Klara reached out for my hand without looking at me. “Hear what?”
“About her mother.” Francis rubbed his eyes, then said, “Oh, didn’t you know? Jan’s dead. Her ship came back a few hours ago. All four of them in the lander got into some kind of fungus; they swelled up and died. I saw her body. She looks—” He stopped. “The one I’m really sorry for,” he said, “is Annalee. She stayed in orbit while the others went down, and she brought Jan’s body back. I guess she was kind of crazy. Why bother? It was too late to matter to Jan. . . . Well, anyway. She could only bring two of them, that was all the room in the freezer, and of course her rations—” He stopped again, and this time he didn’t seem able to talk anymore.
So I sat on the edge of the bed while Klara helped him wake the child and bundle her up to take her back to his own rooms. While they were out, I dialed a couple of displays on the PV, and studied them very carefully. By the time Klara came back I had turned off the PV and was sitting cross-legged on the bed, thinking hard.
“Christ,” she said glumly. “If this night isn’t a bummer.” She sat down at the far corner of the bed. “I’m not sleepy after all,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go up and win a few bucks at the roulette table.”
“Let’s not,” I said. I’d sat next to her for three hours the night before, while she first won ten thousand dollars and then lost twenty. “I have a better idea. Let’s ship out.”
She turned full around to look at me, so quickly that she floated up off the bed for a moment. “What?”
“Let’s ship out.”
She closed her eyes for a moment and, without opening them, said, “When?”
“Launch 29-40. It’s a Five, and there’s a good crew: Sam Kahane and his buddies. They’re all recovered now, and they need two more to fill the ship.”
She stroked her eyelids with her fingertips, then opened them and looked at me. “Well, Rob,” she said, “you do have interesting suggestions.” There were shades over the Heechee-metal walls to cut down the light for sleeping, and I had drawn them; but even in the filtered dimness I could see how she looked. Frightened. Still, what she said was: “They’re not bad guys. How do you get along with gays?”
“I leave them alone, they leave me alone. Especially if I’ve got you.”
“Um,” she said, and then she crawled over to me, wrapped her arms around me, pulled me down and buried her head in my neck. “Why not?” she said, so softly that I was not at first sure I had heard her.
When I was sure, the fear hit me. There had always been the chance she would say no. I would have been off the hook. I could feel myself shaking, but I managed to say, “Then we’ll file for it in the morning?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said, her voice muffled. I could feel her trembling as much as I was. “Get on the phone, Rob. We’ll file for it now. Before we change our minds.”
The next day I quit my job, packed my belongings into the suitcases I had brought them in, and turned them over for safekeeping to Shicky, who looked wistful. Klara quit the school and fired her maid—who looked seriously worried—but didn’t bother about packing. She had quite a lot of money left, Klara did. She prepaid the rent on both her rooms and left everything just the way it was.
We had a farewell party, of course. We went through it without my remembering a single person who was there.
And then, all of a sudden, we were squeezing into the lander, climbing down into the capsule while Sam Kahane methodically checked the settings. We locked ourselves into our cocoons. We started the automatic sequencers.
And then there was a lurch, and a falling, floating sensation before the thrusters cut in, and we were on our way.
13
“Good morning, Rob,” says Sigfrid, and I stop in the door of the room, suddenly and subliminally worried.
“What’s the matter?”
“There’s nothing the matter, Rob. Come in.”
“You’ve changed things around,” I say accusingly.
“That’s right, Robbie. Do you like the way the room looks?”
I study it. The throw pillows are gone from the floor. The nonobjective paintings are off the wall. Now he’s got a series of holopictures of space scenes, and mountains and seas. The funniest thing of all is Sigfrid himself: he is speaking to me out of a dummy that’s sitting back in a corner of the room, holding a pencil in its hands, looking up at me from behind dark glasses.
“You’ve turned out very camp,” I say. “What’s the reason for all this?”
His voice sounds as though he were smiling benevolently, although there is no change in the expression on the face of the dummy. “I just thought you’d enjoy a change, Rob.”
I take a few steps into the room and stop again. “You took the mat away!”
“Don’t need it, Rob. As you see, there’s a new couch. That’s very traditional, isn’t it?”
He coaxes, “Why don’t you just lie down on it? See how it feels.”
“Um.” But I stretch out on it cautiously. How it feels is strange; and I don’t like it, probably because this particular room represents something serious to me and changing it around makes me nervous. “The mat had straps,” I complain.
“So does the couch, Rob. You can pull them out of the sides. Just feel around . . . there. Isn’t that better?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I think,” he says softly, “that you should let me decide whether for therapeutic reasons some sort of change is in order, Bob.”
I sit up. “And that’s another thing, Sigfrid! Make up your flicking mind what you’re going to call me. My name isn’t Rob, or Robbie, or Bob. It’s Robinette.”
“I know that, Robbie—”
“You’re doing it again!”
A pause, then, silkily, “I think you should allow me the choice of the form of address I prefer, Robbie.”
“Um.” I have an endless supply of tbose noncommittal nonwords. In fact, I would like to conduct the whole session without revealing any more than that. What I want is for Sigfrid to reveal. I want to know why he calls me by different names at different times. I want to know what he finds significant in what I say. I want to know what he really thinks of me. . . if a clanking piece of tin and plastic can think, I mean.
Of course, what I know and Sigfrid doesn’t is that my good friend S. Ya. has practically promised to let me play a little joke on him. I am looking forward to that a lot.
“Is there anything you’d like to tell me, Rob?”
“No.”
He waits. I am feeling somewhat hostile and noncommunicative. I think part of it is because I am so much looking forward to the time when I can play a little trick on Sigfrid, but the other part is because he has changed around the auditing room. That’s the kind of thing they used to do to me when I had my psychotic episode in Wyoming. Sometimes i’d come in for a session and they’d have a hologram of my mother, for Christ’s sake. It looked exactly like her, but it didn’t smell like her or feel like her; in fact, you couldn’t feel it at all, it was only light. Sometimes they’d have me come in there in the dark and something warm and cuddly would take me in its arms and whisper to me. I didn’t like that. I was crazy, but I wasn’t that crazy.
Sigfrid is still waiting, but I know that he won’t wait forever. Pretty soon he’s going to start asking me questions, probably about my dreams.
“Have you had any dreams since I last saw you, Rob?”
I yawn. The whole subject is very boring. “I don’t think so. Nothing important, I’m sure.”
“I’d like to hear what they were. Even a fragment.”
“You’re a pest, Sigfrid, do you know that?”
“I’m sorry you feel I’m a pest, Rob.”
“Well. . . I don’t think I can remember even a fragment.”
“Try, please.”
“Oh, cripes. Well.” I get comfortable on the couch. The only dream I can think of is absolutely trivial, and I know there’s nothing in it that relates to anything traumatic or pivotal, but if I told him that he would get angry. So I say obediently, “I was in a car of a long railroad train. There were a number of cars hooked up together, and you could go from one to the other. They were full of people I knew. There was a woman, a sort of motherly type who coughed a lot, and another woman who—well, she looked rather strange. At first I thought she was a man. She was dressed in a sort of utility coverall, so you couldn’t tell from that whether she was male or female, and she had very masculine, bushy eyebrows. But I was sure she was a woman.”