  supposed  to  disappear  when  the  city  was finished.
Shantytowns never disappear. They only become institutionalized.
   The  taxi-driver  pushed  his  cab through nearly a kilometer of narrow
alleys,  muttering to himself, never faster than a crawl. Goats and people
moved  slowly out of our way. Little kids jabbered at me as they ran along
beside  us.  I  made  him  take me to the exact place, and get out and ask
where  Senhor  Hanson  Bover  lived,  but  before he found out I saw Bover
himself sitting on cinder-block steps attached to a rusty old mobile home.
As  soon  as  I  paid him, the driver backed around and left, a lot faster
than we had come, and by then he was swearing out loud.
   Bover  did  not  stand  up as I came toward him. He was chewing on some
kind  of  sweet  roll, and didn't stop doing that, either. He just watched
me.
   By  the  standards  of  the  barrio,  he  lived in a mansion. Those old
trailers  had two or three rooms inside, and he even had a little patch of
something  or  other green growing alongside the step. The top of his head
was  bare  and  sunburned,  and  he was wearing dirty denim cut-offs and a
tee-shirt  printed  with something in Portuguese that I didn't understand,
but  looked  dirty  too.  He swallowed and said, "I would offer you lunch,
Broadhead, but I'm just finishing eating it."
   "I  don't  want  lunch.  I want to make a deal. I'll give you fifty per
cent  of  my interest in the expedition plus a million dollars cash if you
drop your suit."
   He  stroked  the top of his head gingerly. It struck me strange that he
got  burned  so  fast, because I hadn't noticed sunburn the day before-but
then  I  realized I hadn't noticed baldness, either. He had been wearing a
toupee. All dressed up for his mingling with class society. No difference.
I  didn't like the man's manners, and I didn't like the growing cluster of
audience around us, either. "Can we talk this over inside?" I asked.
   He  didn't  answer.  He  just pushed the last bite of the roll into his
mouth and chewed it while he looked at me.
   That was enough of that. I squeezed past him and climbed the steps into
the house.
   The  first  thing  that  hit me was the stink-worse than outside, oh, a
hundred  times worse. Three walls of the room were taken up with stacks of
cages, and breeding rabbits in every cage. What I smelled was rabbit shit,
kilos  of  it.  And  not just from rabbits. There was a baby with a soiled
diaper  being  nursed in the arms of a skinny young woman. No. A girl; she
looked fifteen at the most. She stared up worriedly at me, but didn't stop
nursing.
   So  this  was the dedicated worshipper at his wife's shrine! I couldn't
help it. I laughed out loud.
   Coming  inside  had  not  been  such a good idea. Bover followed me in,
pulling  the  door  shut,  and the stink intensified. He was not impassive
now, he was angry. "I see you don't approve of my living arrangements," he
said.
   I shrugged. "I didn't come here to talk about your sex life."
   "No. Nor do you have any right to. You wouldn't understand."
   I  tried  to  keep the conversation where I wanted it to be. "Bover," I
said,  "I  made  you  an  offer  which is better than you'll ever get in a
court,  and  a lot more than you had any reason to hope for. Please accept
it, so I can go ahead with what I'm doing."
   He  didn't answer me directly that time, either, just said something to
the  girl  in  Portuguese. She got up silently, wrapped a cloth around the
baby's  bottom,  and  went out on the steps, closing the door again behind
her.  Bover  said,  as though he hadn't heard me, "Trish has been gone for
more  than eight years, Mr. Broadhead. I still love her. But I've only got
one  life to live and I know what the odds are against ever sharing any of
it with Trish again."
   "If we can figure out how to run the Heechee ships properly we might be
able  to  go out and find Trish," I said. I didn't pursue that; all it was
doing  was  making  him  look  at  me  with active hostility, as though he
thought I were trying to con him. I said,
   "A  million  dollars,  Bover.  You  can  be  out of this place tonight.
Forever.  With your lady and your baby and your rabbits, too. Full Medical
for all of them. A future for the kid."
   "I told you you wouldn't understand, Broadhead."
   I  checked myself and only said, "Then make me understand. Tell me what
I don't know."
   He  picked  a  soiled baby dress and a couple of pins off the chair the
girl  had  been  sitting  on.  For a moment I thought he had relapsed into
hospitality, but he sat there himself and said, "Broadhead, I've lived for
eight  years on welfare. Brazilian welfare. If we hadn't raised rabbits we
wouldn't  have  had  meat. If we didn't sell the skins I wouldn't have bus
fare  to  meet  you  for  lunch, or to go to my lawyer's office. A million
dollars won't pay me for that, or for Trish."
