It was Albert, sitting now on the edge of his desk and wiping away a tear of amusement. “I do beg your pardon,” he said, “but if you could see your faces.”
“Damn great egotistical program,” Essie grated, no longer fondly, “stop crap immediately. What is going on here?”
Albert gazed at my wife. I could not quite decipher his expression: The look was fond, and tolerant, and a great many other things that I did not associate with a computer-generated image, even Albert’s. But it was also uneasy. “Dear Mrs. Broadhead,” he said, “if you did not wish me to have a sense of humor you should not have programmed me so. If I have embarrassed you I apologize.”
“Follow instructions!” Essie barked, looking baffled.
“Oh, very well. What you have seen,” he explained, turning pointedly away from Essie to lecture to the group, “is what I believe to be the first known example of an actual Heechee-manned operation in real time. That is, the sailship has been abducted. Observe this smaller vessel.” He waved a negligent hand, and the image spun and flowed, magnifying the scene. The magnification was more than the resolution of the scout ship’s optics were good for, and so the edge of the sphere became pebbly and fuzzy.
But there was something behind it.
There was something that moved slowly into eclipse behind the sphere. Just as it was about to disappear Albert froze the picture, and we were looking at a blurry, fish-shaped object, quite tiny, very poorly imaged. “A Heechee ship,” said Albert. “At least, I have no other explanation.”
Janie Yee-xing gave a choking sound. “Are you sure?”
“No, of course not,” said Albert. “It is only a theory as yet. One never says ‘yes’ to a theory, Miss Yee-xing, only ‘maybe,’ for some better theory will surely come along and the one that has seemed best until then will get its ‘no.’ But my theory is that the Heechee have decided to abduct the sailship.”
Now, get the picture. Heechee! Real ones, attested to by the smartest data-retrieval system anyone had ever encountered. I had been looking for Heechee, one way or another, for two-thirds of a century, desperate to find them and terrified that I might. And when it happened the thing uppermost in my mind was not the Heechee but the data-retrieval system. I said, “Albert, why are you acting so funny?”
He looked at me politely, tapping his pipestem against his teeth. “In what way ‘funny,’ Robin?” he asked.
“Damn it, come off it! The way you act! Don’t you-“ I hesitated, trying to put it politely. “Don’t you know you’re just a computer program?”
He smiled sadly. “I do not need to be reminded of that, Robin. I am not real, am I? And yet the reality that you are immersed in is one for which I do not care.”
“Albert!” I cried, but he put up his hand to quiet me.
“Allow me to say this,” he said. “For me reality is, I know, a certain large quantity of parallel-processed on-off switches in heuristic conformations. If one analyzes it, it becomes only a sort of trick one plays on the viewer. But for you, Robin? Is reality for an organic intelligence very different? Or is it merely certain chemical transactions that take place in a kilogram of fatty matter that has no eyes, no ears, no sexual organs? Everything that it knows it knows by hearsay, because some perceptual system has told it so. Every feeling it has comes to it by wire from some nerve. Is it so different between us, Robin?”
“Albert!”
He shook his head. “Ah,” he said bitterly, “I know. You cannot be deceived by my trick, because you know the trickster-she is here among us. But aren’t you deceived by your own? Should I not be granted the same esteem and tolerance? I was quite an important man, Robin. Held in high regard by some very fine persons! Kings. Queens. Great scientists, and such good fellows they were. On my seventieth birthday they gave me a party-Robertson and Wigner, Kurt Goedel, Rabi, Oppenheimer-“ He actually wiped away an actual tear … and that was about as far as Essie was willing to let him go.
She stood up. “My friends and husband,” she said, “is obviously some severe malfunction here. Apologize for this. Must pull out of circuit for complete downcheck, you will excuse, please?”
“It isn’t your fault, Essie,” I said, as kindly as I could, but she didn’t take it kindly. She looked at me in a way I hadn’t seen from her since we first began dating and I told her about all the funny jokes I used to play on my psychoanalysis program, Sigfrid von Shrink. “Robin,” she said coldly, “is all too much talk about fault and guilt. Will discuss later. Guests, must borrow my workroom for a time. Albert! Present yourself there at once for debugging!”
One of the penalties of being rich and famous is that a lot of people invite you to be their guests, and almost all of them expect to be invited back. Hosting is not one of my skills. Essie, on the other hand, really likes it, so over the years we worked out a good way to handle guests. It’s very simple. I hang around them as long as I am enjoying it-that can be several hours, sometimes five minutes. Then I disappear to my study and leave the hosting to Essie. I am particularly likely to do this when, for any reason, there is tension among the guests. It works fine-for me.
But then it stops working sometimes, and then I’m stuck. This was one of the times. I couldn’t leave them to Essie, because Essie was busy. I didn’t want to leave them alone, because we had already done that for a goodish long period. And of tension there was plenty. So there I was, trying to remember how to be gracious when I didn’t have a fallback position: “Would you like a drink?” I asked jovially. “Something to eat? There are some good programs to watch, if Essie hasn’t killed the circuits so she can deal with Albert-“
Janie Yee-xing interrupted me with a question. “Where are we going, Mr. Broadhead?”
“Well,” I said, beaming-jovial; good host; try to make the guests feel at ease, even when they ask you a perfectly good question that you haven’t thought of an answer for because you’ve been thinking about a lot of more urgent things. “I guess the question is, where would you like to go? I mean, it looks like there’s no point in chasing after the sailship.”
“No,” Yee-xing agreed.
“Then I suppose it’s up to you. I didn’t think you’d want to stay in the guardhouse-“ reminding them that I’d done them all a favor, after all.
“No,” Yee-xing said again.
“Back to the Earth, then? We could drop you at one of the loop points. Or Gateway, if you like. Or-let’s see, Audee, you’re from Venus in the first place, right? Do you want to go back there?”
It was Walthers’ turn to say, “No.” He left it at that. I thought it was very inconsiderate of my guests to give me nothing but negatives when I was trying to be hospitable to them.
Dolly Walthers bailed me out. She raised her right hand, and it had one of those hand puppets pf hers on it, the one that was supposed to look like a Heechee. “The trouble is, Mr. Broadhead,” she said, not moving her lips, in a syrupy, snaky kind of voice, “none of us have any place much to go to.”
Since that was obviously true, nobody seemed to have anything to say to it. Then Audee stood up. “I’ll take that drink now, Broadhead,” he growled. “Dolly? Janie?”
It was obviously the best idea any of us had had in some time. We all agreed, like guests arriving too early at a party, finding something to do so we would not obviously be doing nothing.
There were things to do, to be sure, and the biggest of them in my mind was not to be cordial to my company. That biggest thing wasn’t even trying to assimilate the fact that we had (perhaps) seen an actual, operating Heechee vessel with Heechee inside it. It was my gut again. The doctors said I could lead a normal life. They hadn’t said anything about one as abnormal as this, so I was feeling my age and frailty. I was glad to take my gin and water and sit down, next to the make-believe fireplace with its make-believe flames, and wait for someone else to carry the ball.
Which turned out to be Audee Walthers. “Broadhead, I appreciate your getting us out of stir, and I know you’ve got things of your own to do. I suppose the best thing is for you to set all three of us down in the handiest place you can find and go about your business.”