Perhaps, she thought, they were also adding mass at the center-if there is one. And she said that that might explain why the Heechee had run away. They started the process, she guessed, and then went off to hide somewhere, in some sort of timeless stasis, maybe like a big black hole, until it ran its course and they were ready to come out and start things over again. That’s when it really bit the fan! No wonder. Can you imagine a bunch of physics professors trying to cope with something like that? They said she should try for a degree in Heechee psychology instead of astrophysics. They said she had nothing to offer but conjecture and assumption-no way to test the theory, just a guess. And they thought it was a bad one. So they refused her dissertation, and she didn’t get her doctorate, and so she went off to Gateway to be a prospector and wound up where she is. Dead. And,” he said thoughtfully, pulling the pipe out again, “I do actually, Robin, think she was wrong, or at least sloppy. We have very little evidence that the Heechee had any possible way of affecting matters in any galaxy but our own, and she was talking about the entire universe.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“Not a bit sure, Robin.”
I yelled, “Don’t you at least have a fucking guess?”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he said gloomily, “but no more than that. Please calm yourself. See, the scale is wrong. The universe is too big, from anything we know. And the time is too short. The Heechee were here less than a million years ago, and the expansion time of the universe to date is something like twenty thousand times that long-recoil time could hardly be less. It’s mathematically bad odds that they would have picked that particular time to show up.”
“Show up?”
He coughed. “I left out a step, Robin. There’s another guess in there, and I’m afraid it’s my own. Suppose this is the universe the Heechee built. Suppose they somehow evolved in a less hospitable one, but didn’t like it, and caused it to contract to make a new one, which is the one we’re in. That doesn’t fit badly, you know. They could have come Out to look around, maybe found it just the way they wanted it. And now maybe the ones who did the exploring have gone back to get the rest of them.”
“Albert! For Christ’s sake!”
He said gently, “Robin, I wouldn’t be saying these things if I could help it. It’s only a conjecture. I don’t think you have any idea how difficult it is for me to conjecture in this way, and I wouldn’t be able to do it except for-well, here’s the thing. There is one possible way for something to survive a contraction and a new Big Bang, and that is to be in a place where time effectively stops. What kind of place is that? Why, a black hole. A big one. One big enough so that it is not losing mass by quantum tunneling, and therefore can survive indefinitely. I know where there’s a black hole like that, Robin. Mass, about fifteen thousand times the sun. Location, the center of our Galaxy.” He glanced at his watch and changed expression. “If my calculations are close, Robin,” he said, “your wife should be arriving about now.”
“Einstein! The first damn thing she’s going to do is rewrite you!”
He twinkled. “She already has, Robin,” he pointed out, “and one of the things she has taught me to do is to relieve tension, when appropriate, by some comical or personally rewarding comment.”
“You’re telling me I ought to be all tensed up?”
“Well, not really, Robin,” he said. “All this is quite theoretical-if that much. And in terms of human life, perhaps a long way off. But perhaps not. That black hole in the center of our Galaxy is at least one possibility for the place where the Heechee went, and, in terms of flight time in a Heechee ship, not all that distant. And-I said that we had determined the objective of the Oldest One’s course? That was it, Robin. It was heading straight for that black hole when you turned it around.”
I was tired of being on Heechee Heaven weeks before Essie was. She was having the time of her life with the machine intelligences. But I wasn’t tired of Essie, so I stayed around until she at last admitted she had everything she could use on rag-flop tape, and forty-eight hours later we were back at the Tappan Sea. And ninety minutes after that Wilma Liederman was there with all the tools of her trade, checking Essie out to the last crumb under her toenail. I wasn’t worried. I could see that Essie was all right, and when Wilma agreed to stay on for a drink she admitted it. Then she wanted to talk about the medical machine the Dead Men had used to keep Wan in shape, all the time he was growing up, and before she left we had set up a million-dollar research and development company-with Wilma as president-to see what could be done with it, and that’s how easy it was. That’s how easy it all is, when everything’s going your way.
Or almost everything. There was still that sort of uneasy feeling when I thought about the Heechee (if it was the Heechee) at that place at the middle of the Galaxy (if that’s where they were). That is very unsettling, you know. If Albert had suggested that the Heechee were going to come out breathing fire and destruction (or just come out at all) within the next year, why, sure, I could have worried the hell out of that. If he’d said ten years or even a hundred I could have worked up pensiveness as a minimum, and probably full-scale fright. But when you come to astronomical times-well, hell! How easy is it to worry about something that might not happen for another billion years?
And yet the notion just would not go away.
It made me fidgety through dinner, after Wilma left, and when I brought in the coffee Essie was curled in front of the fireplace, very trim in her stretch pants, brushing her long hair, and she looked up at me and said, “Will probably not happen, you know, Robin.”
“How can you be so sure? There are fifteen thousand Heechee targets programmed into those ships. We’ve checked out, what? Fewer than a hundred and fifty of them, and one of those was Heechee Heaven. Law of averages says there are a hundred others like that somewhere, and who’s to say one of them isn’t racing in to tell the Heechee what we’re doing right now?”
“Dear Robin,” she said, turning to rub her nose against my knee in a friendly way, “drink your coffee. You know nothing about statistical mathematics and, anyway, who’s to say they would mean to do us harm?”
“They wouldn’t have to mean to! I know what would happen, for God’s sake. It’s obvious. It’s what happened to the Tahitians, the Tasmanians, the Eskimos, the American Indians-it’s what has always happened, all through history. A people that comes up against a superior culture is destroyed. Nobody means it. They just can’t survive!”
“Always, Robin?”
“Oh, come on!”
“No, mean it,” she insisted. “Counterexample: What happened when Romans discovered Gauls?”