   I  was still trying to keep my temper, but the stink was getting to me,
and  so was his attitude. I switched strategies. "Do you have any sympathy
for your neighbors, Bover? Do you want to see them helped? We can end this
kind  of  poverty  forever, Bover, with Heechee technology. Plenty of food
for everybody! Decent places to live!"
   He said patiently, "You know as well as I do that the first things that
come  from  Heechee  technology-any  technology  don't go to people in the
barrio.  They  go to make rich people like you richer. Oh, maybe sooner or
later  it might all happen, but when? In time to make any difference to my
neighbors?"
   "Yes! If I can make it happen faster I will!"
   He nodded judgmatically. "You say you will do that. I know I will, if I
get control. Why should I trust you?"
   "Because  I  give  you  my  word, you stupid shit! Why do you think I'm
cutting corners?"
   He leaned back and looked up at me. "As to that," he said, "why, yes, I
think  I  know why you're in such a hurry. It doesn't have much to do with
my  neighbors  or  me.  My  lawyers  have  researched you quite carefully,
Broadhead, and I know all about your girl on Gateway."
   I  couldn't  help  it.  I  exploded. "If you know that much," I yelled,
"then you know I want to get her out of where I put her! And I'll tell you
this, Bover, I'm not going to let you and your jailbait whore keep me from
trying!"
   His  face  was  suddenly  as red as the top of his head. "And what does
your wife think about what you're doing?" he asked nastily.
   "Why  don't  you  ask her yourself? If she lives long enough for you to
hassle  her.  Fuck  you,  Bover,  I'm going. How do I get a taxi?" He only
grinned  at  me.  Meanly.  I  brushed past the woman on the stoop and left
without looking back.

   By  the time I got back to the hotel I knew what he was grinning about.
It had been explained to me by two hours of waiting for a bus, in a square
next  to  an open latrine. I won't even say what riding that bus was like.
I've  traveled  in  worse  ways,  but not since I left Gateway. There were
knots  of  people in the hotel lobby, and they looked at me strangely as I
walked  across  the  floor.  Of course, they all knew who I was. Everybody
knew  about the Herter-Halls, and my picture had been on the PV along with
theirs. I had no doubt that I looked peculiar, sweated, and still furious.
   My  console was a fireworks display of attention signals when I slammed
myself  into my suite. The first thing I had to do was go to the bathroom,
but  over my shoulder, through the open door, I called: "Harriet! Hold all
messages  for  a  minute  and  give  me  Morton.  One  way. I don't want a
response,  I just want to give an order." Morton's little face appeared in
the  corner  of the display, looking antsy but ready. "Morton, I just came
from  Bover. I said everything I could think of to him and it did no good,
so  I  want  you to get me private detectives. I want to search his record
like  it's  never  been searched before. The son of a bitch must have done
something  wrong.  I want to blackmail him. If it's a ten-year-old parking
ticket,  I  want  to  extradite  him  for it. Get busy on that." He nodded
silently,  but  didn't  go away, meaning that he was doing what I had said
but wanted to say something himself, if only I would let him. Over him was
the  larger,  waiting face of Harriet, counting out the minute's silence I
had  imposed  on  her.  I  came  back  into the room and said, "All right,
Harriet, let's have it. Top priority first, one at a time."
   "Yes,  Robin,  but..."  She hesitated, making swift evaluations. "Their
are  two  immediate  ones, Robin. First, Albert Einstein wishes to discuss
with you the capture of the Herter-Hall party, apparently by the Heechee."
   "Captured!  Why  the  hell  didn't  you..."  I  stopped;  obviously she
couldn't  have  told  me,  because I was out of communication entirely for
most  of the afternoon. She didn't wait for me to figure that out but went
on:
   "However,  I  think  you would prefer to receive Dr. Liederman's report
first, Robin. I've been putting through a call, and she's ready to talk to
you now, live."
   That stopped me.
   "Do it," I said, but I knew it couldn't be anything good, to make Wilma
Liederman  report live and in person. "What's the matter?" I asked as soon
as she appeared.
   She was wearing an evening dress, with an orchid on her shoulder, first
time I had seen her like that since she came to our wedding. "Don't panic,
Robin,"  she  said,  "but  Essie's  had  a  slight  setback.  She's on the
life-support machines again."
   "What?"
   "It's  not  as  bad as it sounds. She's awake, and coherent, feeling no
pain, her condition is stable. We can keep her like that forever..."
   "Get to the 'but'!"
   "But  she's  rejecting  the  kidney,  and  the tissues around it aren't
regenerating.  She  needs a whole new batch of transplants. She had uremic
failure about two hours ago and now she's on fulltime dialysis. That's not
the  worst  part.  She's  had so many bits and pieces stuck in her from so
many sources that her auto-immune system is all screwed up. We're going to
have to scrounge to get a tissue match, and even so we're going to have to
dope her with anti-immunes for a long time."
