First to last, Orbis McClune was in Wan's employ for, as nearly as he could calculate, somewhere between two and two thousand eternities. He didn't have many opportunities to brood about it. When he was turned off he was off. Completely. The length of such periods could have been microseconds or centuries—in the time of the real world outside—but to Orbis they were no time at all. It was the "waking" times that were both tedious and exhausting. Exhausting because most of them were sessions of intensive questioning, sometimes by that woman or that man, sometimes by some other of Wan's flunkies. Tedious because they went over and over the same ground. Did he really hate the Heechee? Did he hate them a lot? Would he be willing to do them some serious harm, even if that meant that some human beings should get harmed at the same time?
Always the same questions, or minor variations on them. Always the same answers from Orbis, too. Which meant, he thought, one of two possible things: either he was being vetted for some supremely important task. Or they were all loons.
He didn't have much time to think such thoughts, much less to speculate on what was going on. When he did have a moment—when, for instance, his interrogator paused in the questioning to confer with her screen—it was other thoughts that first crossed his mind. They were brief flashes of memory, fleeting, sometimes almost painful. Memories of the humans he had shared his last days with, up on the hills that bordered Waveland. Of the members of his old Rantoul congregation, a few of whom he hadn't really disliked very much. Of his childhood, some of which had been reasonably pleasant. Of his wife.
Of his wife, deceased and machine-stored and thus finally lost to him forever. Or at least lost for what had seemed forever to Orbis McClune, in those days before he had become machine-stored himself.
The next time Orbis awoke it was to a place that resembled a conference room, a fumed-oak table that was long enough for a score of people though only half that were seated at it.
One was Wan himself, relaxed and almost calm, elbows on the table and chin in his hands as he studied a data screen without looking at Orbis. The other person Orbis recognized was Phrygia Todd; the others were equally elderly, shabby, unprepossessing. (Not unlike Orbis himself, he thought.) They sat in uneasy silence while Roz Borraly pointed at things on the screen and whispered in Wan's ear.
Finally Wan peevishly pushed her aside. He looked around the table, making eye contact with each person, one by one. He didn't speak until he had completed the circle. Then he gave them all a great, heartwarming smile and said, "Welcome to you all! From now on you aren't my purchased employees anymore. Now you're gonna be my trusted allies, companions in my struggle against the damned dirty Heechee and their damned dirty Gateway accomplices. We're all in this together, and we'll all win!"
He went on from there, painting rosy pictures of the great rewards they would earn for helping in his crusade for justice, but Orbis had stopped listening. He didn't need to hear more. He knew it all ahead of time, had known what was coming ever since the moment that he saw that great, practiced-before-the-mirror smile that he himself had smiled at so many loathed human beings so many times before.
Most of Wan's oratory was denunciation of the Heechee. He hated them, Wan said. He blamed them for their vile gift of spaceflight, and blamed them for rotting the fiber of human spirit by their horrid Food Factories that ended hunger for all, even the unworthy. He blamed them, in short, for everything that was wrong with the age they lived in, of which, in both his view and Orbis's, there was plenty.
Nearly every word Wan spoke was one Orbis could have said himself. But how to ignore the fact that the man was obviously crazy? Now he was saying, "The individuals who make up my property are very dear to me. They took care of me when I was little, so I want to care for them now. Anyway, they're mine and I want them back."
Orbis stared at him. That really was Wan's stolen treasure? Some kind of creatures from the remote past, before God's gift of salvation? Orbis thought it extremely unlikely that they possessed souls, nearly certain that these might-be ancestors were not included in the general amnesty that followed Calvary.
Which meant that they were not really worth bothering about.
Orbis was shocked. It was one thing to hate the Heechee because they had profaned God's human world. It was another to work condign vengeance on them because they had kidnapped a handful of house pets.
As Wan, sweating and triumphant, concluded his lesson and turned back to his data screen, Orbis decided, he had been right in the first place. The man was a loon.
Even the looniest loco may ultimately wend toward a point. Wan finally reached his. "So here's where we come right down to it. You people aren't the only ones I've been recruiting, all this time. No. There were others, many, many others, but none that were worth more than being, like, house servants. You were the ones with the fire!" Orbis stole a look at the others. They did not seem afire to him. "Anyway, here are your assignments. Horace Packer!" A white-haired little man, looking as though he had long been homeless, raised one finger. "Sindi Gas—Gas—What is it, Sindi?"
A dark-skinned woman with a scarf over her head said, "Gaslakhpard. It's a perfectly normal name."
Wan shrugged. "If you say so. When we land you and Horace will supervise freeing of the Old Ones, along with—what is it, Raffy something or other? You Arab fellow?"
A small, muscular, Middle Eastern-looking man stood up. "I am Egyptian, not Arab. My name is Raafat Gerges."
"Whatever. You guys get the Old Ones onto the ship, right? You might have to knock them around a little bit, but that's all right. They're tough." The people at the foot of the table all responded with some sort of nod or hand movement, and then the only ones left were Orbis himself and the woman with the Dutch-girl braids.
On them Wan now turned one of those effulgent and meaningless smiles. "Now we come to our star players, the ones who are going to make sure nobody tries to interfere with saving the Old Ones. See," he said, so pleased with himself that he was almost doing a little dance, "we got them where they can't do a thing to stop us. If they try, well—" He paused to glance at Roz Borraly. "Is he on time?" he demanded.
"He's just waiting in orbit," she reported. "Here, I'll put it on the screen." In a moment the screen was displaying a rather unattractive ice-blue planet, circled by a largish moon. They all watched in silence for a moment. "It ought to be happening right about now," said Borraly, beginning to sound worried. "Any minute. Pretty soon.... Wow! There it is!"
On the screen that big moon had suddenly swelled, bloated, exploded in all directions. It was no longer a solid object, just an expanding sphere of particles.
Wan was grinning. "We did that," he bragged. "You wouldn't believe how much trouble it was to find the gadgets that did it, but it looks like they work. We blew that sucker up just to teach them a lesson because if anybody gives us any trouble when we do the rescue, why, we'll just blow up a whole big star and kill a few gazillion of them off."
He gave them a real grin this time, as he waited for applause. After a moment, Roz Borraly leading, he got some and returned to his subject. "You, Phrygia Todd! You're going to pilot this ship. You've been trained, right? You think you can do it?"
The woman with the braids shrugged. "Guess so."
Wan scowled at her. "You better more than just guess. So you, Phrygia, after we rescue the Old Ones you pilot us to where Orbis can take his little torpedo to what they call, let me see. Planetless Very Large White Very Hot Star. That's the one we're going to blow up—I mean threaten to." He paused for a moment, then went on. "All right. Then you take us to where we're going that they'll never find us, Phrygia. Then, Orbis, you orbit that star, close up, in your little ship, and you wait for orders from me. If I order it, zap, you blow the sucker up." He took a moment to applaud himself vigorously, his example followed at once by Roz Borraly and, a little more slowly and a lot less vigorously, by most of the others. Any questions?"