“It’s blank!”
“I haven’t started it yet,” he explained. The shape was taller than I, and about half as thick as it was tall. It began to shift before my eyes; the color thinned out until I could see through it clearly and then one, two, three dots began to appear inside it, points of bright red light that spun themselves out in a spiral. There was a sad chittering sound, like telemetry or like the amplified chirps of marmosets. Then the picture froze. The sound stopped. Albert’s voice said:
“I have stopped it at this point, Robin. It is probable that sound is language, but we have not yet been able to isolate semantic units from it. However, the ‘text’ is clear. There are one hundred thirty-seven of those points of light. Now watch while I run a few more seconds of the book.”
The spiral of 137 tiny stars doubled itself. Another coil of dots lifted itself from the original and floated to the top of the spindle, where it hung silently. The chitter of language began again and the original spiral expanded itself, while each of the dots began to trace a spiral of its own. When it was finished there was one large spiral, composed of 137 smaller spirals, each composed of 137 dots. Then the whole red pattern turned orange and it froze.
“Do you want to try to interpret that, Robin?’” Albert’s voice asked.
“Well, I can’t count that high. But it looks like 137 times 137, right?”
“Sure thing, Robin. 137 squared, making 18,769 dots in all. Now watch.”
Short green lines slashed the spiral into ten segments. One of the segments lifted itself off, dropped to the bottom of the spindle and turned red again. “That’s not exactly a tenth of the number, Robin,” said Albert. “By counting you find that there are now 1840 dots at the bottom. I’ll proceed.” Once again, the central figure changed color, this time to yellow. “Notice the top figure.” I looked closely, and saw that the first dot had turned orange, the third yellow. Then the central figure rotated itself on the vertical axis and spun out a three-D column of spirals, and Albert said, “We now have a total of 137 cubed dots in the central figure. From here on,” he said kindly, “it gets a little tedious to watch. I’ll run it through quickly.” And he did, patterns of dots flying around and isolating themselves, colors changing through yellow to avocado, avocado to green, green to aqua, aqua to blue, and on through the spectrum, nearly twice. “Now, do you see what we have? Three numbers, Robin. 137 in the center. 1840 down at the bottom. 137 to the eighteenth power, which is roughly the same as 10 to the thirty-eighth, at the top. Or, in order, three dimensionless numbers: the fine structure constant, the ratio of the proton to the electron and the number of particles in the universe. Robin, you have just had a short course in particle theory from a Heechee teacher!”
I said, “My God.”
Albert reappeared on the screen, beaming. “Exactly, Robin,” he said.
“But Albert! Does that mean you can read all the prayer fans?”
His face fell. “Only the simple ones,” he said regretfully. “This was actually the easiest. But from now on it’s quite straightforward. We play every fan and tape it. We look for correspondences. We make semantic assumptions and test them in as many contexts as we can find-we’ll do it, Robin. But it may take some time.”
“I don’t want to take time,” I snarled.
“Sure thing, Robin, but first every fan must be located, and read, and taped, and coded for machine comparison, and then-“
“I don’t want to hear,” I said. “Just do it-what’s the matter?”
His expression had changed. “It’s a question of funding, Robin,” he said apologetically. “There’s a great deal of machine time involved here.”
“Do it! As far as you can go. I’ll have Morton sell some more stock. What else have you got?”
“Something nice, Robin,” he grinned, shrinking in size until he was just a little face in the corner of the tank. Colors flowed in the center of the display and fused into a set of Heechee controls, displaying a pattern of color on five of the ten panels. The others were blank. “Know what that is, Robin? That’s a composite of all the known Gateway flights that wound up at Heechee Heaven. All the patterns you see are identical in all seven known missions. The others vary, but it’s a pretty good conjecture that they are not directly involved in course-setting.”
“What are you saying, Albert?” I demanded. He had caught me by surprise. I found that I was beginning to shake. “Do you mean if we set ship controls for that pattern we could get to Heechee Heaven?”
“Point nine five yes, Robin,” he nodded. “And I have identified three ships, two on Gateway and one on the Moon, that will accept that setting.”
I put on a sweater and walked down to the water. I didn’t want to hear any more.
The trickle pipes had been busy. I kicked my shoes off to feel the damp, pilowy grass and watched some boys, wind-trolling for perch, near the Nyack shore, and I thought: This is what I bought by risking my life on Gateway. What I paid for with Kiara’s.
And: Do I want to risk all this, and my life, again?
But it wasn’t really a question of “want to”. If one of those ships would go to Heechee Heaven and I could buy or steal a passage on it, I would go.
Then sanity saved me, and I realized I couldn’t, after all. Not at my age. And not the way Gateway Corp was feeling about me. And, most of all, not in time. The Gateway asteroid orbits at right-angles to the ecliptic, just about. Getting there from Earth is a tedious long job; by Hohmann curves twenty months or more, under forced acceleration more than six. Six months from now those ships would have been there and back.
If they were coming back, of course.
The realization was almost as much of a relief as it was a sick, hungry sense of loss.
Sigfrid von Shrink never told me how to get rid of ambivalence (or guilt). He did tell me how to deal with them. The recipe is, mostly, just to let them happen. Sooner or later they burn themselves out. (He says.) At least, they don’t have to be paralyzing. So while I was letting this ambivalence smolder itself into ash I was also strolling along the water, enjoying the pleasant under-the-bubble air and gazing proudly at the house I lived in and the wing where my very dear, and for some time wholly platonic, wife was, I hoped, getting herself good and rested. Whatever she was doing, she wasn’t doing it alone. Twice a taxicart had brought someone over from the tube stop. Both of them had been women; and now another taxicart pulled up and let out a man, who gazed around quite unsurely while the taxi rolled itself around the circle and hurried off to its next call. I somehow doubted that he was for Essie; but I could think of no reason why he would be for me, or at least why he could not be dealt with by Harriet. So it was a surprise when the rifle-speaker under the eaves swiveled around to point at me and Harriet’s voice said, “Robin?’ There’s a Mr. Haagenbusch here. I think you ought to see him.”
That was very unlike Harriet. But she was usually right, so I strolled up the lawn, rinsed my bare feet at the French windows and invited the man into my study. He was a pretty old specimen, pink-skin bald, with a dapper white pair of sideburns and a carefully American accent-not the kind people born in the United States usually have. “Thank you very much for seeing me, Mr. Broadhead,” he said, and handed me a card that read:
Herr Doktor Advokat Wm. I. Haagenbusch
“I’m Pete Herter’s lawyer,” he said. “I flew this morning from Frankfort because I want to make a deal.”
How very quaint of you, I thought; imagine coming in person to conduct business! But if Harriet wanted me to see this old flake she had probably talked it over with my legal program, so what I said was, “What kind of a deal?”
He was waiting for me to tell him to sit down. I did. I suspected he was also waiting for me to order coffee or cognac for two, as well, but I didn’t particularly want to do that. He took off black kid gloves, looked at his pearly nails and said: “My client has asked for $250,000,000 paid into a special account plus immunity from prosecution of any kind. I received this message by code yesterday.”