Heechee Rendezvous Part 14

"We weren't yelling, Wan," Klara said peaceably.

'Weren't yelling!" he yelled. "Mali!" He stomped over to the pilot seat and sat down, fists clenched on his thighs, shoulders hunched, glowering at her. "What if I want something to eat now?" he demanded.

"Do you?"

He shook his head. "Or what if I wanted to make love?"

"Do you?"

"Do I, do I! It is always an argument with you! And you are not really a very good cook and, also, in bed you are far less interesting than you claimed. Dolly was better."

Klara found she was holding her breath, and forced herself to release it slowly and silently. She could not force herself to smile.

Wan grinned, pleased to see that he bad scored on her. "You remember Dolly?" he went on jovially. "That was the one you persuaded me to abandon on Gateway. There they have the rule of no pay, no breathe, and she had no money. I wonder if she is still alive."

"She's still alive," gritted Klara, hoping it was true. But Dolly would always find someone to pay her bills. 'Wan?" she began, desperate to change the subject before it got worse. 'What do those yellow flashes on the screen mean? The Dead Men don't seem to know."

"No one knows. If the Dead Men do not know, is it not foolish to think I would know? You are very foolish sometimes," he complained. And in the very nick of time, just as Klara was reaching the boiling point, the thin voice of the female Dead Man came again: "Setting twenty-three, eighty-four, ninety-seven, eight, fourteen."

'What?" said Klara, startled.

"Setting twenty-three-" The voice repeated the numbers. "What's that?" Klara asked, and Wan took it upon himself to answer. His position had not changed, but the expression on his face was different less hostile. More strained. More fearful.

"It is a chart setting, to be sure," he said.

"Showing what?"

He looked away. "Set it and find out," he said.

It was difficult for Klara to operate the knurled wheels, for in all her previous experience such ~n act was tantamount to suicide: the chart-displaying function had not been learned, and a change in the settings almost invariably meant an unpredictable, and usually fatal, change in course. But all that happened was that the images on the screen flickered and whirled, and steadied to show-what? A star? Or a black hole? Whatever it was, it was bright cadmium yellow on the screen, and around it flickered no fewer than five of the upside-down question marks. "What is it?" she demanded.

Wan turned slowly to stare at it. "It is very big," he said, "and very far away. And it is where we are going now." All that combativeness was gone from his face now. Klara almost wished it were back, for what had replaced it was naked, unrelieved fear.

And meanwhile- Meanwhile, the task of Captain and his Heechee crew was nearing the end of its first phase, though it brought no joy to any of them. Captain was still grieving for Twice. Her slim, sallow, s.h.i.+ny body, emptied of personality, had been disposed of. At home it would have gone to join the other refuse in the settling tanks, for the Heechee were not sentimental about cadavers. On s.h.i.+pboard there were no settling tanks, so it had been jettisoned into s.p.a.ce. The part of Twice that remained was in store with the rest of the ancestral minds, and as Captain roamed about his new and unfamiliar s.h.i.+p he touched the pouch where she was stored from time to time without knowing that he did it.

It was not just the personal loss. Twice was their drone controller, and the cleanup job could not be done properly without her. Mongrel was doing her best, but she was not primarily an operator of enslaved equipment. Captain, standing nervously over her, was not helping much. "Don't kill your thrust yet, that's no stable orbit!" he hissed, and, "I hope those people don't get motion sickness, the way you're jerking them around." Mongrel pulsed her jaw muscles but did not respond. She knew why Captain was so tense and withdrawn.

But at last he was satisfied and tapped Mongrel on the shoulder to signify that she could discharge cargo. The great bubble lurched and revolved. A line of dark appeared from pole to pole, and it opened like a flower. Mongrel, hissing with satisfaction at last, disengaged the crumpled sails.h.i.+p and allowed it to slide free.

"They got a rough ride," commented the communications officer, coming over to stand beside his captain.

Captain twitched his abdomen, in the Heechee equivalent of a shrug.

The sails.h.i.+p was quite clear of the opened sphere now, and Mongrel began to close the great hemisphere. "What about your own task, Shoe? Are the human beings still chattering?"

"More than ever, I'm afraid."

"Ma.s.sed minds! Have you made any progress in translating what they're yelling about?"

"The minds are working on it." Captain nodded gloomily and reached for the eight-sided medallion clipped to the pouch between his legs. He stopped himself barely in time. The satisfaction he might gain from asking the minds how they were getting along with the translation would not justify the pain of hearing Twice among them. Sooner or later he would hear her, necessarily. Not yet.

