Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

13 At the Halfway Point

To love someone is a grace. To marry someone is a contract. The part of me that loved Essie, was loving her wholeheartedly, sank in pain and terror when she relapsed, surged in fearful joy when she showed signs of recovering. I had plenty of occasion for both. Essie died twice in surgery before I could get home, and again, twelve days later, when they had to go in again. That last time they made her clinically dead on purpose. Stopped heart and breath, kept only the brain alive. And every time they reanimated her I was frightened to think she would live-because if she lived it meant she might die one more time, and I could not stand it. But slowly, painfully, she began to gain weight, and Wilma told me the tide had turned, as when the spiral begins to glow in a Heechee ship at the halfway point and you know you’re going to live through the trip. I spent all that time, weeks and weeks of it, hanging around the house, so that when Essie could see me I would be there.

And all that time the part of me that had contracted to be married to her was resenting the bond, and wishing I were free. How do you account for that? That was a good occasion for guilt, and guilt is a feeling that comes readily to me-as my old psychoanalytic program used to tell me all the time. And when I went in to see Essie, looking like a mummy of herself, the joy and worry filled my heart and the guilt and resentment clogged my tongue. I would have given my life to make her well. But that did not seem a practical strategy, or at least I could not see any way to make that deal, and the other guilty and hostile part of me wanted to be free to dwell on lost Kiara, and whether somehow I might find her again.

But she mended, Essie did. She mended fast. The sunken bags of flesh under her eyes filled to be only bruises. The tubes came out of her nostrils. She ate like a pig. Before my very eyes she was filling out, the bust beginning to swell, the hips regaining their power to startle. “My compliments to the doctor,” I told Wilma Liederman when I caught her on her way in to see her patient.

She said sourly, “Yes, she’s doing fine.”

“I don’t like the way you said that,” I told her. “What’s the matter?”

She relented. “Nothing, really, Robin. All her tests are fine. She’s in such a hurry, though!”

“That’s good, isn’t it?’”

“Up to a point it is. And now,” she added, “I have to get in to see my patient. Who will be up and about any day now and, maybe, back to normal in a week or two.” What good news that was! And how reluctantly I received it.

I went through all those weeks with something hanging over me. Sometimes it seemed like doom, like old Peter Herter blackmailing the world and nothing the world could do to resist it, or like the Heechee stirring into anger as we invaded their complex and private worlds. Sometimes it seemed like golden gifts of opportunity, new technologies, new hopes, new wonders to explore and exploit. You would think that I would distinguish between hopes and worries, right? Wrong. Both scared the hell out of me. As good old Sigfrid used to tell me, I have a great talent not only for guilt but also for worry.

And when you came right down to it, I had some fairly real things to worry about. Not just Essie. When you reach a certain age you have, it seems to me, a right to expect some parts of your life to stay stable. Like what, for instance? Like money, for instance. I was used to a lot of it, and now here was my lawyer program telling me that I had to watch my pennies. “But I promised Hanson Bover a million cash,” I said, “and I’m going to pay it. Sell some stock.”

“I’ve sold stock, Robin!” He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t programmed to be able to be really angry, but he could be wretched and he was.

“So sell some more. What’s the best to get rid of?”

“None of it is ‘best,’ Robin. The food mines’re down because of the fire. The fish farms still haven’t recovered from losing the fingerlings. A month or two from now-“

“A month or two from now isn’t when I want the money. Sell.” And when I signed him off and called Bover up to find out where to send his million, he actually seemed surprised.

“In view of Gateway Corp’s action,” he said, “I thought you’d call our arrangement off.”

“A deal is a deal,” I said. “We can let the legalities hang. They don’t mean much while Gateway has preempted me.”

He was suspicious immediately. What is it that I do that makes people suspicious of me when I am going miles out of my way to be fair?’ “Why do you want to hold off on the legalities?” he demanded, rubbing the top of his head agitatedly-was it sunburned again?

“I don’t ‘want’ to,” I said, “it just doesn’t make any difference. As soon as you lift your injunction Gateway will drop theirs on me.”

Alongside Bover’s scowling face, my secretary program’s appeared. She looked like a cartoon of the Good Angel whispering into Bover’s ear, but actually what she was saying was for me: “Sixty seconds until Mr. Herter’s reminder,” she said.

I had forgotten that old Peter had given us another of his two hour notices. I said to Bover, “It’s time to button up for Peter Herter’s next jab,” and hung up-I didn’t really care if he remembered, I only wanted to terminate the conversation. Not much buttoning up was involved. It was thoughtful-no, it was orderly-of old Peter to warn us each time, and then to perform so punctually. But it mattered more to airline pilots and automobus’s than to stay-at-homes like me.

There was Essie, however. I looked in to make sure she was not actually being perfused or catheterized or fed. She wasn’t.

She was asleep-quite normally asleep, with her dark-gold hair spilling all around her, and gently snoring. And on the way back to my comfortable console chair I felt Peter in my mind.

I had become quite a connoisseur of invasions of the mind. It wasn’t any special skill. The whole human race had, over a dozen years, ever since the fool kid, Wan, began his trips to the Food Factory. His were the worst, because they lasted so long and because he shared his dreams with us. Dreams have power; dreams are a kind of released insanity. By contrast, the one light touch we’d had from Janine Herter was nothing, and Peter Herter’s precise two-minute doses no worse than a traffic light-you stop a minute, and wait impatiently until it is over, and then you go on your way. All I ever felt from Peter was the way he felt-sometimes the gut-griping of age, sometimes hunger or thirst, once the fading, angry sexual lust of an old man all by himself. As I sat down I remember telling myself that this time was nothing at all. More than anything else, it was like having a little dizzy spell, too much crouching in one position, when you stand up you have to pause a moment until it goes away. But it didn’t go away. I felt the blurriness of seeing things with two sets of eyes at once, and the inarticulate anger and unhappiness of the old man-no words; just a sort of tone, as though someone were whispering what I could not quite hear.

It kept on not going away. The blurriness increased. I began to feel detached and almost delirious. That second vision, that is never sharp and clear, began to show things I had never seen before. Not real things. Fantasy things. Women with beaks like birds of prey. Great glittering metal monsters rolling across the inside of my eyelids. Fantasies. Dreams.

The two-minute measured dose of reminder had gone off track. The son of a bitch had fallen asleep in the cocoon.

Thank God for the insomnia of old men! It didn’t last eight hours, not much more than one.

