Thor always was better, or at least faster, informed than I—as he had to be, since he controlled the only weaponry we possess that might have any hope of dealing with a Kugels' act of aggression, if one had ever occurred. Which we all most devoutly hoped would never happen, since that hope was pretty small and the occasional rumor that we had a more potent one hidden away somewhere never seemed to get real.
"Yes," I said, "but what I don't know is why the Board is so interested in this rather dull planet."
I had found him in a good mood. He said thoughtfully, "Oh, why not let you in on it? They aren't. There's a report of some unauthorized activity there that the authorities want details on, but nothing that's worth sending a spacecraft. Especially with a crew like yours. Really, the whole thing is an exercise in cooperating on a project, any project, with the Kugels, that's all. Hoping maybe for bigger things at some later time."
"And why that particular planet?"
"For that," he said, "you would have to ask the Kugels. They picked it. You know they have spy-clusters all over."
It wasn't phrased as a question, since I certainly did know that, so I didn't answer it. He went on, "I can only conjecture that one of their spies reported something that interested them—maybe that same activity I was talking about. And listen, Marc, isn't that your enact order coming in now?"
It was. I was ordered onto the trip to Arabella, whether pointless or nor, and Harry and I went off to join our Kugel shipmates.
III
The ship the Authority had given us was a rubbishy old One, the smallest of the classes of ships the Heechee had left on Gateway.
Its size was not a problem for us. If it had just been Harry and me on board we wouldn't have needed even that much space; our programs could have been carried in a single Heechee fan-book, no significant cargo volume required. That didn't work for the Kugel components that were to be our shipmates, though.
When the entire enormous mass of the Kugels was in one place—that is, in that ultimately dense oddball kind of a black hole we called the Kugelblitz—their common gravitational attraction easily held them together. The tiny fraction of the whole who came with us were far bigger than the little spy clusters they sent out all over the galaxy to keep tabs on what was going on, but still nowhere near massive enough for gravity to matter. To keep them from flying off in all directions they had to have a kind of magnetic containment, which meant a physical containment generator, which meant some actual material mass and volume to hold it.
So when the two of us "boarded" the spaceship we could see that changes had been made in the old Heechee design. In the main hold the controls had been supplied with a servomodule, so that immaterial beings like Harry and myself could override the thing's flight program and fly it ourselves if we chose to. The big change, however, was in the lander. Nearly every cubic centimeter of it was filled with the Kugels' containment shell, a complicated metal arrangement shaped like that 3-D representation of a four-dimensional cube that is called a tesseract. What that looks like is a gleaming cube half a meter across with six other identical cubes projecting out from its six faces.
As soon as we were aboard I checked the tesseract's superficial traits. There wasn't much to check. Surface temperature, in equilibrium with the ambient air; albedo, 0.8; radiation emission, negligible. I observed a very faint and high-pitched audible hum, around 300 hertz, but it was unmodulated: no information there. "Well?" Harry, who isn't very good with solid matter, asked anxiously. "Are you getting anything?"
I shook my simulated head. "If you mean have I contacted the Kugels, no."
He said philosophically, "Maybe we wouldn't like them if we did." I didn't answer that. I was thinking about what might happen if we contacted them inadvertently, perhaps through some containment failure, and all that energy came blasting out at us—or, that is, at our own physical data stores. It wasn't a productive thought, since there was nothing I could do to avert it.
Philosophy lasts just so long for I tarry. He was getting restive. "Are we about ready to take off? Or are we going to sit here all day?"
There was only one answer to that. I activated the launch program, set the course and then began to consider just what to do next.
The trouble was that the Wheel was at one edge of the Galaxy, while Arabella circled a G-2 star in the Perseus Arm nearly seventy thousand light-years away. I calculated that, with the ultraspeed drive that had just been installed, it would be about a five-day flight—in our terms, an interminably long one, and with very little to occupy us for that time.
Harry, thinking along the same lines, came up with a suggestion. "What do you say we play a little chess, Markie?" he asked.
I shook my head. "I've got a better idea. Now would be a good time for you to tell me what instructions the Authority gave you for when we get to Arabella."
He blinked at me. "Instructions?"
"Yes. Instructions. To tell you what to do."
He shrugged. "They didn't give me any instructions, Markie. They just said to go there. We're going there, right? That's all there is to it."
That wasn't the best news I had ever had. I'd been hoping that the Authority had had more specific information than Thor Hammerhurler, but if they did they weren't sharing it. Harry patted my simulated shoulder sympathetically.
"They must know what they're doing," he said, in reassuring mode. "Anyway, I can show you where I hung out while I was marooned there. That'll be interesting, won't it?"
I didn't answer that. I am not programmed to be angry, or even to feel annoyance, except as a spur to correct whatever it is in my work that is annoying me. I was pretty close to that point, however.
Harry watched my face for a bit, waiting for me to come up with some constructive remark. When I didn't he lost patience. "You know what, Markie?" he asked. "I'm getting kind of hungry. Any chance of whipping me up some ham and eggs, maybe with some rye toast and one of those champagne and orange juice things to wash it down?"
I came to a decision. "That sounds like a good idea. You can have it for breakfast," I said.
He gave me one of those typical Harry-like looks of bafflement. "Breakfast?"
"Yes, breakfast. By which I mean," I said, "your first meal on arising. I'm going to stand down until we got there. You're welcome to join me if you like."
Well, he didn't like that idea, or at least didn't like it very much, until he understood that I wasn't about to spend all our interminable transit time cooking complex simulated meals for him or playing endless board games that I would always win. He would be left to rely on his own resources, which was quite unsatisfactory to him, since he didn't really have any. So Harry grumbled but did not resist as I set the timers to wake us up when we arrived at Arabella.
Then I put us both in standby.
Standby isn't much like sleep—that is, as far as I know what sleep is like. In standby we don't doze or dream. At one moment we are fully conscious, at the next we're fully conscious again, but time has passed. It doesn't matter how much time. It can be half a millisecond or a thousand years.
So it's snap, off, and snap, back on again, and that's all there is to it. As soon as I was out of standby I turned at once to the timers and instruments. So at first I didn't know what Harry meant when he said in alarm, "And who the hell are you?"
What had startled him was that there was a stranger in our eigenspace.
The stranger was bipedal. He possessed arms and a head with eyes and a face at the top of his shoulders, but he didn't look very human. He didn't look like a Heechee, either. He looked like a sort of golem constructed by somebody who had heard of both Heechee and human beings but hadn't ever actually seen any and didn't know they were separate species. The creature had a flattened torso and a great tangle of hair on his head, combining what I consider pretty much the least attractive traits of both organic types, and he was speaking to us. He said, in a purry, metallic kind of voice, "We observe that we have arrived at the locus identified as Arabella. We also observe that descent procedures have been initiated according to your flight plan."