But at every step there was at least a slim chance for success. And it was not the risk that stopped him at the last.
The Paul Hall who stole about and schemed in the tunnels of Heechee Heaven, half crazed with anger and fear and worry for his wife and the others, was not entirely crazy. He was the same
Paul Hall whose gentleness and patience had made Dorema Herter marry him, who had accepted her saucy, sometimes bratty little sister and abrasive father as part of the bargain. He wanted very much to save them and bring them to freedom. Even at risk. There was always a way out of the risk for him, if only to crawl aboard Wan’s ship and return to the Food Factory and thus-slowly, alone and mournful, but safe-ultimately to Earth and wealth.
But, apart from risk, what was the cost?
The cost was wiping out perhaps an entire population of living and intelligent creatures. They had taken his wife from him, but they had not really harmed her. And, try as he would, Paul could not convince himself he had the right to exterminate them.
And now here was this “rescuer,” this nearly dead castaway named Robin Broadhead, who listened sketchily to Paul’s plan and smiled loftily and said, politely enough, “You’re still working for me, Hall. We’ll do it my way.”
“The hell we will!”
Broadhead stayed polite enough, and even reasonable-it was amazing what a bath and a little food had done for him. “The key,” he said, “is to find out what we’re up against. Help me lug this information-processing stuff to where the Dead Men are, and we’ll take care of that. That’s the first thing.”
“The first thing is rescuing my wife!”
“But why, Hall? She’s all right where she is-you said so yourself. I’m not talking about forever. One day, maybe. We find out what we can from the Dead Men. We tape it all, pump them dry if we can. Then we take the tapes and stick them in my ship, and then-“
“No.”
“Yes!”
“No, and keep your God-damned voice down!” They squared off like kids in a schoolyard, both flushed and furious, their eyes locked. Until Robin Broadhead grimaced and shook his head and said, “Oh, hell. Paul? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Paul Hall let himself relax. After a second he said, “Actually, I’m thinking the two of us would do better to figure out what is the best thing to do, instead of arguing about who makes the decision.”
Broadhead grinned. “That was what I was thinking, all right. You know what my trouble is? I’m so surprised to be still alive that I don’t know how to adjust to it.”
It only took them six hours to haul and set up the PMAL-2 processor where they wanted it, but it was six hours of hard work. They were both near the frayed end of exhaustion and it would have made sense to sleep, but they were itching with impatience, both of them. Once they had the main power source connected to the program banks Albert’s prerecorded voice instructed them, step by step, on how to do the rest-the processor itself sprawled across the corridor, the voice terminals inside the Dead Men’s chamber, next to the radio link. Robin looked at Paul, Paul shrugged to Robin, Robin started the program. From just outside the door they could hear the flat, wheedling voice from the terminal: “Henrietta? Henrietta, dear, can you answer me?”
Pause. No answer. The program Albert had written with Sigfrid von Shrink’s help tried again: “Henrietta, it’s Tom. Please speak to me.” It would have been faster to punch out Henrietta’s code to attract her attention, but harder to square with the pretense that her long-lost husband had reached her from some faroff outpost by radio.
The voice tried again, and once more. Paul scowled and whispered, “It isn’t working.”
“Give it a chance,” Robin said, but not confidently. They stood there nervously, while the dead computer voice pleaded. And then at last, a hesitant voice whispered, “Tom? Tomasino, is that you?”
Paul Hall was a normal human being, squashed a little out of shape, perhaps, from four years of imprisonment and a hundred days of flight and fright. Normal enough, though, to share the normal prurience; but what he heard was more than he wanted to hear. He grinned in embarrassment at Robin Broadhead, who shrugged uneasily back. The hurt tenderness and spiteful jealousy of other people is humiliating to hear and can only be eased by laughter; the divorce detective passes around his bootleg tape of a wired bed for comic relief on a slow day at the office. But this was not comic! Henrietta, any Henrietta, even the machine revenant called Henrietta was not funny in her moment of heart’s-desire, when she was being gulled and betrayed. The program that wooed her was skillfully done. It apologized and begged, and it even sobbed, in rustly tape-hissing sobs, when Henrietta’s own flat tape voice broke with sobs of spent sadness and hopeless joy. And then, as it had been programmed to do, it settled in for the kill. Would you- Dear Henrietta, could you- Is it possible for you to tell me how to operate a Heechee ship?
