“Lie still! Empty your mind!” it ordered, but then it relented for just one second. “It is only a Class Two,” it said. “An unscheduled ship is approaching-now take your position!”
And so they did, all of them, even the tiies. But Sneezy had trouble emptying his mind, because there was a question. Yes, of course, when a ship came in there was always a Class Two Drill, that was not very frightening . . . but never before in his experience bad a ship come in unscheduled.
And this ship was from JAWS.
By the time the Drill was over and Sneezy was back in his parents’ home, the unscheduled ship was secured and silent, but it was still there. And the rumors had flown like fire.
Bremsstrahlung confirmed them. “Yes, Sternutator,” he said with worry, “you must leave. All children must. The Wheel is being evacuated of everyone not an adult, because we can’t risk a child radiating at the wrong time.”
“I am second in my class in satori, Father!”
“Of course you are! But the Joint Assassin Watch has ordered that you must go with the others. Please, my son. There is nothing we can do about it.”
“They’ll take very good care of you,” Femtowave put in, but her voice was even hoarser with worry than his father’s.
“But where will I go?” Sneezy begged.
His parents looked to each other. “To a good place,” his mother said at last. “We don’t know where, yet. You children all come from different places, and I don’t think they will get all of you to your proper homes at once. But truly, Sterny, you will be taken care of. And it is only for a while, until this false alarm is cleared up. You will be back with us soon.”
“I hope that is true,” said his father.
And there was no time, no time for any last visits to the zoo or the coconut grove or anywhere, just one short session at the schoolhall so that each could pick up possessions and say good-bye to the school-thing.
The schoolthing couldn’t keep order that day. It didn’t try. It only dealt with each student separately, bidding a farewell, making sure the lockers were emptied, while all the other children chattered excitedly in anticipation and fear. None of them knew where they were going yet. Harold, of course, was praying for his own home.
Sneezy listened wistfully. He wondered if he envied Harold. Was Peggys Planet really the way Harold pictured it? Summer all the time? and no school? and millions of hectares of wild fruits and berries to pick any time, any day?
“But it’s a long way,” Harold was saying. “I bet I’ll have to change ships. That means I’ll be a month getting home.”
“It would take me nearly three months,” Sneezy said wistfully.
“Oh, but that’s because of your stupid Schwarzschild barrier,” Harold explained, quite unnecessarily to a boy who had already penetrated it once. “You don’t think you’re going to go there, do you, Dopey? Good heavens, they’re not going to run a whole ship for a couple of Heechee kids. That would be just inefficient. They wouldn’t do that!”
In that, Harold was right. There were not that many children on the Wheel, and so the great Earth-built ship that received them was going to only one place. To Earth.
Harold was crushed. Oniko was fearful. Sneezy was-well, Sneezy did not know from one moment to the next what he was, because the excitement and the pangs of leaving his parents and the nagging worry about what this sudden and unprecedented move meant all fought for dominance in his mind. The result was only confusion.
They had less than twelve hours to board. That was a good thing. The less time for the excitement to melt away and the fears and miseries to grow, the better.
At last they trooped one by one into the great interstellar vehicle as soon as the hundred new Watchers and their gear had been taken off. Oniko’s parents were there, hugging their daughter without words. So were Mr. and Mrs. Wroczek, and Sneezy politely looked away as Harold began to cry at the parting.
“Good-bye, Father. Good-bye, Mother,” said Sneezy.
“Good-bye, dear Sternutator,” said his father, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice. Sneezy’s mother didn’t even try.
“It will be a nice place, Sterny, dear,” she promised, hugging him. “We won’t be able to hear from you normally, because they’ve blacked out transmissions to the Wheel-but—oh, Sterny!” She hugged him hard. Heechee can’t cry, but there is nothing in their physiology or minds that keeps them from feeling loss as keenly as any human.
Sneezy turned away.
It was not a Heechee custom to kiss on parting, but as Sneezy entered the ship he wished that, in this case, an exception had been made.
3
ALBERT SPEAKS
I’m Albert Einstein, or at least Robinette Broadhead calls me that, and I think I should clarify some matters.
With all his cutesy false starts, Robin has still failed to convey a good deal of data which I believe to be essential. Among others, who the Foe were. I will help out. That’s what I do; I help Robinette Broadhead.
I should explain my own situation.
To begin with, I’m not the “real” Albert Einstein. He’s dead. He died quite a good many years before it was possible, at least for human beings, to store a person as a database after the meat part wore out. As a result, we don’t even have a real copy of that Albert Einstein around.
I am at most a rough approximation of what he might have been if he had been me.
What I really am is something quite different from any sort of reconstruction of a human being. Basically I am a simple data-retrieval system, dressed up with some fancy touches for pretty’s sake. (The way people used to conceal a bedside communications phone inside a teddy bear.) In order to make me more user-friendly, my user, Robinette, requested that I should look like and act like a person. So my programmer gave him me. She was glad to do it. She liked humoring Robinette, since she was not only his programmer but his wife, S. Ya. LavorovnaBroadhead.
So the way I look and act is really only a whim of Robin’s.
I think it is fair to say that Robin is a man of many whims, and many moods, too. I’m not disparaging him. He can’t help it. Robin started out organic.
For that reason, he suffered the handicaps of all meat beings. His intelligence was only what could be produced by sloppy biochemical means. His mind was not precise, and certainly not mathematical. It was the product of a meat brain, bathed in constant floods of hormones, biased by sensory inputs like pain and pleasure, and quite capable of screwing itself up over programming elements beyond my personal experience, like “doubt” and “guilt” and “jealousy” and “fear.” Imagine living like that! Actually, it’s a wonder to me that he functions as well as he does. I don’t see how I could, myself. But then I can’t say I really understand these things, since I have never felt them, except in an analog sense.
That doesn’t mean I can’t deal with them. Essie Broadhead’s programs can do damn near anything. “Understanding” is quite unnecessary-you don’t have to understand how a spacecraft works to get into it and push the buttons. I can project how given stimuli will affect Robin’s behavior at least as well as he can, and I don’t have to “understand” to do it.
After all, I don’t understand the square root of minus one, either, but that doesn’t keep me from finding useful ways of employing it in equations. It works. e to the i times pi power equals—1. It does not in the least matter that all the quantities involved are irrational, transcendental, imaginary, or negative.
It doesn’t matter that Robin himself is all these things, either. He is. All of them. Especially he is negative a good part of the time, in ways that keep him from being that other irrational, not to say transcendental, state, “happy.”