“Ah, yes, but is he capable of handling the passengers?”
She rolled over sleepily. “Ask him,” she said.
So I called, “Albert? Come and talk to us.” I turned to look at the door, curious to see how he would manage his appearance this time, through a tangible, real door that happened to be closed. He fooled me. There was a sound of Albert apologetically clearing his throat, and when I turned back he was sitting on Essie’s dressing bench again, eyes bashfully averted.
Essie gasped and grabbed for the covers to shield her neat, modest breasts.
Now, that was a funny thing. Essie had never bothered to cover herself in front of one of her programs before. The funniest thing about it was that it did not seem strange at the time. “Sorry to intrude, my dear friends,” said Albert, “but you did call.”
“Yes, fine,” said Essie, sitting up to look at him better-but with the bedspread still clutched to her. Perhaps by then her own reaction had struck her as odd, but all she said was “So. Our guests, how are they?”
“Very well, I should say,” Albert said gravely. “They are having a three-sided conversation in the galley. Captain Walthers is preparing sandwiches, and the two young women are helping.”
“No fights? No eyes scratched out?” I asked.
“Not at all. To be sure, they are rather formal, with many ‘excuse mes’ and ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous.’ However,” he added, looking pleased with himself, “I do have a report for you on the sailship. Would you like to have it now? Or-it occurs to me-perhaps you would like to join your guests, so that you may all hear it at once.”
All my instincts were to get it right away, but Essie looked at me. “Is only polite, Robin,” she said, and I agreed.
“Splendid,” said Albert. “You will find it extremely interesting, I am sure. As do I. Of course, I have always been interested in sailing, you know,” he went on chattily. “When I was fifty the Berliner Handeisgesellschaft gave me such a fine sailboat-lost, unfortunately, when I must leave Germany because of those wicked Nazis. My dear Mrs. Broadhead, I owe you so much! Now I have all these fine memories that I did not have before! I remember my little house near Ostend, where I used to walk along the beach with Albert-that”-he twinkled-“was King Albert, of Belgium. And we would speak of sailing, and then in the evenings his wife would accompany me on the piano while I played my violin- and all this I now remember, dear Mrs. Broadhead, only because of you!”
Through the whole speech Essie had been sitting rigid beside me, staring at her creation with a face like a stone. Now she began to sputter and then she broke out in guffaws. “Oh, Albert!” she cried, reaching behind her for a pillow. She took aim and threw it right through him, to bounce harmlessly against the cosmetics beyond him. “Great funny program, you are welcome! Now get out, please. Since are so human, with memories and tedious anecdotes, cannot permit to observe me unclothed!” And he allowed himself, this time, to simply wink away, while Essie and I hugged each other and laughed. “So get dressed now,” she ordered at last, “so we can find out about sailship in mode satisfactory to computer program. Laughter is sovereign medicine, right? In that case have no further fears for your health, dear Robin, so well rejoiced a body will surely last forever!”
We headed for the shower, still chuckling-unaware that, in my case, “forever” at that moment amounted to eleven days, nine hours, and twenty-one minutes.
We had never built into the True Love a desk for Albert Einstein, particularly not one with his pipe marking his place in a book, a bottle of Skrip next to a leather tobacco jar, and a blackboard behind him half covered with equations. But there it was, and there he was, entertaining our guests with stories about himself. “When I was at Princeton,” he declared, “they hired a man to follow me around with a notebook so that if I wrote something on a blackboard he would copy it down. It was not for my benefit but for theirs-otherwise, you see, they were afraid to erase the blackboards!” He beamed at our guests and nodded genially to Essie and me, standing hand in hand at the doorway to the main lounge. “I was explaining, Mr. and Mrs. Broadhead, something of my history to these people, who perhaps have not really heard of me although I was, I must say, quite famous. Did you know, for example, that since I disliked rain, the administration at Princeton built a covered passage which you can still see, so that I could visit my friends without going outdoors?”
At least he wasn’t wearing his general’s face and Red Baron silk scarf; but he made me just a little uncomfortable. I felt like apologizing to Audee and his two women; instead, I said, “Essie? Don’t you think these reminiscences are getting a bit thick?”
“Is possible,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you wish him to stop?”
“Not really stop. He’s much more interesting now, but if you could just turn down the gain on the personalized-identity database, or twist the potentiometer on the nostalgia circuits-“
“How silly you are, dear Robin,” she said, smiling with forgiveness. Then she commanded: “Albert! Cut out so much gossip. Robin doesn’t like it.”
“Of course, my dear Semya,” he said politely. “No doubt you wish to hear about the sailship, in any case.” He stood up behind his desk-that is, his holographic but physically nonexistent image rose behind his equally nonexistent hologram of a desk; I had to keep reminding myself of that. He picked up a blackboard eraser and began to wipe away the chalk, then recollected himself. With an apologetic glance at Essie, he reached for a switch on the desk instead. The blackboard vanished. It was replaced by the familiar pebbly greeny-gray surface of a Heechee ship’s viewscreen. Then he pressed another switch, and the pebbly gray disappeared, replaced this time by a view of a star chart. That was realistic, too-all it took to convert any Gateway ship’s screen to a usable picture was a simple bias applied to the circuits (though a thousand explorers had died without finding that out). “What you see,” he said genially, “is the place where Captain Walthers located the sailship, and as you see, there is nothing there.”
Walthers had been sitting quietly on a hassock before the imitation fireplace, as far as possible from either Dolly or Janie-and each of them was as far as possible from the other, and also very quiet. But now Walthers spoke out, stung. “Impossible! The records were accurate! You have the data!”
“Of course they were accurate,” Albert soothed, “but, you see, by the time the scout ship arrived there the sailship was gone.”
“It couldn’t have gone very far if its only drive was from starshine!”
“No, it could not. But it was absent. However,” Albert said, beaming cheerfully, “I had provided for some such contingency. If you remember, my reputation-in my former self I mean-rested on the assumption that the speed of light was a fundamental constant, subject,” he added, blinking tolerantly around the room, “to certain broadenings of context that we have learned from the Heechee. But the speed, yes, is always the same-nearly three hundred thousand kilometers per second. So I instructed the drone, in the event that the sailship was not found, to remove itself a distance of three hundred thousand kilometers times the number of seconds since the sighting.”
“Great clever egotistical program,” Essie said fondly. “That was some smart pilot you hired for scout ship, right?”
Albert coughed. “It was an unusual ship, as well,” he said, “since I did foresee that there might be special needs. I fear the expense was rather high. However, when the ship had reached the proper distance, this is what it saw.” And he waved a hand, and the screen showed that multi-winged gossamer shape. No longer perfect, it was folding and contracting before our eyes. Albert had speeded up the action as seen from the scout, and we watched the great wings roll themselves up … and disappear.
Well. What we saw, you have already seen. The way in which you were advantaged over us was that you knew what you were seeing. There we were, Walthers and his harem, Essie and me. We had left a troublesome human world to chase after a troublesome puzzle, and there we saw the thing we were aiming at being-being eaten by something else! It looked exactly that way to our shocked and unprepared eyes. We sat there frozen, staring at the crumpled wings and the great glistening blue sphere that appeared from nowhere to swallow them.
I became aware that someone was chuckling gently, and was shocked for the second time when I realized who it was.