But they were sixty-odd unpleasant minutes. When I felt the unwanted dreams slide tracelessly out of my mind, and was sure they were gone, I ran to Essie’s room. She was wide awake, leaning back against the pillows. “Am all right, Robin,” she said at once. “Was an interesting dream. Nice change from my own.”

“I’ll kill the old bastard,” I said.

Essie shook her head, grinning up at me. “Not practical,” she said.

Well, maybe it wasn’t. But as soon as I had satisfied myself that Essie was all right, I called for Albert Einstein: “I want advice. Is there anything that can be done to stop Peter Herter?”

He scratched his nose.

“You mean by direct action, I assume. No, Robin. Not by any means available now.”

“I don’t want to be told that! There must be something!”

“Sure thing, Robin,” he said slowly, “but I think you’re asking the wrong program. Indirect measures might work. As I understand it, you have some legal questions unresolved. If you could resolve them, you might be able to meet Herter’s demands and stop him that way.”

“I’ve tried that! It’s the other way around, damn it! If I could get Herter to stop, then maybe I could get Gateway Corp to give me back control. Meanwhile he’s screwing up everybody’s mind, and I want it stopped! Isn’t there some kind of interference we could broadcast?”

Albert sucked his pipe. “I don’t think so, Rob,” he said at last. “I don’t have a great deal to go on.”

That startled me. “You don’t remember what it feels like?”

“Robin,” he said patiently, “I don’t feel anything. It is important for you to remember that I am only a computer program. And not the right program, really, to discuss the exact nature of the signals from Mr. Herter-your psychoanalytic program might be more helpful. Analytically I know what happened-I have all the measurements of the radiation involved. Experientially, nothing. Machine intelligence is not affected. Every human being experienced something, I know because there are reports to say so. There is evidence that the larger-brained mammals-primates, dolphins, elephants-were also disturbed; and maybe other mammals were too, although the evidence is sketchy. But I have not experienced it directly. . . . As to broadcasting an interfering pattern, yes, perhaps that could be done. But what would be the effect, Robin? Bear in mind that the interfering signal would come from a nearby point, not one twenty-five light-days away; if Mr. Herter can cause some disorientation, what would a random signal do at close range?”

“It would be bad, I guess.”

“Sure thing, Robin. Probably worse than you guess, but I could not say without experimentation. The subjects would have to be human beings, and such experiments I cannot undertake.”

Over my shoulder Essie’s voice said proudly, “Yes, you exactly cannot, as who would know better than I?”

She had come up behind me without a sound, barefoot in the thick rug. She wore a neck-to-ankle robe and her hair was done up in a turban. “Essie, what the hell are you doing out of bed?” I demanded.

“My bed has become excessively tedious,” she said, kneading my ear in her fingers, “especially occupied alone. Do you have plans for this evening, Robin? Because, if invited, I would like to share yours.”

“But-“ I said, and, “Essie-“ I said, and what I wanted to say was either “You shouldn’t be doing this yet!” or “Not in front of the computer!” She didn’t give me a chance to decide which. She leaned down to press her cheek against mine, perhaps so that I might feel how round and full it had once again become.

“Robin,” she said sunnily, “I am far more well than you believe. You may ask the doctor, if you wish. She will tell you how very rapidly I have healed.” She turned her head to kiss me quickly and added, “I have some affairs of my own for the next few hours. Please continue chatting with your program until then. I am sure Albert has many interesting things to tell you, isn’t that so, Albert?”

“Sure thing, Mrs. Broadhead,” the program agreed, puffing cheerfully on his pipe.

“So, then. It’s settled.” She patted my cheek and turned away, and I have to say that as she walked back to her room she did not in the least look unwell. The robe was not tight, but it was shaped to her body, and the shape of her body was really fine. I could not believe that the wadding of bandage all along her left side was gone, but there was no sign of it.

Behind me, my science program coughed. I turned back, and he was puffing on his pipe, his eyes twinkling.

“Your wife is looking very well, Robin,” he said, nodding judiciously.

“Sometimes, Albert,” I said, “I don’t know just how anthropomorphic you are. Well. What very interesting things do you want to tell me about?”

“Whatever you want to hear, Robin. Shall I continue on the subject of Peter Herter? There are some other possibilities, such as the abort mode. That is, setting aside for the moment the legal complications, it would be possible to command the shipboard computer, known as ‘Vera’, to explode the fuel tanks on the orbital craft.”

“Hell it would! We’d destroy the greatest treasure we’ve ever found!”

“Sure thing, Robin, and it’s even worse than that. The chance of an external explosion damaging the installation Mr. Herter is using is quite small. It might only anger him. Or strand him there, to do as he chooses, as long as he lives.”

“Forget it! Don’t you have anything good to tell me about?”

“As a matter of fact, Robin,” he grinned, “I do. We’ve found our Rosetta stone.” He shrank away to a dwindling spray of colored flecks and disappeared. As a luminous spindle-shaped mass of lavender color replaced him in the tank, he said, “That is the image of the beginning of a book.”

“It’s blank!”

“I haven’t started it yet,” he explained. The shape was taller than I, and about half as thick as it was tall. It began to shift before my eyes; the color thinned out until I could see through it clearly and then one, two, three dots began to appear inside it, points of bright red light that spun themselves out in a spiral. There was a sad chittering sound, like telemetry or like the amplified chirps of marmosets. Then the picture froze. The sound stopped. Albert’s voice said:

“I have stopped it at this point, Robin. It is probable that sound is language, but we have not yet been able to isolate semantic units from it. However, the ‘text’ is clear. There are one hundred thirty-seven of those points of light. Now watch while I run a few more seconds of the book.”

The spiral of 137 tiny stars doubled itself. Another coil of dots lifted itself from the original and floated to the top of the spindle, where it hung silently. The chitter of language began again and the original spiral expanded itself, while each of the dots began to trace a spiral of its own. When it was finished there was one large spiral, composed of 137 smaller spirals, each composed of 137 dots. Then the whole red pattern turned orange and it froze.

“Do you want to try to interpret that, Robin?’” Albert’s voice asked.

“Well, I can’t count that high. But it looks like 137 times 137, right?”

“Sure thing, Robin. 137 squared, making 18,769 dots in all. Now watch.”