Pause. Hesitation. Then the voice of the dead woman said:
“Why-yes, Tomasino.” Another pause. It lengthened itself, until the programmed deceiver moved in to fill the gap:
“Because if you could, dear, I think I might be able to join you. I’m in a sort of a ship. It has a control room. If I knew how to work it-“
It was incredible to Paul that even a poorly stored machine intelligence could succumb to such transparent blandishments. Succumb Henrietta did. It was repellent to him to take part in the fraud, but take part he did, and once started Henrietta could not be stopped. The secret of controlling the Heechee ships? Of course, dear Tomasino! And the dead woman warned her fake lover to stand by for burst transmission and hurled out a whistling crackle of machine talk of which Paul could not understand a sound and in which he could not find a word; but Robin Broadhead, listening to the private status-report voice of the computer on his headset, grinned and nodded and held up thumb and forefinger in a circle of success. Paul signed silence and pulled him down the corridor. “If you’ve got it,” he whispered, “let’s get out of here!”
“Oh, I’ve got it!” chortled Robin. “She’s got it all! She was in open circuit with whatever kind of machine runs this thing, it picked her brains and she picked its, and she’s telling the whole thing.”
“Great. Now let’s find Lurvy!”
Broadhead looked at him, not angry but pleading. “Just a few more minutes. Who knows what else she got?”
“No!”
“Yes!”-and then they looked at each other, and shook their heads. “Compromise,” said Robin Broadhead. “Fifteen minutes, all right? And then we go rescue your wife.”
They edged back along the corridor with smiles of rueful satisfaction on their faces; but the satisfaction drained. The voices were not embarrassingly intimate now. They were worse. They were almost quarreling. There was somehow a snap and a snarl in the flat metallic voice that said, “You’re being a pig, Tom.”
The program was cloyingly reasonable: “But, Henrietta, dear, I’m only trying to find out-“
“What you try to find out,” grated the voice, “depends on what your capacities to learn are. I’m trying to tell you something more important! I tried to tell you before. I tried to tell you all the while we were coming out here, but, no, you didn’t want to hear, all you wanted was to get off in the lander with that fat bitch-“
The program knew when to be placatory. “I’m sorry, Henrietta, dear. If you want me to learn some astrophysics I will.”
“Damn right you will!” Pause. “It’s terribly important, Tom!” Pause. And then: “We go back to the Big Bang. Are you listening, Tom?”
“Of course I am, dear,” said the program in its humblest and most endearing way.
“All right! It goes back to how the universe got started, and we know that pretty well-with one little hazy transition point that’s a little obscure. Call it Point X.”
“Are you going to tell me what ‘Point X’ is, dear?”
“Shut up, Tom! Listen! Before Point X, essentially the whole universe was packed into a tiny glob, no more than a matter of kilometers through, super-dense, super hot, so squeezed it had no structure. Then it exploded. It began to expand-up to Point X, and that part is pretty clear. Do you follow me so far, Tom?”
“Yes, dear. That’s basically simple cosmology, isn’t it?”
Pause. “Just pay attention,” Henrietta’s voice said at last. “Then, after Point X, it continued to expand. As it expanded, little bits of ‘matter’ began to condense out of it. First came nuclear particles, hadrons and pious, electrons and protons, neutrons and quarks. Then ‘real’ matter. Real hydrogen atoms, then even helium atoms. The exploding volume of gas began to slow. Turbulence broke it into immense clouds. Gravity pulled the clouds into clumps. As they shrank the heat of contraction set nuclear reactions going. They glowed. The first stars were born. The rest,” she finished, “is what we can see going on now.”