Wincing, Walthers broke the connection and rested his wrist in his lap. “She says he’ll be here tomorrow,” he grumbled. “I wonder if she’ll give him the message.”
“Of course she will. She wasn’t human, you know.”
“Really? You mean she was a computer program?” That had not occurred to him, for such things were not common on Peggy’s Planet. “Anyway,” he said, taking consolation, “I guess in that case at least she won’t forget.” He poured them each a short drink out of the bottle of Belgian apple brandy they had picked up on the way to the hotel. He set down the bottle, wincing as he rubbed his right wrist, and took a sip before saying, “Janie? How much money have we got left?”
She leaned forward and tapped out their code on the PV. “About enough for four more nights in this hotel,” she reported. “Of course, we could move to a cheaper one-“
He shook his head. “This is where Broadhead’s going to stay, and I want to be here.”
“That’s a good reason,” Yee-xing commented blandly, meaning that she understood his real reason: If Broadhead wasn’t anxious to see Walthers, it would be harder to duck him in person than on the P-phone. “So why did you ask about the money?”
“Let’s spend one night’s rent on some information,” he proposed. “I’d kind of like to know just how rich Broadhead is.”
“You mean buy a financial report? Are you trying to find out if he can afford to pay us a million dollars?”
Walthers shook his head. “What I want to find out,” he said, “is how much more than a million we can take him for.”
Now those were no charitable sentiments, and if I had known about them at the right time I would have been a lot harder-nosed with Audee Walthers, my old friend. Or maybe not. When you’ve got a lot of money you get used to people seeing you as a tappable resource instead of a human being, even though you never get to like it.
Still, I had no objection to his finding out what I owned, or anyway as much about what I owned as I had allowed the financial-report services to know. There was plenty there. A sizable interest in the charter operation of the £ Ya. Some food-mine and fish-farm shares. A great many
Since Robin keeps talking about the “missing mass” question, I should explain what it is. In the latter twentieth century cosmologists had an insoluble contradiction to face. They could see that the universe was expanding, and this was certainly so because of the red shift. They could also see, however, that it contained too much mass for the expansion to be possible. That was proved by such facts as that the outer fringes of galaxies revolved too fast, clusters of galaxies held each other too tightly; even our own Galaxy with its companions was plunging toward a group of starclouds in Virgo much faster than it should have been. Obviously, much mass was missing from observations. Where was it?
There was one intuitively obvious explanation. Namely, that the universe had formerly been expanding, but Something had decided to reverse its growth and cause it to contract. No one believed that for a minute-in the late twentieth century.
enterprises back on Peggy’s Planet, including (to Walthers’ surprise) the company he leased his plane from. The very computer-data service that was selling them the information. Several holding companies and import-export or freight-forwarding firms. Two banks; fourteen real-estate agencies, based everywhere from New York to New South Wales, with a couple on Venus and Peggy’s Planet; and any number of unrecognizable little corporations, including an airline, a fast-food chain, something called Here After Inc.-and something called PegTex Petroventures. “My God,” said Audee Walthers, “that’s Mr. Luqman’s company! So I was working for the son of a bitch all along!”
“And I,” said Janie Yee-xing, looking at the part that mentioned the S. Ya. “Really! Does Broadhead own everything?”
Well, I did not. I owned a lot, but if they had looked at my holdings more sympathetically, they might have been able to see a pattern. The banks loaned money for explorations. The real-estate companies helped settle colonists, or took over their shacks and hogans for cash so they could leave. The £ Ya. ferried colonists to Peggy’s, and, as for Luqman, why, that was the crowning jewel in the empire, if they had only known it! Not that I had ever met Luqman, or would have known what he looked like if I saw him. But he had his orders, and the orders came down the chain of command from me: Find a good oil field somewhere near the equator of Peggy’s Planet. Why the equator? So the Lofstrom loop we would build there could take advantage of the planet’s rotational velocity. Why a launch loop? It was the cheapest and best way of getting things in and out of orbit. The oil we pumped would power up the loop. The excess crude oil would go onto the loop and into orbit, in shipping capsules; the capsules would go back to Earth on the £ Ya. ‘s return flights to be sold there-which meant there would be a profitable cargo of oil to carry on the half of each round trip that was now nearly dead loss which meant that we could cut the prices for colonists on the way out! I do not apologize for the fact that almost all of my ventures showed a profit every year. That’s how I kept them all going, and expanding, but the profit was only incidental. See, I have a philosophy about earning money, and that is that anybody who knocks himself out to accumulate it after the first hundred million or so is sick, and- Oh, but I’ve said all that already, haven’t I?
I’m afraid I wander. What with all the things going on in my mind I get a little confused about what has happened, and what hasn’t happened yet, and what never happens at all except in that mind.
Robin takes a lot of pride in the launch loop, because it reassured him that human beings could invent things the Heechee had not. Well, he’s right-at least if you don’t look at the details. The loop was invented on Earth by a man named Keith Lofstrom in the late twentieth century, though nobody built one until there was enough traffic to justify it. What Robin didn’t know was that although the Heechee never invented the loop, the sailship people did-they had no other way to get out of their dense, opaque atmosphere.
The point I’m making is that all my money-making ventures were also solidly useful projects that contributed to both the conquest of the Galaxy and the alleviation of the needs of human beings, and that’s a fact. And that’s why all these fragments of biography do ultimately fall together. They don’t look as though they’re going to. But they do. All of them. Even the stories of my semi-friend, Captain, the Heechee whom I ultimately came to know quite well, and of his lover and second in command, the female Heechee named Twice, whom, as you will discover, I did at the end come to know quite a lot better than that.
10 The Place Where the Heechee Dwelt
When the Heechee hid inside their Schwarzschild shell at the core of the Galaxy they knew there could be no easy communication between their scared selves and the immense universe outside. Yet they dared not be without news.
So they set up a web of starlets outside the black hole itself. They were far enough away so that the roaring radiation of infall into the hole did not swamp their circuitry, and there were enough of them so that if one were to fail or be destroyed-even if a hundred were-the ones that were left would be able to receive and record the data from their early-warning spy stations all around the Galaxy. The Heechee had run away to hide, but they had left eyes and ears behind.
So from time to time some brave souls sneaked out of the core, to find out what the eyes had seen and the ears had heard. When Captain and his crew were sent out to check space for the errant star, checking the monitors was an added duty. There were five of them aboard his ship- five living ones, anyway. By all odds the one that interested Captain the most was the slim, sallow, shiny-skinned female named Twice. By Captain’s standards she was a raving beauty. And sexy, too-every year without fail-and the time, he judged, was getting near again!
But not, he prayed, just yet. And so prayed Twice, for getting through the Schwarzschild perimeter was a brute of a job. Even when the ship had been purpose-built to manage it. There were other can openers around-Wan had stolen one-but those managed the job only in limited ways. Wan’s ship could not enter the event horizon and survive. It could only extend a part of itself there.