Heechee Rendevous by Frederik Pohl

There was also the fact that my gut felt as though armadillos were engaging in sexual intercourse in it and, everything considered, I wanted Essie with me instead of taking a later commercial flight as planned. So I ordered the pilot to reverse course; and so when Walthers got to Rotterdam I wasn’t there. He could easily have caught me at Tappan Sea if he had taken a straight-through New York flight, and so he was wrong about that.

He was also wrong-quite wrong-forgivably wrong, for he had no way of knowing-about just what sort of mind he had tuned in on on the S.Ya.

And he had made one other error, quite serious. He had forgotten that the TPT worked both ways.

So the secret he had kept at one end of that fleeting mind-touch was no secret at all at the other.

I regret, or almost regret, that I know nothing about this “instant madness” from firsthand experience. I regretted it most when it first happened, a decade earlier. No one knew anything about a “telempathic psychokinetic transceiver” at that time. What it looked like, and was, was periodic, worldwide epidemics of insanity. A lot of the world’s best minds, including mine, had spent their best efforts trying to find a virus, a toxic chemical, a variation in the Sun’s radiation-anything-anything that would account for the shared madness that swept the human race every year or so. However, some of the world’s best minds- like mine-were handicapped. Computer programs like myself simply did not feel the maddening impulses. If we had, I daresay, the problem would have been solved much earlier.

8 The Nervous Crew of the Sailboat

A lavender squid-well, not really a squid, but looking about as squidlike as anything else in human experience-was in the middle of an exhausting, long-term project when Audee Walthers had his little accident with the TPT. Because the TPT goes in both directions it makes a great weapon but a lousy surveillance tool. It is sort of like calling up the person you’re spying on and saying, “Hey, look, I’ve got my eye on you.” So when Walthers bumped his head the sting was felt elsewhere. A where that was, in fact, very else. It was nearly a thousand light-years from the Earth, not far from the geodesic flight-line from Peggy’s Planet home- which was, of course, the reason Walthers was close enough for the touch to register.

Happens I know quite a lot about this particular lavender squid-or

My friend Robin has several faults, and one of them is a kind of cutesy coyness that is not as amusing as he thinks it is. The way he knew about the sailship folk, like the way he knew about most of the other things he was not present to see, is simply explained. He just doesn’t want to explain it. The explanation is that I told him. That simplifies things a lot, but it’s almost true.

Is it possible that cutesy coyness is contagious?

almost squid; you could have said that he looked like a wriggly, fat orchid, and been almost as close. I hadn’t met him at the time, of course, but now I know him well enough to know his name, and where he came from, and why he was there, and, most complicated of all, what he was doing. The best way to think of what he was doing was to say that he was painting a landscape. The reason that is complicated is that there was no one to see it for light-years in every direction, least of all my squid friend. He did not have the proper kind of eyes to perceive it with.

Still, he had his reasons. It was a sort of religious observance. It went back to the oldest traditions of his race, which was old indeed, and it had to do with that theologically crucial moment in their history when they, living among the clathrates and frozen gases of their home environment, with visibility minute in any direction, for the first time became aware that “seeing” could become the receiving end of a significant art form.

It mattered very much to him that the painting should be perfect. And so, when he suddenly felt himself being observed by a stranger, and the startling shock caused him to spray some of the finely divided powders he painted with in the wrong place, and in the wrong mixture of colors, he was deeply upset. Now a whole quarter hectare was spoiled! An Earthly priest would have understood his feelings, if not his reasons for them; it was quite as though in the observance of a mass the Host had been dropped and crushed underfoot.

The creature’s name was LaDzhaRi. The canvas he was working on was an elliptical sail of monomolecular film nearly thirty thousand kilometers long. The work was less than a quarter completed, and it had taken him fifteen years to get that far. LaDzhaRi did not care how long it took. He had plenty of time. His spacecraft would not arrive at its destination for another eight hundred years.

Or at least he thought he had plenty of time … until he felt the stranger staring at him.

Then he felt the need to hurry. He stayed in normal eigenmode while he swiftly collected his painting materials-by then it was August 21- lashed them secure-August 22-pushed himself away from the butterfly-wing sail and floated free until he was well clear. By the first of September he was far enough away to switch on his jet thrust and, in high eigenmode, return to the little cylindrical tin can that rode at the center of the cluster of butterfly wings. Although it was a terribly expensive drain on him, he remained in high mode as he plunged through the entering caves and into the salty slush that was his home environment. He was shouting to his companions at the top of his voice.

By human standards that voice was extraordinarily loud. Terrestrial great whales have such loud voices that their songs can be recognized and responded to by other whales an ocean away. So had LaDzhaRi’s people, and in the tiny confines of the spacecraft his roaring shook the walls. Instruments quivered. Furniture rocked. The females fled in panic, fearing that they were about to be eaten or impregnated.

It was almost as bad for the seven other males, and as fast as he could, one of them struggled up to high eigenmode to shout back at LaDzhaRi. They knew what had happened. They too had felt the touch of the interloper, and of course they had done what was necessary. The whole crew had switched into high, transmitted the signal they owed their ancestors, and returned to normal mode… and would LaDzhaRi please do the same at once, and stop frightening the females?

So LaDzhaRi slowed himself down and allowed himself to “catch his breath”-although that was not an expression in use among his people. It did not do to thrash around in the slush in high for very long. He had already caused several troublesome cavitation pockets, and the whole slurpy environment they lived in was troubled. Apologetically he worked with the others until everything was lashed firm again, and the females had been coaxed out of their hiding places, one of them serving for dinner, and the whole crew settled down to discuss the lunatic touch, madly rapid and quite terrifying, that had invaded all their minds. That took all of September and the first part of October.

By then the ship had settled back into some sort of normal existence and LaDzhaRi returned to his painting. He neutralized the charges on the spoiled section of the great photon-trap wing. He laboriously collected the pigmented dust that had floated away, for one could not waste so much mass.

He was a thrifty soul, was LaDzhaRi. I have to admit that I found him rather admirable. He was loyal to the traditions of his people, under circumstances that human beings might have thought a little too menacing to be tolerated. For, although LaDzhaRi was not a Heechee, he knew where the Heechee could be reached, and he knew that sooner or later the message his shipmates had sent would have an answer.

So then, just as he was beginning to repaint the blanked-out section of his work, he felt another touch, and this time an expected one. Closer. Stronger. Far more insistent, and much, much more frightening.

9 Audee and Me

All the fragments of life stories of these friends-or almost friends, or in some cases non-friends of mine were beginning to fall together. Not very rapidly. Not much faster, in fact, than the fragments of the universe were beginning to fall together in that great crunch back toward the cyclic primordial-atom state that (Albert kept telling me) was about to happen for reasons I never quite understood at the time. (But I didn’t feel badly about that, because at the time neither did Albert.) There were the sail-ship people, uneasily accepting the consequences of doing their duty. There were Dolly and Wan on their way to yet one more black hole, Dolly sobbing in her sleep, Wan scowling furiously in his. And there were Audee Walthers and Janie sitting disconsolate in their very much too expensive Rotterdam hotel room, because they had just found out I wasn’t there yet. Janie squatted on the huge anisokinetic bed while Audee harangued my secretary. Janie had a bruise on her cheek, souvenir of that moment’s madness in Lagos, but Audee had his arm in a cast-sprained wrist. He had not known until that moment that Janie was a black belt in karate.

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