Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (8 page)

“Where does he come from?”

“Ah, that is conjectural, Robin. He speaks of a ‘main station’, presumably another Heechee artifact in some ways resembling Gateway, Gateway Two and the Food Factory itself, but without any self-evident function. There do not appear to be any other living humans there. He speaks of ‘Dead Men’, who appear to be some sort of computer program like myself, although it is not clear whether they may not in fact be quite different in origin. He also mentions living creatures he calls ‘the Old Ones’ or ‘the frog-jaws’. He has little contact with them, in fact avoids it, and it is not clear where they come from.”

I took a deep breath. “Heechee?”

“I don’t know, Robin. I cannot even guess. By Occam’s Razor one would conjecture that living non-humans occupying a Heechee artifact might well be Heechee-but there is no direct evidence. We have no idea what Heechee look like, you know.”

I did know. It was a sobering thought that we might soon find out.

“Anything else? Can you tell me what’s happening with the tests to bring the factory back?”

“Sure thing, Robin,” he said, striking a match to the pipe. “But I’m afraid there’s no good news. The object appears to be course-programmed and under full control. Whatever we do to it it counteracts.”

It had been a close decision whether to leave the Food Factory out in the Oort cloud and somehow try to ship food back to Earth, or bring the thing itself in. Now it looked as though we had no choice. “Is there-do you think it’s under Heechee control?”

“There is no way to be sure as yet. Narrowly, I would conjecture not. It appears to be an automatic response. However,” he said, puffing on his pipe, “there is something encouraging. May I show you some visuals from the factory?”

“Please do,” I said, but actually he hadn’t waited; Albert is a courteous program, but also a smart one. He disappeared and I was looking at a scene of the boy, Wan, showing Peter Herter how to open what seemed to be a hatch in the wall of a passage. Out of it he was pulling floppy soft packages of something in bright red wrappings.

“Our assumption as to the nature of the artifact seems to be validated, Robin. Those are edible and, according to Wan, they are continually replenished. He has been living on them for most of his life and, as you see, appears to be in excellent health, basically-I am afraid he is catching a cold just now.”

I looked at the clock over his shoulder-he always keeps it at the right time for my sake. “That’s all for now, then. Keep me posted if anything that affects your conclusions turns up.”

“Sure thing, Robin,” he said, disappearing.

I started to get up. Talking of food reminded me that lunch should be about ready, and I was not only hungry, I had plans for an afterlunch break. I tied the robe around me-and then remembered the message about the lawsuit. Lawsuits are nothing special in any rich man’s life, but if Morton wanted to talk to me I probably ought to listen.

He responded at once, sitting at his desk, leaning forward earnestly. “We’re being sued, Robin,” he said. “The Food Factory Exploitation Corp., the Gateway Corp., plus Paul Hall, Dorema Herter-Hall and Peter Herter, both in propria persona and as guardian for codefendant Janine Herter. Plus the Foundation and you personally.”

“I seem to have a lot of company, at least. Do I have to worry?” Pause. Thoughtfully, “I think you might, a little. The suit is from Hanson Bover. Trish’s husband, or widower, depending on how you look at it.” Morton was shimmering a little. It’s a defect in his program, and Essie keeps wanting to fix it-but it doesn’t affect his legal ability and I kind of like it. “He has got himself declared conservator of Trish Bover’s assets, and on the basis of her first landing on the Food Factory he wants a full mission completed share of whatever comes out of it.”

That wasn’t too funny. Even if we couldn’t move the damn thing, with the new developments that bonus might be quite a lot. “How can he do that? She signed the standard contract, didn’t she? So all we have to do is produce the contract. She didn’t come back, therefore she doesn’t get a share.”

“That’s the way to go if we wind up in court, yes, Robin. But there are one or two rather ambiguous precedents. Maybe not even ambiguous-her lawyer thinks they’re good, even if they are a little old. The most important one was a guy who signed a fifty-thousand-dollar contract to do a tightrope walk over Niagara Falls. No performance, no pay. He fell off halfway. The courts held that he had given the performance, so they had to pay up.”