He blew air through his nostrils and addressed Mongrel. "b.u.t.ton it up, power it down, let it float there. We can't do any better than that for now. Shoe! Transmit a message to them. Tell them we're sorry we can't fix them up any better right now but we'll try to come back. White-Noise!

Plot all vessels in s.p.a.ce for me."

The navigator nodded, turned to his instruments, and in a moment the screen filled with a whirling ma.s.s of yellow-tailed comets. The color of the nucleus indicated distance, the length of the tail velocity. "Which one is the fool with the corkscrew?" Captain demanded, and the screen contracted its field to show one particular comet. Captain hissed in astonishment. That particular s.h.i.+p, last time he looked, had been safely moored in its home system. Now it was traveling at very high velocity indeed, and had left its home far behind. "Where is he going?" he demanded.

White-Noise twitched his corded face muscles. "It'll take a minute, Captain."

"Well, do it!"

Under other circ.u.mstances, White-Noise might have taken offense at Captain's tone. Heechee did not talk uncivilly to each other. The circ.u.mstances, however, were not to be ignored. The fact that these upstart humans were in possession of black-hole-piercing equipment was terribly frightening in itself. The knowledge that they were filling the air with their loud, foolish communications was worse. Who knew what they would do next? And the death of a s.h.i.+pmate was the final straw, making this trip just about the worst since those long-ago days, before White-Noise had been born, when they learned of the existence of the others "It doesn't make sense," White-Noise complained. "There's nothing along their course that I can see."

Captain scowled at the cryptic graphics on the screen. Reading them was a task for a specialist~. but Captain had to have a smattering of everyone's skills and he could see that along the plotted geodesic there was nothing in reasonable range. "What about that globular cl.u.s.ter?" he demanded.

"I don't think so, Captain. It's not directly in line of flight, and there's nothing there. Nothing at all, really, all the way to the edge of the Galaxy."

"Minds!" said a voice from behind them. Captain turned. The black-hole piercer, Burst, was standing there, and all his muscles were rippling madly. The man's fear communicated itself to Captain even before Burst said tightly: "Extend the geodesic." White-Noise looked at him uncomprehendingly. "Extend it! Outside the Galaxy!"

The navigator started to object, then caught his meaning. His own muscles were twitching as he obeyed. The screen flickered. The fuzzed yellow line extended itself. It pa.s.sed through regions where there was nothing else on the screen at all, undiluted black s.p.a.ce, empty.

Not quite empty.

A deep-blue object emerged from the darkness of the screen, paling and yellowing. It was quintuply flagged. There was a hiss from every member of the crew as it steadied, and stopped, and the fuzzy yellow geodesic reached out to touch it.

The Heechee looked at each other, and not one of them had a word to say. The one s.h.i.+p that could do the greatest damage one could imagine was on its way to the place where the damage was waiting to be done.

18 In the High Pentagon

The High Pentagon isn't exactly a satellite in geostationary orbit. It's five satellites in geostationary orbit. The orbits are not precisely identical, so all five of these armored, pulse-hardened chunks of metal waltz around each other. First Alpha's on the outside and Delta's nearest the Earth, then they swing awhile and it's Epsilon that's facing out and maybe Gamma that's inboard, swing your partners, do-si-do, and so on. Why, one might ask, did they do it that way instead of just building one big one? Well, one is answered, five satellites are five times as hard to hit as one satellite. Also, I personally think, because both the Soviet Orbit Tyuratam and the Peep-China command post are single structures. Naturally the U. S. of A. wanted to show that they could do the job better. Or at least different. It all dated from the time of the wars. At one time, they said, it had been the very latest in defense. Its huge nuke-fueled lasers were supposed to be able to zap any enemy missile from fifty thousand miles away. Probably they indeed could-when they were built-and for maybe three months after that, until the other fellows began using the same pulse-hardening and radar-decoy tricks and everybody was back to Go. Unfortunately they all "went," but that's a whole other story.

So we never saw four-fifths of the Pentagon, except on our screens. The hunk they vectored us in on was the one that held crew quarters, administration-and the brig. That was Gamma, sixty thousand tons of metal and meat, about the size of the Great Pyramid and pretty much the same shape, and we found out right away that no matter how open-handed General Manzbergen had been back on Earth, here in orbit we were about as welcome as a cold sore. For one thing, they kept us waiting for permission to unseal. "Suppose they must have been hard-hit in the minute madness," Essie speculated, scowling at the viewscreen, which showed nothing but the metal flank of Gamma.

