Or, at least, I wanted not to make them any sicker than they were, and that was where we got into the morality of it all. How much do you have to steal from another person before the act makes you a thief?
The question was much on my mind, and I had no good place to go for the answers. Not to Essie, because with Essie the conversation always came back to my gut. Not with my old psychoanalytic program, because those conversations always shifted from “What do I do to make things better?” to “Why, Robin, do you feel that you must make things better?” Not even with Albert. I could chat with Albert about anything at all. But when I ask him questions like that he gives me the sort of look he would give me if I asked him to define the properties of phlogiston. Or of God. Albert is only a holographic projection, but he interacts with the environment really well, just as well as though he were there, sometimes. So he looks meditatively around wherever we happen to be-the Tappan Sea house, for instance, which I admit is pretty comfortably fixed up, and he says something like, “Why do you ask such metaphysical questions, Robin?” and I know that the unspoken part of his message is, Good heavens, boy, don’t you know when you’ve got it made?
Well, I do have it made. Up to a point I do. God’s own good luck gave me a bundle of money when I expected it least, and money makes money, and now I can buy anything that is for sale. Even some things that aren’t. I already own a large number of things worth having. I have Powerful Friends. I am a Person to Be Reckoned With. I am loved, really well loved, by my dear wife, Essie-and frequently, too, in spite of the fact that we’re both getting along in years. So I sort of laugh, and change the subject … but I haven’t had an answer.
I haven’t, even now, had an answer, although now the questions are a lot tougher.
Another thing on my conscience is that I am letting poor Audee Walthers stew in his misery a long time while I digress, so let me finish the point.
The reason I felt guilty about the terrorists was that they were poor and I was rich. There was a great grand Galaxy out there for them, but we didn’t have any good way of getting them to it, not fast enough, anyway, and they were screaming. Starving. Seeing on the PV screen how glorious life could be for some of us, and then looking around their own huts or hogans or tenements and seeing how despairing it was for them, and how little chance there was that the great good things could become theirs before they died. It is called the revolution of rising expectations, Albert says. There should have been a cure for it-but I couldn’t find it. And the question on my mind was, did I have the right to make it worse? Did I have the right to buy somebody else’s organs and integument and arteries when my own wore out?
I didn’t know the answer and I don’t know it now. But the pain in my gut was not as bad for me as the pain of contemplating what it meant for me to steal somebody else’s life, just because I could pay for it and he could not.
And while I was sitting there, pressing my hand against my belly and wondering what I was going to be when I grew up, the whole huge universe was going on about its business.
And most of its business was worrisome. There was that Mach’s Principle thing that Albert had tried and tried to explain to me that suggested somebody, maybe the Heechee, was trying to crush the universe into a ball so as to rewrite the physical laws. Incredible. Also incredibly scary, when you let yourself think about it … but millions or billions of years in the future, too, so I wouldn’t call it a really pressing worry. The terrorists and the growing armies were nearer at hand. The terrorists had hijacked a loop capsule heading for the High Pentagon. New recruits for their ranks were being generated in the Sahel, where crops had failed one more time. Meanwhile, Audee Walthers was trying to start a new life for himself without his errant wife; and meanwhile, the wife was erring with that nasty creature, Wan; and meanwhile, near the core, the Heechee Captain was beginning to think erotic thoughts about his second in command,
The “Mach’s Principlething” Robin talks about was at that time still only a speculation, though, as Robin says, a very scary one. It is a complicated subject. For now, let me just say that there were indications that the expansion of the universe had been arrested and a contraction had begun-and even a suggestion, from old fragmentary Heechee records, that the process was not natural.
whose friendly-name was Twice; and meanwhile, my wife, troubled about my belly, was nevertheless happily completing a deal for extending her fast-food franchise chain to Papua New Guinea and the Andaman Islands; and meanwhile-oh, meanwhile! What a lot was going on meanwhile!
And always is, though usually we don’t know about it.
4 Aboard the S. Ya.
1908 light-years from Earth my friend-former friend-about to be friend again, Audee Walthers, was remembering my name again, and not too favorably. He was coming up against a rule I had made.
I mentioned that I owned a lot of things. One of the things I owned was a share in the biggest space vehicle known to mankind. It was one of the bits and pieces of gadgetry the Heechee had left behind in the solar system, floating out beyond the Oort comet cloud until it got discovered. Discovered by human beings, I mean-Heechee and australopithecines don’t count. We called it Heechee Heaven, but when it occurred to me that it would make a marvelous good transport for getting some of those poor people away from the Earth, which couldn’t support them, to some hospitable other planet that could, I persuaded the other shareholders to rename it. After my wife: the S. Ya. Broadhead it was called. So I put up the money to refit it for colonist-carrying, and we started it off on round trips to the best and nearest of those places, Peggy’s Planet.
This put me into another of those situations where conscience and common sense came into conflict, because what I really wanted was to get everybody to a place where they could be happy, but in order to get it done, I had to be able to show a profit. Thus Broadhead’s Rules. They were pretty much the same rules as for the Gateway asteroid, years ago. You had to pay your way there, but you could do it on credit if you were lucky enough to have your name come up in the draw. Getting back to Earth, however, was strictly cash. If you were a land-grant colonist, you could reassign your sixty hectares to the company and they would give you a return ticket. If you didn’t have the land anymore because you’d sold it, or traded it, or lost it shooting craps, you had two choices. You could pay for a return ticket in cash. Or you could stay where you were.
Or, if you happened to be a fully qualified pilot, and if one of the ship’s officers had made up his mind to stay on Peggy’s, you could work your way back. That was Walthers’ way. What he would do when he got back to Earth he didn’t know. What he knew for sure was that he could not stay in that empty apartment after Dolly left, and so he sold off their furnishings for whatever he could get, in the minutes between shuttle flights, made his deal with the S. Ya.‘s captain, and was on his way. It struck him as queer and unpleasant that the thing that had seemed so impossible when Dolly asked for it suddenly became the only thing he could do when she left him. But life, he had discovered, was often queer and unpleasant.
So he came aboard the S. Ya. at the last minute, shaking with fatigue. He had ten hours before his first duty shift, and he slept it all. Even so, he was still groggy, and maybe a little numbed with trauma, when a fifteen-year-old failed colonist came to bring him coffee and escort him to the control room of the interstellar transport S. Ya. Broadhead née Heechee Heaven.
How huge the damn thing was! From outside you couldn’t really tell, but those long passages, those chambers with ten-tiered bunk beds, now empty, those guarded galleries and halls with unfamiliar machines or the stubs of places where the machines had been taken away-such vastness was no part of Walthers’ previous experience of spacecraft. Even the control room was immense; and even the controls themselves were duplicated. Walthers had flown Heechee vessels-that was how he’d got to Pews Planet in the first place, piloting a converted Five. The controls here were almost the same, but there were two sets of them, and the transport could not be flown unless both sets were manned. “Welcome aboard, Seventh.” The tiny Oriental-looking woman in the left-hand seat smiled. “I’m Janie Yee-xing, Third Officer, and you’re my relief. Captain Ainheiro will be here in a minute.” She didn’t offer her hand or even lift either of them from the controls before her. That much Walthers had expected. Two pilots on duty at all times meant two pilots’ hands on the controls; otherwise the bird did not fly. It wouldn’t crash, of course, because there was nothing for it to crash into; but it wouldn’t maintain course and acceleration, either.