   "Shit! That's right out of the Dark Ages!"
   She  nodded.  "Usually we can get a four-four match, but not for Essie.
Not  this time. She's a rare-blood to begin with, you know. She's Russian,
and her types are uncommon in this part of the world, so..."
   "Get some from Leningrad, for Christ's sake!"
   "So,  I was about to say, I've checked tissue banks all over the world.
We can come close. Real close. But in her present state there's still some
risk."
   I looked at her carefully, trying to figure out her tone. "Of having to
do  it over, you mean?" She shook her head gently. "You mean, of-of dying?
I don't believe you! What the hell is Full Medical for?"
   "Robin-she already has died of this, you know. We had to reanimate her.
There's a limit to the shock she can survive."
   "Then  the  hell  with the operation! You said she's stable the way she
is!"
   Wilma  looked  at the hands clasped in her lap for a moment, then up at
me. "She's the patient, Robin, not you."
   "What's that supposed to mean?"
   "It's her decision. She has already decided she doesn't want to be tied
down to a life-support system forever. We're going to go in again tomorrow
morning."
   I  sat  there  staring  at  the  tank,  long after Wilma Liedermari had
disappeared  and  my  patient  secretarial  program  had  formed, silently
waiting  for  orders. "Uh, Harriet," I said at last, "I want a flight back
tonight."
   "Yes,  Robin,"  she  said.  "I've already booked you. There's no direct
flight tonight, but there's one that you can transfer at Caracas, gets you
in to New York about five AM. The surgery is not scheduled until eight."
   "Thank  you."  She went back to silent waiting. Morton's silly face was
still  there  in  the  tank,  too,  tiny and reproachful down in the lower
right-hand  corner. He did not speak, but every once in a while he cleared
his  throat  or swallowed to let me know he was waiting. "Morton," I said,
"didn't I tell you to get lost?"
   "I  can't  do  that, Robin. Not while I have an unresolved dilemma. You
gave orders about Mr. Bover..."
   "Damn  right  I did. If I can't handle him that way maybe I'll just get
him killed."
   "You  don't  have  to  bother," Morton said quickly. "There's a message
from his lawyers for you. He has decided to accept your offer."
   I  goggled  at  him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. "I don't understand it
either,  Robin,  and  neither  do his lawyers," he said quickly. "They are
quite  upset  But  there  is  a  personal  message for you, if it explains
anything."
   "What's that?"
   "Quote, 'Maybe he does understand after all.' Close quote."

   In  a  somewhat confusing life, and one that is rapidly becoming a long
one,  I've  had a lot of confusing days, but that one was special. I ran a
hot  tub  and soaked in it for half an hour, trying to make my mind empty.
The effort didn't bring calm.
   I  had three hours before the Caracas plane left. I didn't know what to
do with it. It was not that there wasn't plenty for me to do. Harriet kept
trying  to  get  my  attention-Morton  to firm up the contract with Bover,
Albert  to  discuss  the bioanalysis of the Heechee droppings somebody had
collected,  everybody to talk to me, about everything. I didn't want to do
any  of  them.  I  was  stuck in my dilated time, watching the world flash
past. But it didn't flash, it crept. I didn't know what to do about it. It
was nice that Bover thought I understood so well. I wondered what he would
take to explain what I understood to me.
   After  a  while  I  managed to work up enough energy to let Harriet put
through  some  of  the  decision-needed  calls  for  me,  and  I made what
decisions  seemed necessary; and a while after that, toying with a bowl of
crackers and milk, I listened to a news summary. It was full of talk about
the  Herter-Hall capture, all of which I could get better from Albert than
from the PV newscasters.
   And  at  that  point I remembered that Albert had wanted to talk to me,
and  for a moment I felt better. It gave me a point and purpose in living.
I  had someone to yell at. "Halfwit," I snapped at him as he materialized,
"magnetic tapes are a century old. How come you can't read them?"
   He  looked  at me calmly under his bushy white brows. "You're referring
to  the  so-called  'prayer fans', aren't you, Robin? Of course we did try
that,  many times. We even suspected that there might be a synergy, and so
we tried several kinds of magnetic fields at once, steady and oscillating,
oscillating  at  different  rates  of  speed.  We  even tried simultaneous
microwave radiation, though, as it turned out, the wrong kind..."
   I  was  still  bemused, but not so much so that I didn't pick up on the
implication. "You mean there's a right kind?"
   "Sure  thing,  Robin,"  he  grinned. "Once we got a good trace from the
Herter-Hall  instrumentation  we  just  duplicated  it. The same microwave
radiation  that's  ambient in the Food Factory, a flux of a few microwatts
of  elliptically  polarized  million-A  microwave.  And  then  we  get the
signal."