Short green lines slashed the spiral into ten segments. One of the segments lifted itself off, dropped to the bottom of the spindle and turned red again. “That’s not exactly a tenth of the number, Robin,” said Albert. “By counting you find that there are now 1840 dots at the bottom. I’ll proceed.” Once again, the central figure changed color, this time to yellow. “Notice the top figure.” I looked closely, and saw that the first dot had turned orange, the third yellow. Then the central figure rotated itself on the vertical axis and spun out a three-D column of spirals, and Albert said, “We now have a total of 137 cubed dots in the central figure. From here on,” he said kindly, “it gets a little tedious to watch. I’ll run it through quickly.” And he did, patterns of dots flying around and isolating themselves, colors changing through yellow to avocado, avocado to green, green to aqua, aqua to blue, and on through the spectrum, nearly twice. “Now, do you see what we have? Three numbers, Robin. 137 in the center. 1840 down at the bottom. 137 to the eighteenth power, which is roughly the same as 10 to the thirty-eighth, at the top. Or, in order, three dimensionless numbers: the fine structure constant, the ratio of the proton to the electron and the number of particles in the universe. Robin, you have just had a short course in particle theory from a Heechee teacher!”

I said, “My God.”

Albert reappeared on the screen, beaming. “Exactly, Robin,” he said.

“But Albert! Does that mean you can read all the prayer fans?”

His face fell. “Only the simple ones,” he said regretfully. “This was actually the easiest. But from now on it’s quite straightforward. We play every fan and tape it. We look for correspondences. We make semantic assumptions and test them in as many contexts as we can find-we’ll do it, Robin. But it may take some time.”

“I don’t want to take time,” I snarled.

“Sure thing, Robin, but first every fan must be located, and read, and taped, and coded for machine comparison, and then-“

“I don’t want to hear,” I said. “Just do it-what’s the matter?”

His expression had changed. “It’s a question of funding, Robin,” he said apologetically. “There’s a great deal of machine time involved here.”

“Do it! As far as you can go. I’ll have Morton sell some more stock. What else have you got?”

“Something nice, Robin,” he grinned, shrinking in size until he was just a little face in the corner of the tank. Colors flowed in the center of the display and fused into a set of Heechee controls, displaying a pattern of color on five of the ten panels. The others were blank. “Know what that is, Robin? That’s a composite of all the known Gateway flights that wound up at Heechee Heaven. All the patterns you see are identical in all seven known missions. The others vary, but it’s a pretty good conjecture that they are not directly involved in course-setting.”

“What are you saying, Albert?” I demanded. He had caught me by surprise. I found that I was beginning to shake. “Do you mean if we set ship controls for that pattern we could get to Heechee Heaven?”

“Point nine five yes, Robin,” he nodded. “And I have identified three ships, two on Gateway and one on the Moon, that will accept that setting.”

I put on a sweater and walked down to the water. I didn’t want to hear any more.

The trickle pipes had been busy. I kicked my shoes off to feel the damp, pilowy grass and watched some boys, wind-trolling for perch, near the Nyack shore, and I thought: This is what I bought by risking my life on Gateway. What I paid for with Kiara’s.

And: Do I want to risk all this, and my life, again?

But it wasn’t really a question of “want to”. If one of those ships would go to Heechee Heaven and I could buy or steal a passage on it, I would go.

Then sanity saved me, and I realized I couldn’t, after all. Not at my age. And not the way Gateway Corp was feeling about me. And, most of all, not in time. The Gateway asteroid orbits at right-angles to the ecliptic, just about. Getting there from Earth is a tedious long job; by Hohmann curves twenty months or more, under forced acceleration more than six. Six months from now those ships would have been there and back.

If they were coming back, of course.

The realization was almost as much of a relief as it was a sick, hungry sense of loss.

Sigfrid von Shrink never told me how to get rid of ambivalence (or guilt). He did tell me how to deal with them. The recipe is, mostly, just to let them happen. Sooner or later they burn themselves out. (He says.) At least, they don’t have to be paralyzing. So while I was letting this ambivalence smolder itself into ash I was also strolling along the water, enjoying the pleasant under-the-bubble air and gazing proudly at the house I lived in and the wing where my very dear, and for some time wholly platonic, wife was, I hoped, getting herself good and rested. Whatever she was doing, she wasn’t doing it alone. Twice a taxicart had brought someone over from the tube stop. Both of them had been women; and now another taxicart pulled up and let out a man, who gazed around quite unsurely while the taxi rolled itself around the circle and hurried off to its next call. I somehow doubted that he was for Essie; but I could think of no reason why he would be for me, or at least why he could not be dealt with by Harriet. So it was a surprise when the rifle-speaker under the eaves swiveled around to point at me and Harriet’s voice said, “Robin?’ There’s a Mr. Haagenbusch here. I think you ought to see him.”

That was very unlike Harriet. But she was usually right, so I strolled up the lawn, rinsed my bare feet at the French windows and invited the man into my study. He was a pretty old specimen, pink-skin bald, with a dapper white pair of sideburns and a carefully American accent-not the kind people born in the United States usually have. “Thank you very much for seeing me, Mr. Broadhead,” he said, and handed me a card that read:

Herr Doktor Advokat Wm. I. Haagenbusch

“I’m Pete Herter’s lawyer,” he said. “I flew this morning from Frankfort because I want to make a deal.”

How very quaint of you, I thought; imagine coming in person to conduct business! But if Harriet wanted me to see this old flake she had probably talked it over with my legal program, so what I said was, “What kind of a deal?”

He was waiting for me to tell him to sit down. I did. I suspected he was also waiting for me to order coffee or cognac for two, as well, but I didn’t particularly want to do that. He took off black kid gloves, looked at his pearly nails and said: “My client has asked for $250,000,000 paid into a special account plus immunity from prosecution of any kind. I received this message by code yesterday.”

I laughed out loud. “Christ, Haagenbusch, why are you telling me? I haven’t got that kind of money!”

“No, you don’t,” he agreed. “Outside of your investment in the Herter-Hall syndicate and some fish-farm stock, you don’t have anything but a couple of places to live and some personal effects. I think you could raise six or seven million, not counting the Herter-Hall investment. God knows what that might be worth right now, everything considered.”

I sat back and looked at him. “You know I got rid of my tourist stuff. So you checked me out. Only you forgot the food mines.”

“No, I don’t think so, Mr. Broadhead. My understanding is that that stock was sold this afternoon.”

