world, apparently independently, maybe simultaneously. Are they Heechee suggestions, via the couch?”
He sat there, puffing his pipe and smiling at me, while I thought about that.
All the thinking in the world didn’t make it good, clean fun. Thrilling, maybe. But nothing you could relax to. The world had changed in fundamental ways since the first astronauts discovered Heechee diggings on Venus, and the more we explored the bigger the changes got. A lost kid, playing with something he didn’t understand, had plunged the whole human race into recurring madness for more than a decade. If we kept on playing with things we didn’t understand, what were the Heechee going to give us for an encore?
To say nothing of the queasiness of Albert’s suggestion that these creatures had been spying on us for hundreds of thousands of years-maybe even throwing us a crumb, now and then, to see what we would make of it.
I told Albert to bring me up to date on everything else he knew about what was going on in the Food Factory, and while he was running through the physical facts I called up Harriet. She appeared in one corner of the tank, looking questioning, and took my order for dinner while Albert kept right on with his show and tell. He was continuously monitoring all the transmissions even as he was reporting on them, and be showed me selected scenes of the boy, the Herter-Hall party, the interiors of the artifact. The damn thing was still determined to go its own way. Best course estimates suggested that it was moving toward a new cluster of comets, several million miles away-at present rates, it would get there in a few months. “Then what?” I demanded.
Albert shrugged apologetically. “Presumably it will then stay there until it has mined them of all the CHON ingredients, Robin.”
“Then can we move it?”
“No evidence, Robin. But it’s possible. Speaking of which, I have a theory about the controls of the Heechee ships. When one of them reaches an operating artifact-the Food Factory, Gateway, whatever-its controls unlock and it can then be redirected. At any rate, I think that may be what happened to Ms. Patricia Bover-and that, too, has certain obvious implications,” he twinkled.
I don’t like to let a computer program think it’s smarter than I am. “You mean that there may be a lot of stranded Gateway astronauts all over the Galaxy, because their controls unlocked and they didn’t know how to get back?”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he said approvingly. “That may account for what Wan calls the ‘Dead Men’. We’ve received some conversations with them, by the way. Their responses are sometimes quite nonrational, and of course we’re handicapped by not being able to interact. But it does appear that they are, or were, human beings.”
“Are you telling me they were alive?”
“Sure thing, Robin, or at least in the sense that Enrico Caruso’s voice on a tape was once the voice of a living Neapolitan tenor. Whether they are ‘alive’ now is a matter of definition. You might ask the same question-“ puff, pull, “about me.”
“Huh.” I thought for a minute. “Why are they so crazy?”
“Imperfect transcription, I would say. But that is not the important thing.” I waited until he drew on his pipe to get ready to tell me the important thing. “It seems rather sure, Robin, that the transcription occurred by some sort of chemical readout of the actual brains of the prospectors.”
“You mean the Heechee killed them and poured their brains into a bottle?”
“Certainly not, Robin! First, I would hazard the opinion that the prospectors died naturally rather than being killed. That would degrade the chemistry of brain storage and contribute to the degradation of the information. And certainly not into a bottle! Into some sort of chemical analogs, perhaps. But the point is, how did this happen to be?”
I groaned. “Do you want me to abolish your program, Al? I could get all this quicker from straight visual synoptics.”
“Sure thing you could, Robin, but not,” he twinkled, “perhaps, as entertainingly. At any rate, the question is, how did the Heechee happen to have equipment to read out a human brain? Think about it, Robin. It seems very improbable that the chemistry of the Heechee would be the same as the chemistry of a human being. Close, yes. We know that from general considerations, e.g., what they breathed and ate. Fundamentally their chemistry was not unlike ours. But peptides are quite complex molecules. It seems most unlikely that a compound which represents, e.g., the ability to play a Stradivarius well, or even toilet-training, would be the same in their chemistry as in ours.” He started to relight his pipe, then caught my eye and added hurriedly, “So I conclude, Robin, that these machines were designed not for Heechee brains.”
He startled me. “For humans, then? But why? How? How did they know? When-“
“Please, Robin. At your instructions, your wife has programmed me to make large deductions from small data. Therefore I cannot defend all that I say. But,” he added, nodding sagely, “I have this opinion, yes.”
“Jesus,” I said. He did not seem to want to add anything to that, so I tucked it away and went on to the next worry. “What about the Old Ones? Are they human, do you think?”
He tapped his pipe out and reached for the tobacco pouch. “I would say not,” he said at last.
I didn’t ask him what the alternative was. I didn’t want to hear it.
When Albert had run himself dry for the moment, I told Harriet to put my legal program on. I couldn’t talk to him right away, though, because right then my dinner came up and the waiter was a human being. He wanted to ask me how I had got through the fever, so that he could tell me how he had, and that took time. But at last I sat down in front of the holo tank, sliced into my chicken steak and said, “Go ahead, Morton, what’s the bad news?”
He said apologetically, “You know that Bover suit?”
“What Bover suit?”
“Trish Bover’s husband. Or widower, depending on how you look at it. We filed the appearance, only unfortunately the judge had a bad attack of the fever and-Well. He is wrong in the law, Robin, but he denied our request for time to set a hearing date and entered summary judgment against.”
I stopped chewing. “Can he do that?” I roared through my mouthful of prime rare chicken.
