Pohl, Frederik - Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

“‘Caught’?”

“Pregnant,” she explained. “Winning the goddam reproductive race. Knocked up. Oh, Wan,” she said, nuzzling the top of his head, “you just don’t know where it’s all at. I bet you and I are going to conjugate the hell out of each other, some time or other, and maybe we’ll even get married, or something, and we’ll just win that old reproductive race a whole bunch. But right now you’re just a snotty-nosed kid, and so am I. You don’t want to reproduce. You just want to make love.”

“Well, that is true, yes, but Tiny Jim-“

“Will you shut up about Tiny Jim?” She stood up and regarded him for a moment, and said affectionately, “Tell you what. I’m going back to the Dead Men’s room. Why don’t you go read a book for a while to cool off?”

“You are silly!” he scolded. “I have no book here, or reader.”

“Oh, for the Lord’s sake! Then go somewhere and whack off until you feel better.”

Wan looked up at her, then down at his freshly laundered kilt. No bulge was visible, but there was a pale, spreading spot of damp. He grinned. “I guess I don’t need to any more,” he said.

By the time they got back, Paul and Lurvy were no longer cozily nestling each other, but Janine could detect that they were more at peace than usual. What Lurvy could detect about Wan and Janine was less tangible. She looked at them thoughtfully, considered asking what they had been up to, decided against it. Paul was, in any event, more interested in what they had just discovered. He said, “Hey, kids, listen to this.” He dialed Henrietta’s number, waited until her weepy voice said a tentative hello and then asked: “Who are you?”

The voice strengthened. “I am a computer analog,” it said firmly. “When I was alive I was Mrs. Arnold Meacham of mission Orbit Seventy-four, Day Nineteen. I have a bachelor of science and master’s from Tulane and the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and my special discipline is astrophysics. After twenty-two days we docked at an artifact and were subsequently captured by its occupants. At the time of my death I was thirty-eight years old, two years younger than-“ the voice hesitated, “than Doris Filgren, our pilot, who-“ it hesitated again, “who-who my husband seemed to-who had an affair with-who-“ The voice was sobbing now, and Paul turned it off.

“Well, it doesn’t last,” he said, “but there it is. Poor dumb old Vera has sorted out some kind of a connection with reality for her. And not just for her. Do you want to know your mother’s name, Wan?”

The boy was staring at him, pop-eyed. “My mother’s name?” he shrilled.

“Or anybody else’s. Tiny Jim, for instance. He was actually an airbody pilot from Venus who got to Gateway, and then here. His name is James Cornwell. Willard was an English teacher. He embezzled money from the students’ fund to pay his way to Gateway-didn’t get much out of it, of course. His first flight brought him here. The downlink computers wrote an interrogation program for Vera, and she’s been working at it all along, and-what’s the matter, Wan?”

The boy licked his lips. “My mother’s name?” he repeated.

“Oh. Sorry,” Paul apologized, reminded to be kind. It had not occurred to him that Wan’s emotions would be involved. “Her name was Elfega Zamorra. But she doesn’t seem to be one of the Dead Men, Wan. I don’t know why. And your father-well, that’s a funny thing. Your real father was dead before she came here. The man you talk about must have been somebody else, but I don’t know who. Any idea why that is?” Wan shrugged. “I mean, why your mother or, I guess you’d call him, your step-father doesn’t seem to be stored?” Wan spread his hands.

Lurvy moved closer to him. The poor kid! Responding to his distress, she put her arm around him and said, “I guess this is a shock to you, Wan. I’m sure we’ll find out a lot more.” She gestured at the mare’s nest of recorders, encoders and processors that littered the once bare room. “Everything we find out gets transmitted back to Earth,” she said. He looked up at her politely, but not entirely comprehendingly, as she tired to explain the vast complex of information-handling machinery on Earth, and how it systematically analyzed, compared, collated, and interpreted every scrap from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory-not to mention every other bit of data, wherever derived. Until Janine intervened.

“Oh, leave him alone. He understands enough,” she said wisely. “Just let him live with it for a while.” She rummaged through the case of rations for one of the slate-green packages, and then said casually, “By the way. Why is that thing beeping at us?”

Paul listened, then sprang to his clutter of gadgets. The monitor slaved to their portable cameras was emitting a faint Queep. Queep. Queep. He spun it around so they could all see, swearing to himself.

It was the camera they had left by the berryfruit bush, set patiently to record the unchanging scene and to sound an alarm whenever it detected movement.

It had. There was a face scowling out at them.

Lurvy felt a thrill of terror. “Heechee,” she breathed.

But if so, the face showed no evidence of concealing a mind that could colonize a galaxy. It seemed to be down on all fours, peering worriedly at the camera, and behind it were four or five others like it. The face had no chin. The brow slanted down from a fuzzy scalp; there was more hair on the face than on the head. If the skull had had an occipital ridge, it would have looked like a gorilla. Taken all in all, it was not far from the shipboard computer’s reconstruction of Wan’s description, but on a cruder, more animal design. Yet they were not animals. As the face moved to one side Lurvy saw that the others, clustered around the berryfruit bush, wore what no animal had ever spontaneously worn. They were clothed. There were even evidences of fashion in what they wore, patches of color sewn to their tunics, what looked like tattoos on exposed skin, even a string of sharp-edged beads around the neck of one of the males. “I suppose,” Lurvy said shakily, “that even the Heechee might degenerate in time. And they’ve had lots of time.”

The view in the camera spun dizzily. “Damn him,” Paul snapped. “He’s not so degenerate he doesn’t notice the camera. He’s picked the damn thing up. Wan! Do you suppose they know we’re here?”

The boy shrugged disinterestedly. “Of course they do. They always have, you know. They simply do not care.”

Lurvy’s heart caught. “What do you mean, Wan? How do you know they won’t come after us?”

The view in the camera steadied; the Old One who had picked it up was handing it to another. Wan glanced at it and said, “I have told you, they almost never come into this part of the blue. Or ever, into the red; and there is no reason to go into the green. Nothing works there, not even the food chutes or the readers. Almost always, they stay in the gold. Unless they have eaten all the berryfruit there, and want more.”

There was a mewling cry from the sound system of the monitor, and the view whirled again. It stopped momentarily on one of the female Old Ones, sucking a finger; then she reached out balefully for the camera. It spun and then went blank. “Paul! What did they do?” Lurvy demanded.

“Broke it, I suppose,” he said, failing to get the picture back after manipulating the controls. “Question is, what do we do? Haven’t we got enough here? Shouldn’t we think about going back?”

And think about it Lurvy did. They all did. But however carefully they questioned Wan, the boy stubbornly insisted there was nothing to fear. The Old Ones had never troubled him in the corridors walled with red skeins of light. He had never seen them in the green-though, to be sure, he seldom went there himself. Rarely in the blue. And, yes, of course they knew there were people here-the Dead Men assured him the Old Ones had machines that listened, and sometimes watched, everywhere-when they were not broken, of course. They simply did not care very much. “If we don’t go into the gold they will not trouble us,” he said positively. “Except, of course, if they come out.”