By then Estrella was clinging to Stan's hand even more tightly than he was holding hers. "Salt?" she implored. "What's going on?"
Salt didn't answer. She was shrieking questions they couldn't understand at Achiever, who didn't answer because he was frantically working to try to restore pictures to the lookplates. When he had failed he stared at them for a moment, then made a harsh moaning noise. "Is a great peril," he said hollowly. "Can be little or no doubt."
Stan squeezed Estrella's hand even harder. "Then you think all this is real?"
"I am indeed so thinking," Achiever said gloomily. "What am I also thinking, you wish to know? I am also thinking that you and I and ship mentioned in threat are all also part of it."
18
The Threat
I
Being chef to thousands, does take time. Some of my special meal orders had been backing up while I was visiting with Thermocline, so my first job was getting out several hundred of them. There was a ceviche of Moreton Bay bugtails for an old lady nostalgic for Australia, some dried cod with leeks and milk for a couple of former Italians, and I hadn't filled Thermocline's order, either. I got busy on them all.
Over the next few seconds or so these orders of my clients kept me busy. I wasn't simply "kept" busy, either, because the demands of the Core's rapidly increasing populations of human immigrants, along with the much smaller but very discerning number of Heechee sophisticates, grew almost exponentially.
That, of course, didn't mean that I had forgotten what Thermocline had told me. I can't pretend that I was actually preparing threat estimates and making contingency plans. I wish I could, but in fact I was giving the consideration of Thermocline's information no more than ten percent of my capacity.
All the same, it was not a total surprise when a queer green flash appeared on all of my screens at once, along with the beginnings of a deep roaring sound.
I knew what that sound was. It was the beginning of what would have-
been a shrill, high-pitched squeal for the organics, downshifted for machine-stored persons to a basso-profundo rumble. It was, in fact, the Heechee alarm system doing its work.
There is no point in acting before you know what action is required. I went on with my work, but I took the precaution of turning a lot of the new ethnic requests over to my sous-chefs. African, for instance. There had been few Africans on the Wheel, and most of them preferred French cuisine or American hamburgers. Now we were asked for peanut lamb stew and the codfish in pureed tomato they called thu djen, along with the dessert thiaky and ginger root juice as a beverage. I had never made any of those meals before, but naturally the recipes were in my datastore. The subroutines could handle that, and if any of the fish dishes arrived filleted in spite of the fact that Africans preferred their fish on the bone, and if all the rice grains hadn't been properly broken up before cooking, they would simply have to live with it.
The opening siren of the Heechee warning had just descended to the neighborhood of middle C—for the organics, that is; for us now a sub-audible thump-thump-thump—when abruptly all of my screens at once began showing the same picture. It was what I took to be a satellite of some kind—there was a big gas giant in the background. I had just time to wonder why this quite ordinary scene was being displayed when suddenly it changed. The satellite wasn't a satellite anymore. It was a cloud, rapidly expanding. Why or how I could not have said, but it was clearly the total disruption of that chunk of featureless rock.
So I was not surprised when my private communicator called to me in Thermocline's voice. "Please join with me as soon as possible for a conference. Serious events have occurred."
II
Thermocline had changed his surround quite a lot since I had seen it last. Most of the half-dozen or so assorted chairs and perches that now furnished it were already occupied. There was Thermocline himself, looking completely unflustered although the thump-thump was still going on. Next to him was a female Heechee I had never seen before, then a human male (of course, I'm talking about simulations in every case; no organics were present.) I hadn't met the human male, either, but I knew who he was. His name was Sigfrid von Shrink, and he was a subset of the Robinette Broadhead shipmind who was known as Albert Einstein. Next to von Shrink was Gelle-Klara Moynlin's shipmind, Hypatia of Alexandria. Then, as I watched, an older human woman unknown to me popped into existence and took a seat, giving a nod to Hypatia.
She was evidently the last one expected, because then Thermocline said, "I thank you all for coming. I presume that all of you know who Wan Enrique Santos-Smith is, and also that you have all heard the accelerated version of his organic-time communication—" as we certainly had, and in fact were still hearing, at low volume, the organic-time drone as a background sound in Thermocline's surround. "He had transmitted it to the Stored Minds, in electronic-time mode, which is what was forwarded to you."
His lookplates were still cycling their alarm colors while the continuing thud-thud of the organic-time message had dropped still more in frequency. Just then the nearest of the screens erased its alarm colors. As the murky colors on the plate paled, a human face looked out at us.
I had seen Wan only once, long ago, but there was no doubt that the face on the screen was his. Improvements had been made, however. Now that he was no longer organic his skin was less sallow, his hair less wild. But the sneer was the same.
As Wan was finishing his threats, Hypatia was on her feet. "Thermocline! What the hell is he talking about? Do you guys have some kind of weapon you didn't tell us about?"
I will say for Thermocline that he kept his temper. He let Hypatia go on for quite a while, and he just sat there and took it. The thing that struck me as curious, though, was that Hypatia was the only person in the room reacting so violently. I had expected Sigfrid to chime in, but he didn't move and the look on his face was not so much angry as mournful.
Which told me that the news about the weapon hadn't surprised him at all. I tucked that fact away in my datastore, in case I ever needed to be reminded that Sigfrid von Shrink didn't usually put all his cards on the table.
Either Hypatia wore herself out, at last, or some sign from Sigfrid discouraged her from going on. Then Sigfrid was placatory. "Perhaps it would be better if we didn't try to assign blame at this time," he suggested. "But let me clarify a point, Thermocline. Am I correct in believing that you and the Stored Minds regard this as a serious threat?"
Thermocline looked judicious. "We do," he said.
"The word Wan used was 'explode.' He didn't simply mean to fire some sort of bomb at the star, did he?"
"Of course not. What the device does is nullify gravity. With no gravitational attraction to hold it together, the star will fly apart.... Hypatia?"
She was leaning forward, ready to speak again though not, this time, with reproachful invective. "I asked Dr. Ibarruru here just to help us understand things like this; she's an astronomer and astrophysicist. Dr. Ibarruru? Can you tell us if such a thing could happen?"
The striking elderly woman did not hesitate. "Given a device such as Thermocline describes, certainly. The star will expand at a major fraction of the speed of light. In a very short time it will become a cloud of gas."
Thermocline looked disgruntled. "This human person may well have studied astronomy, but what can she tell us about matters here in the Core?"
Hypatia gave him a hostile smirk. "Everything, Thermocline. Shortly after coming here she became machine-stored, and has been studying the Core stars ever since. Also—you probably should be informed of this— she is an old friend of Klara's. They worked together in studying a certain supernova, and Klara has complete confidence in her." She nodded as though that settled the matter, and perhaps it did.