"That's no excuse," I said, and Albert chipped in his two cents' worth: "They were not hit so hard but that they were ready to hit much harder, I'm afraid. I have seen too much war; I do not like such things." He was fingering his Two Percent b.u.t.ton and acting, for a hologram, rather nervous. What he said was true enough. A couple weeks earlier, when the terrorists had zapped everybody from s.p.a.ce with their TPT, the whole station had gone crazy for a minute. Literally one minute; it was no more than that. And a good thing it was no longer, because in that one minute eight of the eleven duty stations that had to be manned in order to aim a proton beam at terrestrial cities were in fact manned. And raring to go.

That wasn't what was troubling Essie. "Albert," she said, "do not play games that make me nervous. You have not in fact seen any war, ever. You are only a program."

He bowed. "As you say, Mrs. Broadhead. Please? I have just received permission for us to unseal and you may enter the satellite."

So we entered, with Essie looking thoughtfully over her shoulder at the program we left behind. The ensign waiting for us did not seem enthusiastic. He ran his thumb over the s.h.i.+p's data chip as though he were trying to make sure the magnetic ink didn't come off. "Yeah," he said, "we got a signal about you. Only thing, I'm not sure if the brigadier can see you now, sir."

"It was not a brigadier we wished to see," Essie explained sweetly, "simply a Mrs. Dolly Walthers, whom you are holding here."

"Oh, yes, ma'am. But Brigadier Ca.s.sata has to sign your pa.s.s, and right now we're all pretty busy." He excused himself to whisper into a phone, then looked happier. "If you'll just come with me, sir and ma'am," he said, and conducted us out of the port at last.

You lose the habit of maneuvering in low-G or zero-G if you don't practice it, and I was long out of practice. Also I was rubbernecking. All this was new to my experience. Gateway is an asteroid, tunneled out by the Heechee long ago and every interior surface lined by them with their favorite blue-glowing metal. The Food Factory, Heechee Heaven, and all of the other large structures I had visited in s.p.a.ce were also Heechee construction. It was confusing for me to be for the first time in a very large human-made s.p.a.ce artifact. It seemed more alien than anything Heechee. No familiar blue glow, just painted steel. No spindle-shaped chamber at the core. No prospectors looking sick-scared or triumphant, no museum collections of bits and pieces of Heechee technology found here and there around the Galaxy. What there was plenty of was military personnel in skintights and, for some reason, crash helmets. The curiousest thing of all was that although every one of them wore a weapons holster, all the holsters were empty.

I slowed down to point this out to Essie. "Looks like they don't trust their own people," I commented.

She shook me by the collar and pointed ahead, where the ensign was waiting. "Do not talk against hosts, Robin, not until are behind their backs, anyway. Here. This must be place."

Not a minute too soon; I was beginning to run out of breath with the exertion of puffing myself along a zero-G corridor. "Right inside, sir and ma'am," said the ensign hospitably, and of course we did as he said.

But what was inside the door was only a bare room with a couple of sit-down las.h.i.+ngs around the walls, and nothing else. "Where's the brigadier?" I demanded.

"Why, sir, I told you we're all pretty busy right now. He'll see you soon's he can." And, with a shark's smile, he closed the door on us; and the interesting thing about that door, we both perceived at once, was that there was no k.n.o.b on the inside surface.

Like everybody, I have had fantasies of being arrested. You're busy with your life, herding fish or balancing somebody's books or writing the great new symphony, and all of a sudden there's a knock on the door. "Come along without resistance," they say, and snap the cuffs on and read you your rights, and the next thing you know you're in a place like this. Essie s.h.i.+vered. She must have had the same fantasies, though if ever there was a blameless life it was hers. "Is silly," she said, more to herself than to me. "What a pity there is no bed here. Could put the time to use."

I patted her hand. I knew she was trying to cheer me up. "They said they were busy," I reminded her.

So we waited.

And half an hour later, without warning, I felt Essie stiffen under the hand I had on her shoulder, and the expression on her face was suddenly raging and mad; and I felt a quick, hurting, furious jolt to my own mind- And then it was gone, and we looked at each other. It had only lasted a few seconds. Long enough to tell us just what it was they had been busy about, and why they had carried no weapons in their holsters.

The terrorists had struck again-but only a glancing blow.