It was not altogether pleasant to find out that he knew more about my financial position than I did. So Morton had had to sell that out, too! I didn’t have time to think about what that implied just then, because Haagenbusch stroked his sideburns and went on: “The situation is this, Mr. Broadhead. I have advised my client that a contract obtained under duress is not enforceable. He therefore no longer has any hope of attaining his purposes through an agreement with the Gateway Corporation, or even with your syndicate. So I have received new instructions: to secure immediate payment of the sum I have mentioned; to deposit it in untraceable bank accounts in his name; and to turn it over to him when, and if, he returns.”

“Gateway won’t like being blackmailed,” I said. “Still, they may not have any choice.”

“Indeed they do not,” he agreed. “What is wrong with Mr. Herter’s plan is that it won’t work. I am sure they will pay over the money. I am also sure that my communications will be tapped and my offices bugged, and that the justice departments of every nation involved in the Gateway treaty will be preparing indictments for Mr. Herter when he returns. I do not want to be named in those indictments as an accomplice, Mr. Broadhead. I know what will happen. They’ll find the money and take it back. They’ll void Mr. Herter’s previous contract on grounds of his own noncompliance. And they’ll put him-him at least-in jail.”

“You’re in a tough situation, Mr. Haagenbusch,” I said.

He chuckled dryly. His eyes were not amused. He stroked his sideburns for a moment and burst out: “You don’t know! Every day, long orders in code! Demand this, guarantee that, I hold you personally responsible for this other! And then I send off a reply that takes twenty-five days to get there, by which time he has sent me fifty days of new orders and his thoughts are somewhere far beyond and he upbraids me and threatens me! He is not a well man, and he certainly is not a young one. I do not truly think that he will live to collect any of this blackmail-But he might.”

“Why don’t you quit?”

“I would if I could! But if I quit, then what? Then he has no one on his side at all. Then what would he do, Mr. Broadhead? Also-“ he shrugged, “he is a very old friend, Mr. Broadhead. He was at school with my father. No. I can’t quit. Also I can’t do what he asks. But perhaps you can. Not by handing over a quarter of a billion dollars, no, because you have never had that kind of money. But you can make him an equal partner with that. I think he would-no. I think he might accept that.”

“But I’ve already-“ I stopped. If Haagenbusch did not know I had already given half my holdings to Bover, I wasn’t going to tell him. “Why wouldn’t I void the contract too?” I asked.

He shrugged. “You might. But I think you would not. You are a symbol to him, Mr. Broadhead, and I believe he would trust you. You see, I think I know what it is he wants from all this. It is to live the way you do, for all that remains of his life.”

He stood up. “I do not expect you to agree to this at once,” he said. “I have perhaps twenty-four hours before I must reply to Mr. Herter. Please think about this, and I will speak to you in one day.”

I shook his hand, and had Harriet order him a taxicart, and stood with him in the driveway until it rolled up and bore him briskly away into the early night.

When I came back into my own room Essie was standing by the window, looking out at the lights on the Tappan Sea. It was suddenly clear to me who her visitors had been this day. At least one had been her hairdresser; that tawny Niagara of hair hung true and even to her waist once more, and when she turned to smile at me it was the same Essie who had left for Arizona, all those long weeks before.

“You were so very long with that little man,” she remarked. “You must be hungry.” She watched me standing there for a moment, and laughed. I suppose that the questions in my mind were written on my face, because she answered them. “One, dinner is ready now. Something light, which we can eat at any time. Two, it is laid out in our room whenever you care to join me there. And, three, yes, Robin, I have Wilma’s assurance that all of this is quite all right. Am much more well than you think, Robin dear.”

“You surely look about as well as a person can get,” I said, and must have been smiling because her pale, perfect eyebrows came down in a frown.

“Are you amused at spectacle of horny wife?” she demanded. “Oh, no! No, it is not that at all,” I said, putting my arms around her. “I was just wondering a moment ago why it was that anybody would want to live the way I do. Now I know.”

Well. We made love tentatively and slowly, and then when I found out she wasn’t going to break we did it again, rougher and rowdier. Then we ate most of the food that was waiting for us on the sideboard, and lounged around and hugged each other until we made love again. After that we just sort of drowsed for a while, spooned together, until Essie commented to the back of my neck, “Pretty impressive performance for old goat, Robin. Not too bad for seventeen-year-old, even.”

I stretched and yawned where I lay, rubbing my back against her belly and breasts. “You sure got well in a hurry,” I commented.

She didn’t answer, just nuzzled my neck with her nose. There is a sort of radar that cannot be seen or heard that tells me true. I lay there for a moment, then disengaged myself and sat up. “Dearest Essie,” I said, “what aren’t you telling me?”

She lay within my arm, face against my ribs. “About what?” she asked innocently.

“Come on, Essie.” When she didn’t answer, I said, “Do I have to get Wilma out of bed to tell me?”

She yawned and sat up. It was a false yawn; when she looked at me her eyes were wide awake. “Wilma is most conservative,” she said, shrugging. “There are some medicines to promote healing, corticosteroids and such, which she did not wish to give me. With them there is some slight risk of consequences many years from now-but by then, no doubt, Full Medical will be able to cope, I am sure. So I insisted. It made her angry.”

“Consequence! You mean leukemia!”

“Yes, perhaps. But most likely not. Certainly not soon.”

I got out of the bed and sat naked on the edge so that I could see her better. “Essie, why?”

She slipped her thumbs under her long hair and pushed it back away horn her face to return my stare. “Because I was in a hurry,” she said. “Because you are, after all, entitled to a well wife. Because it is uncomfortable to pee through a catheter, not to say unesthetic. Because was my decision to make and I made it.” She threw the covers off her and lay back. “Study me, Robin,” she invited. “Not even scars! And inside, under skin, am fully functional. Can eat, digest, excrete, make love, conceive your child if we should wish. Not next spring or maybe next year. Now.”

And it was all true. I could see it for myself. Her long pale body was unmarked-no, not entirely; down her left side was an irregular paler patch of new skin. But you had to look to see it, and there was nothing else at all to show that a few weeks earlier she had been gouged, and mutilated, and in fact dead.

I was getting cold. I stood up to find Essie’s robe for her and put my own on. There was still some coffee on the sideboard, and still hot “For me too,” Essie said as I poured.

“Shouldn’t you be resting?”

“When I am tired,” she said practically, “you will know, because I will roll over and go to sleep. Has been very long time since you and I were like this, Robin. Am enjoying it.”

She accepted a cup from me and looked at me over the rim as she sipped it. “But you are not,” she observed.

“Yes I am!” And I was; but honesty made me add, “I puzzle myself sometimes, Essie. Why is it that when you show me love it comes out in my head feeling like guilt?”

