“If you wanted him with you, should not have given him two mil to chase his wife with,” said Essie practically, and then, looking at me more closely, “How you feeling?”
“Absolutely in the pink,” I said. It wasn’t far from true. “Quit worrying about me. When you’ve got Full Medical Plus they don’t dare let you die before you reach a hundred-it’s bad for business.”
“Don’t have much to say about it,” she said gloomily, “when customer is reckless desperado who spends time chasing for make-believe Heechee Anyway,” she added, brightening, “here is van for fleabag, hop in.”
So when we were inside the van I leaned over and kissed the back of her neck-easy to do, because she had braided her long hair and brought it around her neck to tie in front like a kind of a necklace-getting ready for the launch, you see. She leaned against my lips. “Khuligan.” She sighed. “But not bad khuligan.”
The hotel wasn’t really a fleabag. They had given us a comfortable suite on the top floor, looking over the lake and the loop. Besides, we would only be in it for a few hours. I left Essie to key in her programs on the hotel PV screen while I wandered over to the window, telling myself~ indulgently, that I wasn’t really a hooligan. But that wasn’t true, because it certainly was not the act of a responsible senior citizen of wealth and substance to skylark off into interstellar space just for the glamour and excitement of it.
It occurred to me then that Essie might not be taking quite that view of my motives. She might think I was after something else.
It then occurred to me that maybe my own view was wrong. Was it really the Heechee I was looking for? Sure it was, or anyway could be; everybody was desperately curious about the Heechee. But not everybody had left something else out in interstellar space. Was it possible that somewhere in the down-deep hidden part of my mind, what was driving me out and on was the hope that somehow, somewhere, I might find that misplaced thing again? I knew what the thing was. I knew where I had left it. What I didn’t know was what I would do with it-or, more accurately, her-if I found her again.
And then I felt a sort of quivery not-quite-pain in my middle. It had nothing to do with my two point three meters of new gut. What it had to do with was the hope, or the fear, that somehow Gelle-Klara Moynlin might indeed turn up in my life again. There was more emotion left over there than I had realized. It made my eyes tear, so the spidery launch structure out the window seemed to ripple in my sight.
But there were no tears in my eyes.
And it wasn’t an optical illusion. “My God!” I shouted. “Essie!” And she hurried over to stand beside me and look at the tiny flare of light from a capsule on the launch run, and the shaking, shuddering of the whole thread-thin structure. Then there was the noise-a single faint blast like a distant cannon shot, and then the lower, slower, longer thunder of the immense loop tearing itself apart. “My God,” Essie echoed faintly, clutching my arm. “Terrorist?”
And then she answered herself. “Of course terrorist,” she said bitterly. “Who else could be so vile?”
I had opened our windows to get a good look at the lake and the loop; good thing, because that meant they weren’t blown in. Others in the hotel were not so lucky. The airport itself wasn’t touched, not counting the occasional aircraft sent flying because it wasn’t tied down. But the airport officials were scared. They didn’t know whether the destruction of the launch loop was an isolated incident of terrorist sabotage, or maybe the beginnings of a revolution-no one seemed to think, ever, that it might have been just a simple accident. It was scary, all right. There’s a hell of a lot of kinetic energy stored in a Lofstrom loop, over twenty kilometers of iron ribbon, weighing about five thousand tons, moving at twelve kilometers a second. Out of curiosity I asked Albert later and he reported that it took 3.6 x lO8 Joules to pump it up. And when one collapses, all those Joules come out at once, one way or another.
I asked Albert later because I couldn’t ask him then. Naturally, the first thing I did was to try to’ key him up, or any other data-retrieval or information program that could tell me what was going on. The comm circuits were jammed; we were cut off. The broadcast PV was still working, though, so we stood and watched that mushroom cloud grow and listened to damage reports. One shuttle had been actually accelerating on the ribbon when it blew-that was the first explosion, perhaps because it had carried a bomb. Three others had been in the loading bypass. More than two hundred human beings were now hamburger, not counting the ones they hadn’t counted yet who had been working on the launcher itself, or had been in the duty-free shops and bars underneath it, or maybe just out for a stroll nearby. “I wish I could get Albert,” I grumbled to Essie.
“As to that, dear Robin,” she began hesitantly, but didn’t finish, because there was a knock on the door; would the señor and the señora come at once to the Bolivar Room, por favor, as there was a matter of the gravest emergency.
The matter of the gravest emergency was a police checkup, and you never saw such a checking of passports. The Bolivar Room was one of those function things that they divide up for meetings and open for grand banquets, and one partitioned-off part of it was filled with turistas like us, many of them squatting on their baggage, all looking both resentful and scared. They were being kept waiting. We were not. The bellhop who fetched us, wearing an armband with the initials “S.ER.” over his uniform, escorted us to the dais, where a lieutenant of police studied our passports briefly and then handed them back. “Señor Broadhead,” he said in English, accent excellent, touches of American Midwest, “does it occur to you that this act of terrorist violence may in fact have been aimed personally at you?”
I gawked. “Not until now,” I managed. He nodded.
“Nevertheless,” he went on, touching a PV hard-copy printout with his small, graceful hand, “we have received from Interpol a report of a terrorist attempt on your life only two months ago. Quite a well-organized one. The commissaris in Rotterdain specifically suggests that it did not appear random, and that further attempts might well be made.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Essie leaned forward. “Tell me, Teniente,” she said, regarding him, “is this your theory?”
“Ah, my theory. I wish I had a theory,” he said furiously. “Terrorists? No doubt. Aimed against you? Possibly. Aimed against the stability of our government? Even more possibly, I think, as there has been widespread dissatisfaction in rural areas; there are even reports, I tell you in confidence, that certain military units may be planning a coup. How can one know? So I ask you the necessary questions, such as, have you seen anyone whose presence here struck you as suspicious or coincidental? No? Have you any opinion as to who attempted to assassinate you in Rotterdam? Can you shed any light at all on this terrible deed?”
The questions came so fast that it hardly seemed he expected answers, or even wanted them. That bothered me nearly as much as the destruction of the loop itself; it was a reflection, here, of what I had been seeing and sensing all over the world. A sort of despairing resignation, as though things were bound to get worse and no way could be found to get them better. It made me very uncomfortable. “We’d like to leave and get out of your way,” I said, “so if you’re through with your questions-“
He paused before he answered, and began to look like someone with a job he knew how to do again. “I had intended to ask you a favor, Señor Broadhead. Is it possible that you would allow us to borrow your aircraft for a day or two? It is for the wounded,” he explained, “since our own general hospital was unfortunately in the direct path of the loop cables.”
I am ashamed to say I hesitated, but Essie did not. “Most certainly yes, Teniente,” she said. “Especially as we will need to make a reservation for another loop in any event before we know where we want to go to.”
He beamed. “That, my dear señora, we can arrange for you through the military communications. And my deepest thanks for your generosity!”
Services in the city were falling apart, but when we got back to our suite there were fresh flowers on the tables, and a basket of fruits and wine that had not been there before. The windows had been closed. When I opened them I found out why. Lake Tehigualpa wasn’t a lake anymore. It was just the heat sink where the ribbon was supposed to dump in case of the catastrophic failure of the loop that no one believed would ever happen. Now that it had happened the lake had boiled down to a mud wallow. Fog obscured the loop itself, and there was a stink of cooked mud that made me close the window again quickly enough.