When at last the ensign came back for us he was gleeful. I do not mean that he was friendly. He still didn't like civilians. He was happy enough to have a big smile on his face and hostile enough not to tell us why. It had been a long time. He ~'didn't apologize, just conducted us to the commandant's office, grinning all the way. And when we got there, pastel-painted steel walls with its West Point holoscape on the wall and its sterling silver smoke eater trying vainly to keep up with his cigar, Brigadier Ca.s.sata was smiling, too.

There were not very many good explanations possible for all this secret joffity, so I took a long leap in the dark and landed on one of them. "Congratulations, Brigadier," I said politely, "on capturing the terrorists."

The smile flickered, but came back. Ca.s.sata was a small man, and pudgier than the military medics must have preferred; his thighs bulged out at the hems of his olive-drab shorts as he sat on the edge of his desk to greet us. "As I understand it, Mr. Broadhead," he said, "your purpose here is to interview Mrs. Dolly Walthers. You may certainly do that, considering the instructions I have received, but I can't answer your questions about security matters."

"I didn't ask any," I pointed out. Then, as I felt Essie's why-you-antagonize-this-creep? glare burning the back of my neck, I added, "Anyway, it's very kind of you to let us do it."

He nodded, obviously agreeing that he was very kind. "I'd like to ask you a question, though. Would you mind telling me why you want to see her?"

Essie's glare was still burning, which kept me from telling him that I did mind. "Not at all," I lied. "Mrs. Walthers spent some time with a very good friend of mine, whom I am anxious to see. We're hoping she can tell us how to get in touch with, uh, with my friend."

It was not a lot of use skipping the gender-revealing p.r.o.noun. They had surely interrogated the h.e.l.l out of poor Dolly Walthers and knew that there were only two people I could mean, and of the two it was not at all likely that I would call Wan a friend. He looked at me in a puzzled way, then at Essie, then said, "Walthers is certainly a popular young lady. I won't keep you any longer." And he turned us over to the ensign for the conducted tour.

As a tour guide, the ensign was a flat failure. He didn't answer questions; he didn't volunteer information. There was a lot to be curious about, too, because the Pentagon was showing signs of recent trouble. Not physical damage, so much, but when the station had gone crazy for the earlier minute of madness the brig was damaged. Its locking program had been crashed by the duty guards. Fortunately they had wrecked it in the open position; otherwise, there would have been some sorry skeletons starving to death in the cells.

The way I found out about it was by pa.s.sing through a tier of cells and observing that they were all open, with armed MPs squatting boredly in the corridors to make sure the inmates stayed inside. The ensign paused to talk briefly to the guard officer and, while we waited, Essie whispered: "If didn't catch terrorists, what would brigadier be nice to you for?"

"Good question," I answered. "Here's one back. What did he mean about her being a very popular young lady?"

The ensign was scandalized by our talking in ranks. He cut short the chat with the MP lieutenant and hustled us along to a cell like any other cell, door standing open. He pointed inside. "There's your prisoner," he said. "You can talk to her all you like, but she doesn't know anything much."

"I realize that," I said, "because if she did, you surely wouldn't let us see her at all, would you?" I got the hot flash of another of Essie's glares for that. She was right, too. If I hadn't annoyed him, the ensign might have had the common decency to move back a few steps so that we could talk to Dolly Walthers in private, instead of posting himself firmly at the open door.

Or might not. The latter theory is the one that got my vote.

Dolly Walthers was a child-sized woman with a childish, high-pitched voice and bad teeth. She was not at her best. She was scared, fatigued, angry, and sullen.

And I was not all that much better. I was wholly, disconcertingly aware that this young woman before me had just spent a couple of weeks in the company of the love of my life-or one of the loves of my life-in the top two, anyway. I say this lightly enough. It wasn't a light thing. I didn't know what to do, and I didn't know what to say.

"Say h.e.l.lo, Robin," Essie instructed.

"Miz Walthers," I said obediently, "h.e.l.lo. I'm Robin Broadhead."

She had manners left. She put out her hand like a good child. "I know who you are, Mr. Broadhead, even not counting that I met your wife the other day." We shook hands politely and she flashed a hint of a sad smile.

It wasn't until some time later, when I saw her Robinette Broadhead puppet that I knew what she had been smiling at. But she looked puzzled, too. "I thought they said there were four people who wanted to see me," she said, peering past the stolid ensign in search of the others.

"Is just the two of us," said Essie, and waited for me to speak.

