The Annals of the Heechee

20 BACK HOME

Albert Einstein was not the only appliance that seemed to have stopped functioning. The JAWS ships had problems of their own. Every control system for weaponry of any kind had been simply fried. They didn’t work.

Everything else was fully operational. Communications were fine—and busy, with everyone asking everyone else just what the hell had happened. Nothing nondestructive was damaged. The lights on the Wheel still worked, and so did the air-changers. The workthings prepared meals and tidied up spills. The bunks in the commodore’s cabin in the JAWS flagship continued to make themselves, and the trash receptacles emptied themselves into the recycling pools.

The True Love, which had never had any arms, was as good as new. We could have started it and flown right off to anywhere at all.

But where should we go?

We went nowhere. Alicia Lo took the controls and kept us in a safe orbit, but that was it. I didn’t bother. I was focused one hundred percent on my faithful data-retrieval system and very dear friend. I said desperately, “Albert, please.”

He took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at me absently. “Robin,” he said, “I must ask you to be patient for a while.”

“But Albert! I beg you! What’s going to happen next?” He gave me what is called an unfathomable look-at least, I certainly couldn’t fathom it.

“Please! Are we in danger? Are the Foe going to come down and kill us all?”

He looked astonished. “Kill us? What an idea, Robin! After they met you and me and Mrs. Broadhead and Miss Lo and General Cassata? No, of course not, Robin, but I must excuse myself, I’m quite busy now.”

And that was all he would say.

And after a while the shuttles began to come up from the launch loops, and we had our datastores taken back down to the good old Earth, and we tried-oh, for a long time we tried-to sort things out.