She put down her cup and lay back. “Do you wish to tell me about it, dear Robin?”

“I just have.” Then I added, “I suppose, if anybody, I should call up old Sigfrid von Shrink and tell him.”

“He is always available,” she said.

“Hum. If I start with him God knows when I’d ever finish. Anyway, he’s not the program I want to talk to. There’s so much going on, Essie! And it’s all happening without me. I feel left out.”

“Yes,” she said, “am aware this is how you feel. Is something you wish to do, so will not feel left out any more?”

“Well-maybe,” I said. “About Peter Herter, for instance. I’ve been fooling around with a kind of an idea that I’d like to talk over with Albert Einstein.”

She nodded. “Very well, why not?” She sat up on the edge of the bed.. “Hand me my slippers, please. Let us do this now.”

“Now? But it’s late. You shouldn’t be-“

“Robin,” she said kindly, “I too have talked with Sigfrid von Shrink. Is good program, even if not written by me. Says you are good man, Robin, well adjusted, generous, and to all of this I also can testify, not to add excellent lover and much fun to be with. Come into study.” She took my hand as we walked into the big room looking over the Tappan Sea and sat before my console in the comfortable loveseat. “However,” she went on, “Sigfrid says you have great talent for inventing reasons not to do things. So I will help you get off dime. Daite gorod Polymat.” She was not talking to me, but to the console, which sprang at once into light “Display both Albert and Sigfrid programs,” she ordered. “Access both files in interactive mode. Now, Robin! Let us pursue questions you have raised. After all, I am quite interested too.”

This wife of so many years, this S. Ya. Lavorovna I married, she surprises me most when I least expect it. She sat quite comfortably beside me, holding my hand, while I talked quite openly about doing the things that I had most wanted not to want. It was not just a matter of going to Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory and stopping old Peter Herter from messing up the world. It was where I might go after that

But at first It did not look as though I were going anywhere. “Albert,” I said, “you told me that you had worked out a course setting for Heechee Heaven from Gateway records. Can you do that for the Food Factory too?”

The two of them were sitting side by side in the PV tank, Albert puffing on his pipe, Sigfrid, hands clasped and silent, attentively listening. He would not speak until I spoke to him, and I was not doing that. “‘Fraid not,” Albert said apologetically. “We have only one known setting for the Food Factory, Trish Bover’s, and that’s not enough to be sure. Maybe point-six probable that it would get a ship there. But then what, Robin? It couldn’t come back. Or at least Trish Bover’s didn’t.” He settled himself comfortably, and went on, “There are, of course, certain alternatives.” He glanced at Sigfrid von Shrink beside him. “One might so manipulate Herter’s mind by suggestion that he would change his plans.”

“Would that work?” I was still talking to Albert Einstein. He shrugged, and Sigfrid stirred but did not speak.

“Oh, do not be such a baby,” Essie scolded. “Answer, Sigfrid.”

“Gospozha Lavorovna,” he said, glancing at me, “I think not. I believe my colleague has raised this possibility only so that I might dismiss it. I have studied the records of Peter Herter’s transmissions. The symbolism is quite obvious. The angelic women with the raptor beaks-what is a ‘hooked nose’, gospozha? Think of Payter’s childhood, and what he heard of the ‘cleansing’ of the world of the evil Jews. There is also the violence, the punitive emotions. He is quite ill, has in fact already suffered one coronary attack, and is no longer rational; he has, in fact, regressed to quite a childish state. Neither suggestion nor appeals to reason will work, gospozha. The only possibility would be perhaps long-term analysis. He would not likely agree, the shipboard computer could not well handle it and, in any case, there is not time. I cannot help you, gospozha, not with any real chance of success.”

Long and long ago I spent a couple of hundred mostly very unpleasant hours listening to Sigfrid’s reasonable, maddening voice, and I had not wanted ever to hear it again. But, you know, it wasn’t all that bad.

Beside me, Essie stirred, “Polymath,” she called, “have fresh coffee prepared.” To me she said, “I think will be here for some time.”

“I don’t know for what,” I objected. “I seem to be stymied.”

“And if you are,” she said comfortably, “we need not drink the coffee but can go back to bed. Meanwhile am quite enjoying this, Robin.”

Well, why not? I was strangely no more sleepy than Essie appeared to be. In fact, I was both alert and relaxed, and my mind had never been clearer. “Albert,” I said, “is there any progress on reading the Heechee books?”

“Not much, Robin,” he apologized. “There are other mathematical volumes such as the one you saw, but as yet no language-Yes, Robin?”

I snapped my fingers. The vagrant thought that had been in the back of my mind had come to the fore. “Gosh numbers,” I said. “Those numbers the book showed us. They’re the same as the ones the Dead Men call ‘gosh numbers.’”

“Sure thing, Robin,” he nodded. “They are basic dimensionless constants of the universe, or at least of this universe. However, there is the question of Mach’s Principle, which suggests-“

“Not now, Albert! Where do you suppose the Dead Men got them?”

He paused, frowning. Tapping out his pipe, he glanced at Sigfrid before he said, “I would conjecture that the Dead Men interfaced with the Heechee machine intelligence. No doubt there was some transmission both ways.”

“My very thought! What else do you conjecture the Dead Men might know?”

“That is very difficult to say. They are very incompletely stored, you know. Communication was extremely difficult at best and has now been interrupted entirely.”

I sat up straight. “And what if we got back in communication? What if somebody went to Heechee Heaven to talk to them?”

He coughed. Trying not to be patronizing, he said, “Robin, several members of the Herter-Hall party, plus the boy, Wan, have failed to get clear answers from them on these questions. Even our machine intelligence has succeeded only poorly-though,” he said politely enough, “that is primarily because of the necessity to interface with the shipboard computer, Vera. They are poorly stored, Robin. They are obsessive, irrational and often incoherent.”

Behind me Essie was standing with the tray of coffee and cups-I had hardly heard the bell from the kitchen to say it was ready. “Ask him, Robin,” she commanded.

I did not pretend to misunderstand. “Hell,” I said, “all right, Sigfrid. That’s your line of work. How do we trick them into talking to us?”

Sigfrid smiled and unlaced his hands. “It is good to speak to you again, Robin,” he said. “I would like to compliment you on your very considerable progress since we spoke last-“

“Get on with it!”

“Of course, Robin. There is one possibility. The storage of the female prospector, Henrietta, seems rather complete, except for her one obsession, that is, with the unfaithfulness of her husband. I think that if a machine program were written from what we know of her husband’s personality and interfaced with her-“

“Make a fake husband for her?”