“That’s crazy, Morton!”

“That’s the case law, Robin. But I only said you might have to worry a little. I think probably we’re all right, I’m just not sure we’re all right. We have to file an appearance within two days. Then we’ll see how it goes.”

“All right. Shimmer away, Morton,” I said, and got up, because by now I was absolutely sure it was time for lunch. In fact, Essie was just coming through the door, and, to my disappointment, she was fully dressed.

Essie is a beautiful woman, and one of the joys of being married to her for five years is that every year she looks better to me than the year before. She put her arm around my neck as we walked toward the dining porch and turned her head to look at me. “What’s matter, Robin?” she asked.

“Nothing’s the matter, dear S. Ya.,” I said. “Only I was planning to invite you to shower with me after lunch.”

“You are randy old goat, old man,” she said severely. “What is wrong with showering after dark, when we will then naturally and inevitably go to bed?”

“By dark I have to be in Washington. And tomorrow you’re off to Tucson for your conference, and this weekend I have to go for my medical. It doesn’t matter, though.”

She sat down at the table. “You are also pitifully bad liar,” she observed. “Eat quickly, old man. One cannot take too many showers, after all.”

I said, “Do you know, Essie, that you are a thoroughly sensual creature? It’s one of your finest traits.”

The quarterly statement on my food mines holdings was on my desk file in my Washington suite before breakfast. It was even worse than I had expected; at least two million dollars had burned up under the Wyoming hills, and another fifty thousand or so more was smoldering away every day until they got the fire all out. If they ever did. It did not mean I was in trouble, but it might mean that a certain amount of easy credit would no longer be easy. And not only did I know it, but by the time I got to the Senate hearing room it appeared that all of Washington knew it too. I testified quickly, along the same lines I had testified before, and when I was through Senator Praggler recessed the hearing and took me out to brunch. “I can’t figure you out, Robin,” he said. “Didn’t your fire change your mind about anything?”

“No, why should it? I’m talking about the long pull.”

He shook his head. “Here’s somebody with a sizeable position in food mine stocks-you-begging for higher taxes on the mines! Doesn’t make sense.”

I explained it to him all over again. Taken as a whole, the food mines could easily afford to allocate, say, ten percent of their gross to restoring the Rockies after scooping out the shale. But no company could afford to do it on its own. If we did it, we’d just lose any competitive position, we’d be undersold by everybody else. “So if you put through the amendment, Tim,” I said, “we’ll all be forced to do it. Food prices will go up, yes-but not a lot. My accountants say no more than eight or nine dollars a year, per person. And we’ll have an almost unspoiled countryside again.”

He laughed. “You’re a weird one. With all your do-gooding- and with your money, not to mention those things-“ he nodded at the Out bangles I still wore on my arm, three of them, signifying three missions that had each scared the hell out of me when I earned them as a Gateway prospector, “why don’t you run for the Senate?”

“Don’t want to, Tim. Besides, if I ran from New York I’d be running against you or Sheila, and I don’t want to do that. I don’t spend enough time in Hawaii to make a dent. And I’m not going to move back to Wyoming.”

He patted me on the shoulder. “Just this once,” he said, “I’m going to use a little old-fashioned political muscle. I’ll try to get your amendment through for you, Robin, though God knows what your competitors are going to do to try to stop it.”

After I left him I dawdled back to the hotel. There was no particular reason to hurry back to New York, with Essie in Tucson, so I decided to spend the rest of the day in my hotel suite in Washington-a bad decision, as it turned out, but I didn’t know that then. I was thinking about whether I minded being called a “do-gooder” or not. My old psychoanalyst had helped me along to a point where I didn’t mind taking credit for things I thought deserved credit, but most of what I did I did for me. The revegetation amendment wouldn’t cost me a dime; we’d make it up in raising prices, as I had explained. The money I put into space might pay off in dollar profits-probably would, I figured-but anyway it was going there because space was where my money had come from. And besides, I had some unfinished business out there. Somewhere. I sat by my window on the penthouse floor of the hotel, forty-five stories up, looking toward the Capitol and the Washington Monument, and wondered if my unfinished business was still alive. I hoped so. Even if she was hating me still.