But I didn't speak. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to ask. If it had been just Essie there, perhaps I could have managed to tell Dolly Walthers what Klara had meant to me and ask for her help-any kind of help. Or if it had been just the ensign, I could have ignored him like any other piece of furniture. Or I think I could-but they were both there, and I stood tongue-tied while Dolly Walthers gazed at me curiously, and Essie expectantly, and even the ensign turned to stare.

Essie sighed, an exasperated and compa.s.sionate sound, and made her decision. She took charge. She turned to Dolly Walthers. "Dolly," she said briskly, "must excuse my husband. Is quite traumatic for him, for reasons too complex to explain just now. Must excuse me also, please, for allowing MPs to take you away; I also have some trauma for related reasons. Important thing is what we do now. That will be as follows: First we secure your release from this place. Second we invite your company and help in voyage to locate Wan and Gelle-Klara Moynlin. You agree?"

It was all happening too fast for Dolly Walthers, too. "Well," she said, "I-"

"Good," said Essie, nodding. "We go to arrange this. You, Ensign! Take us back to our s.h.i.+p, True Love, at once, please."

The ensign opened his mouth, scandalized, but I got in ahead of him.

"Essie, shouldn't we see the brigadier about that?"

She squeezed my hand and gazed at me. The gaze was compa.s.sionate. The squeeze was a shut-silly-mouth-Robin! warning that nearly broke my knuckles. "Poor lamb," she said apologetically to the officer, "has just had major surgery. Is confused. To s.h.i.+p for his medicine, and quickly!"

When my wife Essie is determined to do something, the way to get along with her is to let her do it. What she had in mind I did not know, but what I should do about it was very clear. I a.s.sumed the demeanor of an elderly man dazed by recent surgery, and let her guide me in the wake of the ensign down the corridors of the Pentagon.

We didn't move very fast, because the corridors of the Pentagon were pretty busy. The ensign halted us at an intersection while a party of prisoners marched past. For some reason they were clearing out an entire block of cells. Essie nudged me and pointed to the monitors on the wall.

One set of them were no more than signposts, Commissary Z Enlisted Personnel Latrines Docking V, and so on. But the other- The other showed the docking area, and there was something big coming in. Great, hulking, human-built; you could tell it was Earth-built rather than Heechee at the first glance. It wasn't just the lines, or the fact that it was constructed of gray steel rather than Heechee-metal blue. The proof lay in the mean-looking projectile weapons that poked their snouts out of its smooth exterior.

The Pentagon, I knew, had lost six of those s.h.i.+ps in a row, trying to adapt the Heechee faster-than-light drive to human s.h.i.+ps. I couldn't complain about that; it was from their mistakes that the design for the True Love had benefited. But the weapons were not pleasant to see. You never saw one on a Heechee vessel.

"Come on," snapped the ensign, glaring at us. "You're not supposed to be here. Let's move it." He started along a relatively empty corridor, but Essie slowed him down.

"Is faster this way," she said, pointing to the Docking sign.

"Off limits!" he snapped.

"Not for good friend of Pentagon who is unwell," she replied, and tugged at my arm, and we headed for the densest, noisiest knots of people. There are secrets within secrets in Essie, but this one clarified itself in a moment. The commotion had been the captured terrorists being brought in from the cruiser, and Essie had just wanted to get a look at them.

The cruiser had intercepted their stolen s.h.i.+p just as it was coming out of FTL. They shot it up. Apparently there had been eight terrorists on board-eight, in a Heechee s.h.i.+p that five persons crowded! Three of them had survived to become prisoners. One was comatose. One was missing a leg, but conscious. The third one was mad.

It was the mad one that was attracting all the attention. She was a young black girl-from Sierra Leone, they said-and she was screaming incessantly. She wore a straitjacket. By the look of it she had been kept in it for a very long time, for the fabric was stained and stinking, her hair was matted, her face was cadaverous. Somebody was calling my name, but I pressed forward along with Essie to get a better look. "Is Russian she is saying," said Essie, her brows furrowing, "but is not very good. Georgia accent. Very strong. Says she hates us."

"I could have figured that out," I said. I had seen enough. When the ensign got through the crowd, yelling furious orders for people to get out of the way, I let him tug me back, and then I heard my name called again.

So it wasn't the ensign? In fact, it wasn't a man's voice at all. It came from the knot of prisoners being moved out of their cells, and I saw who it was. The Chinese girl. Janie something. "Good G.o.d," I said to the ensign, "what have you arrested her for?"