“Essentially, yes, Robin,” he nodded. “It wouldn’t have to be exact. Because the Dead Men in general are so poorly stored, any responses that were inappropriate might be overlooked. Of course, the program would be quite-“

“Stow it, Sigfrid. Can you write a program like that?”

“Yes. With help from your wife, yes.”

“And then how do we get it in contact with Henrietta?”

He looked sidewise at Albert. “I believe my colleague can help there.”

“Sure thing, Sigfrid,” Albert said cheerily, scratching one foot with the toe of the other. “One. Write the program, with ancillaries. Two. Read it into a PMAL-2 flip processor, with a gigabit fast-access memory and necessary slave units. Three. Put it in a Five and fire it off to Heechee Heaven. Then interface it with Henrietta and start the interrogation. I’d give that, oh, maybe a point-nine probability of working.”

I frowned. “Why ship all that machinery around?”

Patiently he said, “It’s c, Robin. The speed of light. Lacking an FTL radio, we have to ship the machine to where the job is.”

“The Herter-Hall computer has an FTL radio.”

“Too dumb, Robin. Too slow. And I haven’t told you the worst part. All that hardware is pretty big, you know. It would just about fill a Five. Which means it arrives naked and undefended at Heechee Heaven. And we don’t know who is going to meet it at the dock.”

Essie was sitting beside me again, looking beautiful and concerned, holding a cup of coffee. I took it automatically and swallowed a gulp. “You said ‘just about’,” I pointed out “Does that mean a pilot could go along?”

“‘Fraid not, Robin. There’s only room for about another hundred and fifty kilos.”

“I only weigh half that!” I felt Essie tense beside me. We were getting right down to it, now. I felt more clear-headed and sure of myself than in weeks. The paralysis of inaction was loosening every minute. I was aware of what I was saying, and very conscious of what it meant to Essie-and unwilling to stop.

“That’s true, Robin,” Albert conceded, “but do you want to get there dead? There’s food, water, air. Your round-trip standard allowance, with all provision for regeneration, comes to more than three hundred kilos, and there simply is not-“

“Cut it out, Albert,” I said. “You know as well as I do that we’re not talking about a round trip. We’re talking about, what was it? Twenty-two days. That was flight time for Henrietta. That’s all I need. Enough for twenty-two days. Then I’ll be on Heechee Heaven and it won’t matter.”

Sigfrid was looking very interested, but silent. Albert was looking concerned. He admitted, “Well, that’s true, Robin. But it’s quite a risk. There’s no margin for error at all.”

I shook my head. I was way ahead of him-way ahead, at any rate, of where he was willing to go by himself. “You said there’s a Five on the Moon that will accept that destination. Is there a what-do-you-call-it PMAL there too?”

“No, Robin,” he said, but added sadly, “However, there is one at Kourou, ready for shipment to Venus.”

“Thank you, Albert,” I said, half a snarl because it was like pulling teeth to get it out of him. And then I sat back and contemplated what had just been said.

I was not the only one who had been listening intently. Beside me Essie set down her coffee cup. “Polymath,” she commanded, “access and display Morton program, in interactive mode. Go ahead, Robin. Do what you must do.”

There was the sound of a door opening from the tank, and Morton walked in, shaking hands with Sigfrid and Albert as he glanced over his shoulder at me. He was accessing information as he stepped, and I could tell by his expression that he didn’t like what he was finding out. I didn’t care. I said, “Morton! There’s a PMAL-2 information processor at the launch base in Guiana. Buy it for me.”

He turned and confronted me. “Robin,” he said stubbornly, “I don’t think you realize how rapidly you’re eating into capital! This program is costing you over a thousand dollars a minute alone. I’ll have to sell stock-“

“Sell it!”

“Not only that. If you’re planning to ship yourself and that computer to Heechee Heaven-Don’t! Don’t even think of it! First place, Bover’s injunction still prevents it. Second place, if you should manage to get around that, you’d be liable to a contempt citation and damages that-“

“I didn’t ask you about that, Morton. Suppose I got Bover to lift his injunction. Could they stop me then?”

“Yes! But,” he added, softening, “although they could, there is some chance they would not. At least not in time. Nevertheless, as your legal advisor, I have to say-“

“You don’t have to say anything. Buy the computer. Albert and Sigfrid, program it the way we discussed. You three get out of the tank; I want Harriet. Harriet? Get me a flight, Kourou to the Moon, same ship as the computer Morton’s buying for me, soon as you can. And while you’re doing that see if you can locate Hanson Bover for me. I want to talk to him.” When she nodded and winked away I turned to look at Essie. Her eyes were damp, but she was smiling.

“You know something?” I said. “Sigfrid never called me ‘Rob’ or ‘Bobby’ once.”

She put her arms around me and hugged me close. “Maybe he thinks you are not to be treated like an infant now,” she said. “And neither am I, Robin. Do you think I wanted to get well only so we could make love quickly? No. It was also so you would not be held prisoner here by a wife you thought it wicked to leave. And so that I would be well able to deal with it,” she added, “when you left anyway.”

We landed at Cayenne in pitch dark and pouring rain. Bover was waiting for me as I cleared Customs, half asleep in a foam armchair by the baggage terminal. I thanked him several times for meeting me, but he shrugged it off. “We have only two hours,” he said. “Let us get on with it.”

Harriet had chartered a chopper for us. We took off over the palms just as the sun was coming up from the Atlantic. By the time we reached Kourou it was full daylight, and the lunar module was erect beside its support tower. It was tiny compared to the giants that climb up from Kennedy or California, but the Centre Spatial Guyanais gets one-sixth better performance out of its rockets, being almost on the equator, so they don’t have to be as big. The computer was already loaded and stowed, and Bover and I got aboard at once. Slam. Shove. Retching taste of the breakfast I shouldn’t have eaten on the airplane rising in my throat, and then we were under way.

It takes three days for the lunar flight. I spent as much of it as I could sleeping, the rest talking to Bover. It was the longest time I had spent out of reach of my comm facilities in at least a dozen years, and I thought it would hang heavy on my hands. It went like lightning. I woke up when the acceleration warnings went off, and watched the brassy Moon rise up toward us, and then there we were.