Thinking about my unfinished business made me think of Essie, by now arriving in Tucson, and that gave me a twinge of worry. We were about due for another attack of the 130-day fever. I hadn’t thought about that early enough. I didn’t like the idea of her being three thousand kilometers away, in case it was a bad one. And, although I am not a jealous person, even if it was a mild, but lecherous and orgiastic one, as they seemed to be becoming more and more frequently, I really preferred that she be lecherous and orgiastic with me.

Why not? I called Harriet and had her make me reservations on an afternoon flight to Tucson. I could conduct my business as well from there as anywhere else, if not quite as comfortably. And then I started conducting some of it. Albert first. There was nothing significantly new, he said, except that the boy seemed to be developing a bad cold. “We’ve instructed the Herten-Hall party to administer standard antibiotics and symptom-suppressants,” he told me, “but they will not receive the message for some weeks, of course.”

“Serious?”

He frowned, puffing at his pipe. “Wan has never been exposed to most viruses and bacteria,” he said, “so I can’t make any definite statement. But, no, I would hope not. In any case, the expedition has medical supplies and equipment capable of dealing with most pathologies.”

“Do you know anything more about him?”

“A great deal, but not anything that changes my previous estimates, Robin.” Puff, puff. “His mother was Hispanic and his father American-Anglo, and they were both Gateway prospectors. Or so it would seem. So, apparently, in some way, were the personalities he refers to as the ‘Dead Men,’ although it is still unclear just what those are.”

“Albert,” I said, “look up some old Gateway missions, at least ten years back. See if you can find one that had an American and a Hispanic woman on it-and didn’t come back.”

“Sure thing, Bob.” Some day I must tell him to change to a snappier vocabulary, but actually he works very well as he is. He said almost at once, “There is no such mission. However, there was a launch which contained a pregnant Hispanic woman, still unreported. Shall I display the specs?”

“Sure thing, Albert,” I said, but he is not programmed to pick up that sort of nuance. The specs didn’t tell much. I hadn’t known the woman; she was before my time. But she had taken a One out after surviving a mission in which her husband and the other three crew members had been killed in a Five. And had never been heard of again. The mission was a simple go-out-and-see-what-you-get. What she had got had been a baby, in some strange place.

“That doesn’t account for Wan’s father, does it?”

“No, Robin, but perhaps he was on another mission. If we assume that the Dead Men are in some way related to unreturned missions, there must have been several.”

I said, “Are you suggesting that the Dead Men are actual prospectors?”

“Sure thing, Robin.”

“But how? You mean their brains might have been preserved?”

“Doubt it, Robin,” he said, rekindling his pipe thoughtfully. “There’s insufficient data, but I’d say whole-brain storage is no more than a point-one probability.”

“Then what are the other points?”

“Perhaps a readout of the chemical storage of memory-not a high probability, perhaps put it at point-three. Which is still the highest probability we’ve got. Voluntary interface on the part of the subjects-for instance, if they talked all their memories onto tape somehow-really low. Point-zero zero one, tops. Direct mental link-what you might call telepathy of some sort-about the same. Means unknown, point-five plus. Of course, Robin,” he added hurriedly, “you realize that all of these estimates are based on insufficient data and on inadequate hypotheses.”

“I suppose you’d do better if you could talk to the Dead Men direct”

“Sure thing, Bob. and I am about to request such a hookup through the Herter-Hall shipboard computer, but it needs careful programming beforehand. It is not a very good computer, Robin.” He hesitated. “Uh, Robin? There is one other interesting thing.”

“What’s that?”

“As you know, several large ships were docked at the Food Factory when it was discovered. It has been under frequent observation since, and the number of ships remained the same-not counting the Herter-Hall ship and the one in which Wan arrived two days ago, of course. But it is not certain they are the same ships.”