“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.