Considering how far I had been, it was surprising that I had never been on the Moon before. I didn’t know what to expect. It all took me by surprise: the dancy, prancy feeling of weighing no more than an inflated rubber doll, the sound of the reedy tenor that came out of my mouth in the twenty-percent helium atmosphere. They weren’t breathing Heechee mixture any more, not on the Moon. Heechee digging machines went like a bomb in the lunar rock, and with all the sunlight anybody could want to drive them it cost nothing to keep them going. The only problem was filling them with air, which was why they supplemented with helium-cheaper and easier to get than N2.

The Heechee lunar spindle is near the shuttle base-or, to put it the right way around, the shuttle base was located where it is, near Fra Mauro, because that was where the Heechee had dug most a million years before. It was all underground, even the docking ports concealed under the lee of a ridge. A couple of American astronauts named Shepard and Mitchell had spent a weekend roaming around within two hundred kilometers of it once, and never noticed it was there. Now a community of more than a thousand people lived in the spindle, and the digs and the new tunnels were branching off in all directions, and the lunar surface was a rash of microwave dishes and solar collectors and plumbing. “Hi, you,” I said to the first able-bodied man who seemed to have nothing to do. “What’s your name?”

He loped leisurely toward me, chewing on an unlighted cigar. “What’s it to you?” he asked.

“There’s cargo coming off the shuttle. I want it loaded onto the Five that’s in the dock now. You’ll need half a dozen helpers and probably cargo-handling equipment, and it’s a rush job.”

“Urn,” he said. “You got authority for this?”

“I’ll show it to you when I pay you off,” I said. “And the pay’s a thousand dollars a man, with a ten thousand dollar bonus to you personally if you do it within three hours.”

“Urn. Let’s see the cargo.” It was just coming off the rocket. He looked it over carefully, scratched for a while, thought for a while. He wasn’t entirely without conversation. A couple of words at a time it developed that his name was A. T. Walthers, Jr., and that he had been born in the tunnels on Venus. By his bangle I could tell that he had tried his luck on Gateway, and by the fact that he was doing odd jobs on the Moon I could tell that his luck hadn’t been good. Well, mine hadn’t been either, the first couple of times; and then it changed. In which direction is hard to say. “Can do it, Broadhead,” he said at last, “but we don’t have three hours. That joker Herter is due to perform again in about ninety minutes. We’ll have to wrap this up before that.”

“All the better,” I said. “Now, which way is the Gateway Corp office?”

“North end of the spindle,” he said. “They close in about half an hour.”

All the better, I thought again, but didn’t say it. Dragging Bover after me I prancy-danced back along the tunnel to the big spindle-shaped cavern that was headquarters for the area and argued our way into the Launch Director’s room. “You’ll want an open circuit to Earth for ID,” I told her. “I’m Robin Broadhead, and here’s my thumbprint. This is Hanson Bover-if you’ll oblige, Bover-“ He pressed his thumb on the plate next to mine. “Now say your bit,” I invited him.

“I, Allen Bover,” he said by rote, “hereby withdraw my injunction against Robin Broadhead, the Gateway Corp et al.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Now, Director, while you’re verifying that, here’s a signed copy of what Bover has just said for your records, plus a mission plan. Under my contract with Gateway Corp. which your machines can retrieve for you, I have the right to make use of Gateway facilities in connection with the Herter-Hall expedition. I am going to do so, for which purpose I need the Five at present parked in your landing docks. You will see by the mission plan that I intend to go to Heechee Heaven, and from there to the Food Factory, where I will prevent Peter Herter from inflicting any more damage to the Earth, also rescuing the Herter-Hall party and returning valuable Gateway information for processing and use. And I’d like to leave within the next hour,” I finished strongly.

Well, for a minute there it looked like it was going to work. The Launch Director looked at the thumbprints on the register plate, picked up the spool of mission plan and weighed it in her hand, and then stared at me in silence for a moment, her mouth open. I could hear the whine of whatever volatile gas they were using in the heat engines, Carnot-cycling from under the Fresnel lenses to the shaded artichoke-shaped reflectors just above us. I didn’t hear anything else at all. Then she sighed and said, “Senator Praggler, have you been getting all that?”

And from the air behind her desk came Praggler’s growl. “You bet your ass I have, Sally. Tell Broadhead it won’t work. He can’t have the ship.”

It was the three days in transit that had done me in. Automatically the passport identities of all passengers were radioed ahead, and the officials had known I was coming before the shuttle left French Guiana. It was just chance that it was Praggler who was there to meet me; even if he hadn’t been, they had plenty of time to get orders from the headquarters in Brasilia. I thought for a while that because it was Praggler I could talk him out of it. I couldn’t. I yelled at him for thirty minutes and begged for thirty more. No good. “There’s nothing wrong with your mission plan,” he admitted. “What’s wrong is you. You’re not entitled to use Gateway facilities, because Gateway Corp preempted you yesterday, while you were in orbit. Even if it hadn’t, Robin, I wouldn’t let you go. You’re too personally involved. Not to mention too old for this kind of thing.”

“I’m an experienced Gateway pilot!-“

“You’re an experienced pain in the ass, Robin. And maybe a little bit crazy, too. What do you think one man could do on Heechee Heaven? No. We’ll use your plan. We’ll even pay you royalties on it-if it works. But we’ll do it the right way, from Gateway itself, with at least three ships going, two of them full of young, healthy, well armed daredevils.”

“Senator,” I pleaded, “let me go! If you ship this computer to Gateway it’ll take months-years!”

“Not if we send it right up there in the Five,” he said. “Six days. Then it can take right off again, in convoy. But not with you. However,” he said reasonably, “we’ll certainly pay you for the computer and for the program. Leave it at that, Robin. Let somebody else take the risks. I’m speaking as your friend.”

Well, he was my friend and we both knew it, but maybe not as much of a friend as he had been, after I told him what he could do with his friendship. Finally Bover pulled me away. The last I saw of the Senator he was sitting on the edge of the desk staring after me, face still purple with rage, eyes looking as though they were getting ready to weep.

“That’s tough luck, Mr. Broadhead,” said Bover sympathetically.

I took a breath to straighten him out, too, and stopped myself just in time. There was no point in it. “I’ll get you a ticket back to Kourou,” I said.

He smiled, showing perfectly chiseled Chiclets-he had been spending some of that money on himself. “You have made me a rich man, Mr. Broadhead. I can pay for my own ticket. Also, I’ve never been here before and will not likely come again, so I think I’ll stay a while.”

“Suit yourself.”

“And you, Mr. Broadhead? What are your plans?”

