So much excitement was bad for him. When they were all awake again he found himself still shaking, his body aching as though he had not slept at all. No matter. The questions and the chatter began again at once:
“And who are the Dead Men?”
“I don’t know. Let us ask them? Perhaps-sometimes they call themselves ‘prospectors’. From a place called ‘Gateway’.”
“And this place they are in, is it a Heechee artifact?”
“Heechee?” He thought; he had heard the word, long ago, but he did not know what it meant. “Do you mean the Old Ones?”
“What do the Old Ones look like?” And he could not say in words, so they gave him a sketch pad again and he tried to draw the big waggling jaws, the frowsty beards, and as each sketch was finished they snatched it up and held it before the machine they called “Vera”.
“This machine is like a Dead Man,” he offered, and they flew in with questions again:
“Do you mean the Dead Men are computers?”
“What is a ‘computer’?”
And then the questions would go the other way for a while, as they explained to him the meaning of “computer”, and presidential elections, and the 130-day fever. And all the while they were roaming the ship, as he explained to them what he knew of it. Wan was becoming very tired. He had had little experience of fatigue, because in his timeless life when he was sleepy he slept and did not get up until he was rested. He did not enjoy the feeling, or the scratchiness in his throat, or the headache. But he was too excited to stop, especially when they told him about the female person named Trish Bover. “She was here? Here in the outpost? And she did not stay?”
“No, Wan. She didn’t know you would come. She thought if she stayed she would die.” What a terrible pity! Although, Wan calculated, he had only been ten years old when she came, he could have been a companion for her. And she for him. He would have fed her and cared for her and taken her with him to see the Old Ones and the Dead Men, and been very happy.
“Then where did she go?” he asked.
For some reason, that question troubled them. They looked at each other. Lurvy said after a moment, “She got in her ship, Wan.”
“She went back to Earth?”
“No. Not yet. It is a very long trip for the kind of ship she had. Longer than she would live.”
The younger man, Paul, the one who coupled with Lurvy, took over. “She is still traveling, Wan. We don’t know where exactly. We are not even sure she is alive. She froze herself.”
“Then she is dead?”
“Well-she is probably not alive. But if she is found, maybe she can be revived. She’s in the freezing compartment of her ship, at minus-forty degrees. Her body will not decay for some time, I think. She thought. At any rate, she thought it was the best chance she had.”
“I could have given her a better one,” Wan said dejectedly. Then he brightened. There was the other female, Janine, who was not frozen. Wishing to impress her, he said, “That is a gosh number.”
“What is? What kind of a number?”
“A gosh number, Janine. Tiny Jim talks about them. When you say ‘minus-forty’ you don’t have to say whether it is in Celsius or Fahrenheit, because they are the same.” He tittered at the joke.
They were looking at each other again. Wan could see that something was wrong, but he was feeling stranger, dizzier, more fatigued at every second. He thought perhaps they had not understood the joke, so he said, “Let us ask Tiny Jim. He can be reached just down this passage, where the dreaming couch is.”
“Reached? How?” demanded the old man, Payter.
Wan did not answer; he was not feeling well enough to trust what he said, and, besides, it was easier to show them. He turned abruptly away and hauled himself toward the dreaming chamber. By the time they followed he had already keyed the book in and called for number one hundred twelve. “Tiny Jim?” he tried; then, over his shoulder, “Sometimes he doesn’t want to talk. Please be patient.” But he was lucky this time, and the Dead Man’s voice responded quite quickly.
“Wan? Is that you?”
“Of course it is me, Tiny Jim. I want to hear about gosh numbers.”
“Very well, Wan. Gosh numbers are numbers which represent more than one quantity, so that when you perceive the coincidence you say, ‘Gosh.’ Some gosh numbers are trivial. Some are perhaps of transcendental importance. Some religious persons count gosh numbers as a proof of the existence of God. As to whether or not God exists, I can give you only a broad outline of-“
“No, Tiny Jim. Please stick to gosh numbers now.”
“Yes, Wan. I will now give you a list of a few of the simplest gosh numbers. Point-five degrees. Minus-forty degrees. One thirty-seven. Two thousand and twenty-five. Ten to the 39th. Please write one paragraph on each of these, identifying the characteristics which make them gosh numbers and-“
“Cancel, cancel,” Wan squeaked, his voice rising higher because it smarted so. “This is not a class.”
“Oh, well,” said the Dead Man gloomily, “all right. Point-five degrees is the angular diameter of both the sun and the Moon as seen from Earth. Gosh! How strange that they should be the same, but also how useful, because it is partly because of this coincidence that Earth has eclipses. Minus-forty degrees is the temperature which is the same in both Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. Gosh. Two thousand twenty-five is the sum of the cubes of the integers, one cubed plus two cubed plus three cubed and so on up to nine cubed, all added together. It is also the square of their sum. Gosh. Ten to the thirty-ninth is a measure of the weakness of the gravitational force as compared with the electromagnetic. It is also the age of the universe expressed as a dimensionless number. It is also the square root of the number of particles in the observable universe, that is, that part of the universe relative to Earth in which Hubble’s constant is less than point-five. Also-well, never mind, but gosh! Gosh, gosh, gosh. On these goshes P.A.M. Dirac constructed his Large Numbers Hypothesis, from which he deduced that the force of gravity must be weakening as the age of the universe increased. Now, there is a gosh for you!”
“You left out one thirty-seven,” the boy accused.
The Dead Man cackled. “Good for you, Wan! I wanted to see if you were listening. One thirty-seven is Eddington’s fine structure constant, of course, and turns up over and over in nuclear physics. But it is more than that. Suppose you take the inverse, that is one over one thirty-seven, and express it as a decimal. The first three digits are Double Ought Seven, James Bond’s identification as a killer. There is the lethality of the universe for you! The first eight digits are Clarke’s Palindrome, point oh seven two nine nine two seven oh. There is its symmetry. Deadly, and two-faced, that is the fine structure constant! Or,” he mused, “perhaps I should say, there is its inverse. Which would imply that the universe itself is the inverse of that? Namely kind and uneven? Help me, Wan. I am not sure how to interpret this symbol.”
“Oh, cancel, cancel,” said Wan angrily. “Cancel and out.” He was feeling irritable and shaky, as well as more ill than he had ever been, even when the Dead Men had given him shots. “He goes on like that,” he apologized to the others. “That’s why I don’t usually speak to him from here.”
“He doesn’t look well,” said Lurvy worriedly to her husband, and then to Wan, “Do you feel all right?” He shook his head, because he did not know how to answer.
Paul said, “You ought to rest. But-what did you mean, ‘from here.’ Where is, uh, Tiny Jim?”
“Oh, he is in the main station,” said Wan weakly, sneezing.
“You mean-“ Paul swallowed hard. “But you said it was forty-five days away by ship. That must be a very long way.”
The old man, Payter, cried: “Radio? Are you talking to him by radio? Faster-than-light radio?”
Wan shrugged. Paul had been right; he needed to rest, and there was the couch, which had always been the exact proper place to make him feel good and rested.
“Tell me, boy!” shouted the old man. “If you have a working FU radio- The bonus-“
“I am very tired,” said Wan hoarsely. “I must sleep.” He felt himself falling. He evaded their clutching arms, dove between them and plunged into the couch, its comforting webbing closing around him.
4 Robin Broadhead, Inc.