“Be fair,” it pronounced distinctly, and waved a skinny arm toward the viewscreen.
Klara swallowed laughter nervously trying to bubble out of her throat. Be fair! To whom? For what?
“Be fair,” it said again, “for dese are sass sass sins.”
So there was Klara, my truest love that was. She had suffered in a matter of weeks the terror of the black hole, the shock of losing decades of the world’s life, the misery of Wan, the intolerable trauma of being taken by the Heechee. And meanwhile- And meanwhile, I had problems of my own. I had not yet been vastened and did not know where she was; I did not hear the warning to beware of the Assassins; I didn’t then know that the Assassins existed. I couldn’t reach out to comfort her in her fear-not just because I didn’t know, but because I was full of fears of my own. And the worst of them did not involve Klara or the Heechee, or even my aberrant program Albert Einstein; it was in my own belly.
21 Abandoned by Albert
Nothing worked. We tried everything. Essie pulled Albert’s fan from its socket, but he had locked the controls so that even without him we could change nothing. Essie set up another piloting program and tried to insert it; it was locked out. We shouted his name and scolded and begged him to appear. He would not.
For days that seemed like weeks we kept going, guided by the nonexistent hands of my nonfunctioning data-retrieval system, Albert Einstein. And meanwhile, the nut-kid Wan and the dark lady of my dreams were in the spaceship of Captain’s Heechee crew and behind us the worlds were stewing and grumbling toward a violence too large to be accommodated. They were not what occupied our minds. Our worries were closer to hand. Food, water, air. We’d stocked the True Love for long cruises, much longer than this.
But not for five people.
We weren’t doing nothing. We were doing everything we could think to do. Walthers and Yee-xing tinkered together piloting programs of their own-tried them-could not override what Albert had done. Essie did more than any of us, for Albert was her creation and she would not, could not, admit herself beaten. Check and recheck; write test programs and watch them come up blank; she hardly slept. She copied Albert’s entire program into a spare datafan and tried that-still hoping, you see, that the fault was mechanical somewhere. But if so it carried over into the new storage. Dolly Walthers uncomplainingly fed the rest of us, stayed out of our way when we thought we might be getting somewhere (though we never were), and let us talk ideas out when we were stumped (which was often). And I had the hardest job of all. Albert was my program, said Essie, and if he would reply to anyone he would reply to me. So I sat there and talked to him. Talked to the air, really, because I had no evidence at all that he was listening as I reasoned with him, chatted with him, called his name, yelled at him, begged him.
He did not answer, not even a flicker in the air.
When we took a break for food Essie came to stand behind me and rub my shoulders. It was my larynx that was wearing out, but I appreciated the thought. “At least,” she said shakily, to the air more than to me, “must know what he’s doing, I think. Must realize supplies are limited. Must provide for return to civilization for us, because Albert could not deliberately let us die?” The words were a statement. The tone wasn’t.
“I’m certain of it,” I said, but did not turn around so that she could see my face.
“I, too,” she said in a dismal tone as I pushed away my plate; and Dolly, to change the subject, said in a motherly way:
“Don’t you like my cooking?”
Essie’s fingers stopped massaging my shoulders and dug in. “Robin! You don’t eat!”
And they were all looking at me. It was actually funny. We were out in the middle of nowhere at all with no good way of getting home, and four people were staring at me because I didn’t eat my dinner. It was Essie, of course, clucking over me in the early stages of the trip, before Albert went mute; they suddenly realized that I might not be well.
In point of fact I wasn’t. I tired quickly. My arms felt tingly, as though they had gone to sleep. I had no appetite-had not eaten much for days, and bad escaped notice only because usually we ate in quick gobbles when we found time. “It helps to stretch out the supplies.” I smiled, but nobody smiled back.
“Foolish Robin,” hissed Essie, and her fingers left my shoulders to test the temperature of my forehead. But that was not too bad, because I’d been gulping aspirin when no one was looking. I assumed an expression of patience.
“I’m fine, Essie,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie-a little wishful thinking, maybe, but I wasn’t sure I was sick. “I guess I should have been checked over, but with Albert out of commission-“
“For this? Albert? Who needs?” I craned my neck, puzzled, to look at Essie. “For this need only subset medic program,” she said firmly.
“Subset?”
She stamped her foot. “Medic program, legal program, secretarial program-all subsumed into Albert program, but can be accessed separately. You call medic program this instant!”
I gaped at her. For a moment I couldn’t speak, while my mind raced. “Do as I say!” she shouted, and at last I found my voice.
“Not the medical program!” I cried. “There’s something better than that!” And I turned around and bellowed to thin air:
“Sigfrid von Shrink! Help! I need you desperately!”
There was a time in the year of my psychoanalysis when I hung on hooks while I waited for Sigfrid to appear. Sometimes I had a real wait, for in those days Sigfrid was a patched-together program of Heechee circuits and human software, and none of the software was my wife Essie’s. Essie was good at her trade. The milliseconds of response time became nano-, pico-, femtoseconds, so that Albert could in real time respond as well as a human-well, hell, no! Better than any human!
And so when Sigfrid did not at once appear it was the feeling you get when you turn a switch and the light doesn’t go on because it’s burned out. You don’t waste your time flicking the switch back and forth. You know. “Don’t waste time,” said Essie over my shoulder. If a voice can be pale, hers was.
I turned and smiled shakily at her. “I guess things are worse than we thought,” I said. Her face was pale, all right. I put my hand on hers. “Takes me right back,” I said, making conversation so that we would not have to face just how much worse things were. “When I was in analysis with Sigfrid, waiting for him to show up was the worst part. I would always get uptight, and …” Well, I was rambling. I might have gone on doing it forever if I hadn’t seen in Essie’s eyes that I didn’t have to.
I turned around and heard his voice at the same time: “I am sorry to hear that it was so difficult for you, Robin,” said Sigfrid von Shrink.
Even for a holographic projection, Sigfrid looked rather poorly. He was there with his hands clasped on his lap, sitting uncomfortably on nothing at all. The program had not troubled to furnish him with chair or pad. Nothing. Just Sigfrid, looking, for one of the few times in my recollection of him, quite ill at ease. He gazed around at the five of us, all staring at him, and sighed before returning to me. “Well, Robin,” he said, “would you like to tell me what is bothering you?”
I could hear Audee Walthers take a breath to answer him, and Janie click her tongue to stop him, because Essie was shaking her head. I didn’t look at any of them. I said, “Sigfrid, old tin whiz, I have a problem that’s right down your alley.”
He looked at me under his brows. “Yes, Robin?”
“It’s a case of fugue.”
“Severe?”
“Incapacitating,” I told him.
He nodded as though it were what he had been expecting. “I do prefer that you not use technical terms, Robin.” He sighed, but his fingers were lacing and relacing themselves in his lap. “Tell me. Is it yourself that you are asking me to help?”
“Not really, Sigfrid,” I admitted. The whole ballgame could have blown up then. I think it almost did. He was silent for a moment, but not at all still-his fingers snaked in and out of each other, and there was a bluish sparkle in the air around the outlines of his body when he moved. I said, “It’s a friend of mine, Sigfrid, maybe the closest friend I have in the world, and he is in bad trouble.”