“I don’t have any.” Nor could I think of any. I had run out of programming. I cannot tell you how empty that feels. I had nerved myself up for another Heechee mystery-ship ride-well, not as much a mystery as when I was prospecting out of Gateway. But still a pretty scary prospect. I had taken a step with Essie that I had feared taking for a long time. And all for nothing.

I stared wistfully down the long, empty tunnel toward the docks. “I might shoot my way through,” I said.

“Mr. Broadhead! That’s-that’s-“

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going to, mostly because all the guns I know anything about are already loaded onto that Five. And I doubt they’ll let me in to get one.”

He peered into my face. “Well,” he said doubtfully, “perhaps you, too, might enjoy just spending a few days-“

And then his expression changed.

I hardly saw it; I was feeling what he felt, and that was enough to demand all my attention. Old Peter was in the couch again. Worse than ever. It was not just his dreams and fantasies that I was experiencing-that everyone alive was feeling. It was pain. Despair. Madness. There was a terrible sense of pressure around the temples, a flaming ache from arms and chest. My throat was dry, then raw with sour clots as I vomited.

Nothing like that had ever come from the Food Factory before.

But then no one had ever died in the couch before. It did not stop in a minute, or in ten. My lungs heaved in great starving gasps. So did Bover’s. So did everyone else’s, wherever they were in range of his transmission. The pain kept on, and every time it seemed to reach a plateau there was an explosion of new pain; and all the time there was the terror, the rage, the awful misery of a man who knew he was dying, and hated it.

But I knew what it was.

I knew what it was, and I knew what I could do-what at least my body could do, if I could only hold my mind together enough to make it. I forced myself to take a step, and then another. I made myself trot down that wide, weary corridor, when Bover was writhing on the ground behind me and the guards were staggering, completely helpless, ahead. I blundered past them and doubt they even saw me, into the narrow hatch of the lander, tumbling all bruised and shaken, forcing myself to dog it closed over my head.

And there I was, in the disastrously familiar tiny cubbyhole, surrounded by shapes of molded tan plastic. Walthers had done his part of the job, at least. I had no way of paying him for it, but if he had put his hand in the port as I was closing it I would have given him a million.

At some point old Peter Herter died. His death did not end the misery. It only began to slow it down. I could not have guessed what it would be like to be in the mind of a man who has died, while he feels his heart stop and his bowels loosen and the certainty of death stab into his brain. It goes on much longer than I would have believed possible. It was going on all the time I cut the lander loose and sent it up on its little hydrogen jets to where the Heechee drive could work. I jammed and heaved the course-guidance wheels about until they showed that well-learned pattern Albert had taught me.

And then I squeezed the launch teat, and I was on my way. The ship began its lurchy, queasy acceleration. The star patterns I could see, barely see, by craning past a memory-storage unit, began to drift together. No one could stop me now. I could not even stop myself.

By all the data Albert had been able to collect the trip would be twenty-two days exactly. Not very long-not unless you are squeezed into a ship that is already filled to capacity. There was room for me-more or less. I could stretch out. I could stand up. I could even lie down, if the vagrant motion of the ship let me know where “down” was, and if I did not mind being folded over between pieces of metal. What I could not do, for those twenty-two days, was move more than half a meter in any direction-not to eat, not to sleep, not to bathe or excrete; not for anything.

There was plenty of time on my hands for the purpose of remembering how terrifying Heechee flight was, and to feel all of it.

There was plenty of time, too, to learn. Albert had been careful to record for me all the data I had not had the wit to ask him for, and those tapes were available for me to play. They were not very interesting or sophisticated in delivery. The PMAL-2 was all memory: plenty of brain, not much display. There was no three-dimensional tank, only a stereo flatplate goggle system when my eyes would bear watching it, or a screen the size of the palm of my hand when they would not.

At first I did not use it. I just lay there, sleeping as much as I could. Partly I was recovering from the trauma of Peter’s death, so terrifyingly like my own. Partly I was experimenting with the inside of my head-allowing myself to feel fear (when I had every reason for it!), encouraging myself to feel guilt. There are kinds of guilt that I know I cherish, the contemplation of obligations unmet and commitments undone. I had plenty of those to think about, beginning with Peter (who would almost surely have been still alive, if I had not accepted him for that expedition) and ending, or rather not ending, with Kiara in her frozen black hole-not ending because I could always think of others. That amusement staled before long. To my surprise I found that the guilt was not very overpowering after all, once I let myself feel it; and that took care of the first day.

Then I turned to the tapes. I let the semi-Albert, the rigid, half-animated caricature of the program I knew and loved, lecture me on Mach’s Principle and gosh numbers and more curious forms of astrophysical speculation than I had ever dreamed of. I didn’t really listen, but I let the voice roll over me, and that was the second day.

Then, from the same source, I poured into myself all that was stored about the Dead Men. I had heard almost all of it before. I heard it all again. I had nothing better to do, and that was the third day.

Then there were miscellaneous lectures on Heechee Heaven and the provenance of the Old Ones and possible strategies for dealing with Henrietta and possible risks to be guarded against from the Old Ones, and that was the third day, and the fourth, and the fifth.

I began to wonder how I would fill twenty-two of them, so I went back and did those tapes all over again, and that was the sixth day, and the eighth, and the tenth; and on the eleventh-On the eleventh I cut off the computer entirely, grinning to myself with anticipated pleasure.

It was halfway day. I hung there in my restraining straps, waiting for the satisfaction of the one event this cramped and cussed trip could produce for me: the twinkling eruption of golden sparks of light in the crystal spiral that would signify turnover time. I didn’t know exactly when it would happen. Probably not in the first hour of the day (and it didn’t). Probably not, either, in the second or third . . . and it didn’t. Not in those hours, nor in the fourth, or fifth, or the ones after that. It did not happen at all on the eleventh day.

Or on the twelfth.

Or on the thirteenth.

Or on the fourteenth; and when at last I punched in the data to check out the arithmetic I did not care to do in my head, the computer told me what I did not want to know.

It was too late.

Even if the halfway point occurred any time now-even in the next minute-there would not be water, food and air enough to carry me through to the end.

There are economies one can make. I made them. I moistened my lips instead of drinking, slept all I could, breathed as shallowly as I knew how. And turnover at last did occur-on day nineteen. Eight days late.

When I played the figures into the computer they came back cold and clear.

The halfway point had come too late. Nineteen days from now the ship might well arrive at Heechee Heaven, but not with a living pilot aboard. By then I would have been dead for at least six.