   "Bloody marvelous, Albert! And what is it you got?"
   "Uh,  well,"  he said, reaching for his pipe, "actually not a lot, yet.
It's  hologram-stored  and  time-dependent,  so  what  we get is a kind of
choppy cloud of symbols. And, of course, we can't read any of the symbols.
It's  Heechee language, you know. But now it's just straight cryptography,
so to speak. All we need is a Rosetta stone."
   "How long?"
   He shrugged, and spread his hands, and twinkled.
   I  thought for a moment. "Well, stay with it. Another thing. I want you
to read into my lawyer program the whole thing, the microwave frequencies,
schematics, everything. There ought to be a patent in there somewhere, and
I want it."
   "Sure thing, Robin. Uh. Would you like to hear about the Dead Men?"
   "What about the Dead Men?"
   "Well,"  he  said,  "not  all  of them are human. There are some pretty
strange  little minds in those storage circuits, Robin. I think they might
be what you call the Old Ones."
   The back of my neck prickled. "Heechee?"
   "No,  no,  Robin!  Almost human. But not. They don't use language well,
especially  what seem to be the earliest of them, and I bet you can't even
guess  the computer-time bill you're going to get for analysis and mapping
to make any sense of them at all."
   "My God! Essie'll be thrilled when..."
   I stopped. For a moment I had forgotten about Essie.
   "Well,"  I said, "that's-interesting. What else is there to tell?" But,
really,  I  didn't care. I had used up my own last jolt of adrenaline, and
there wasn't any more.
   I  let  him tell me the rest of his budget of conversation, but most of
it  rolled right off me. Three members of the Herter-Hall party were known
to  be  captured.  The  Heechee had brought them to a spindle-shaped place
where  some  old machinery was lying about. The cameras were continuing to
return  frames  of  nothing  very exciting. The Dead Men had gone haywire,
were making no sense at all. Paul Hall's whereabouts were unknown; perhaps
he  was  still  at  liberty.  Perhaps he was still alive. The haywire link
between  the  Dead Men's radio and the Food Factory was still functioning,
but  it  was  not  clear how long it would last-even if it had anything to
tell  us.  The  organic  chemistry of the Heechee was quite surprising, in
that it was less unlike human biochemistry than one might guess. I let him
talk until he ran down, not prompting him to continue, then turned back to
the  commercial  PV. It bad two rapid-fire comedians delivering bellylaugh
lines  to  each  other.  Unfortunately,  it  was  in Portuguese. It didn't
matter.  I still had an hour to kill, and I let it run. If nothing else, I
could  admire  the  pretty  Carioca, fruit salad in her hair, whose scanty
costume the comedians were tweaking off as they passed her back and forth,
giggling.
   Harriet's attention signal lighted up, bright red.
   Before  I  could  make  up my mind to respond, the picture slid off the
commercial   PV  channel  and  a  man's  voice  said  something  stern  in
Portuguese.  I  couldn't  understand  a  word  of it, but I understood the
picture that showed almost at once.
   It  was  the  Food  Factory,  taken  out  of  stock,  a  shot  from the
Herter-Halls  as  they  were  approaching  it  to  dock.  And in the short
sentence  the  announcer  had  spoken  were two words that could have been
"Peter Herter".
   Could have been.
   Were.
   The  picture  didn't change, but a voice began, and it was old Herter's
voice,  angry  and firm. "This message," it said, "is to be broadcast over
all networks at once. It is a two-hour warning. In two hours I am going to
cause  a  one-minute  attack  of  the  fever  by  entering  the  couch and
projecting  the  necessary,  uh,  projections.  I  tell  you  all  to take
precautions.  If  you  do  not,  it  is your responsibility, not mine." It
paused  for  a  moment, then resumed. "Remember, you have two hours from a
count  which  I  will  give  you. no more. Shortly after that I will speak
again  to  tell  you  the  reason for this, and what I demand as my proper
right  if  you  do  not  wish  this  to  happen  many  times.  Two  hours.
Beginning... now."
   And the voice stopped.
   The  announcer came back on, babbling in Portuguese, looking scared. It
didn't matter that I couldn't understand what he was saying.
   I had understood what Peter Herter had said, very well. He had repaired
the  dreaming  couch  and  was going to use it. Not out of ignorance, like
Wan. Not as a quick experiment, like the girl, Janine. He was going to use
it  as  a  weapon.  He  had a gun pointed at the heads of the entire human
race.
   And my first thought was: So much for the deal with Bover. Gateway Corp
was sure to take over now, and I couldn't blame them.