Pohl, Frederik - Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

Lurvy followed her example, and then stopped at a strange sound from her sister. It was almost a laugh! “What’s so funny?” she snapped.

Janine pulled a sweater over her head before she answered. It was too big, but it was warm. “I was just thinking about the orders we got,” she said. “To get Heechee tissue samples, you know? Well, the way it worked out-they got ours instead. All of them.”

8 Schwarze Peter

When the shipboard computer’s mail bell rang, Payter woke quickly and completely. It was an advantage of age that one slept shallowly and woke at once. There were not many advantages. He got up, rinsed his mouth, urinated into the sanitary, washed his hands, and took two food packets with him to the terminal. “Display the mail now,” he ordered, munching on something that tasted like sour rye bread but was meant to be a sweet roll.

When he saw what the mail was, his good mood passed. Most of it was interminable mission orders. Six letters for Janine, one each for Paul and Dorema, and for himself only a petition addressed to Schwarze Peter and signed by eight hundred and thirty school-children of Dortmund, begging him to return and become their Burgermeister. “Dumb head!” he scolded the computer. “Why do you wake me for this trash?” Vera did not answer, because he did not give her time to identify him and rummage through her slow magnetic bubbles to locate his name.

Long before then, he was complaining, “Also this food is not fit for pigs! Attend to it at once!”

Poor Vera erased the attempt to interpret his first question and patiently attended to the second. “The recycling system is below optimal mass levels,” she said,”. . . Mr. Herter. In addition, my processing routines have been subject to overload for some time. Many programs have been deferred.”

“Do not defer the food question any more,” he snarled, “or you will kill me, and there’s an end to it.” He gloomily commanded display of the mission orders while he forced himself to chew the remainder of his breakfast. The orders rolled for ten solid minutes. What marvelous ideas they had for him, back on Earth! And if only there were a hundred of him, perhaps they could do one one-hundredth of the tasks proposed. He allowed the end of it to run unwatched, while he carefully shaved his pink old face and brushed his sparse hair. And why was the recycling system depleted, so that it could not function properly? Because his daughters and their consorts had removed themselves and thus their useful by-products, as well as all the water Wan had stolen from the system. Stolen! Yes, there was no other word for it. Also they had taken the mobile bio-assay unit, so that there was only the sampler in the sanitary to monitor his health, and what could that tell of fever or arrhythmic heart, if he should have either? Also they had taken all but one of the cameras, so that he must carry that one with him wherever he went. Also they had taken-They had taken themselves, and Schwarze Peter, for the first time in his life, was wholly alone.

He was not only alone, he was powerless to change it. Family came back, they would do so in their own good time and not before. Until then he was a reserve unit, a pillbox soldier, a standby program. He was given excessive tasks to do, but the real center of action was somewhere else.

In his long life Payter had taught himself to be patient, but he had never taught himself to enjoy it. It was maddening to be forced to wait! To wait fifty days for an answer from Earth to his perfectly reasonable proposals and questions. To wait almost as long for his family and that hooligan boy to get to where they were going (if they ever did) and report to him (if they should happen to choose to). Waiting was not so bad if one had enough of a life left to wait in. But how much, realistically, had he? Suppose he had a stroke. Suppose he developed a cancer. Suppose any part of the complicated interactions that kept, his heart beating and his blood flowing and his bowels moving and his brain thinking broke down in any place. What then?

And some day they surely would, because Payter was old. He had lied about his age so many times that he was no longer sure of what it was. Not even his children knew; the stories he told about his grandfather’s youth were really about his own. Age in itself did not matter. Full Medical could deal with anything, repair or replace, as long as it was not the brain itself that was damaged-and Payter’s brain was in the best of shape, because had it not schemed and contrived to get him here?

But “here” there was no Full Medical, and age began to matter a great deal.

He was no longer a boy! But once he had been, and even then he had known that somehow, some day, he would possess exactly what he owned now: the key to heart’s desire. Burgermeister of Dortmund? That was nothing! Skinny young Peter, shortest and youngest in his unit of the Hitler Youth but their leader all the same, had promised himself he would have much more. He had even known that it would turn out to be something like this, some grand futuristic pattern would emerge, and he alone would be able to find the handle to wield it, like a weapon, like an axe, like a scythe, to punish or reap or remake the world. Well, here it was! And what was he doing with it? He was waiting. It had not been like that, in the boyhood stories by Juve and Gail and Dominik and the Frenchman, Verne. The people in them did not waste themselves so spinelessly.

But what, after all, was one to do?

So while he waited for that question to answer itself, he kept up his daily rounds. He ate four light meals a day, every other one of CHON-food, methodically dictating to Vera his impressions of taste and consistency. He ordered Vera to design a new mobile bio-assay out of what odds and ends of sensor instrumentation could be spared, and worked at building it as she found time to complete parts of the design. He worked out ten minutes each morning with the weights, half an hour every afternoon with bending and stretching. He methodically walked every pathway in the Food Factory, with his hand-held camera pointed into every cranny. He composed long letters of complaint to his masters on Earth, cagily arguing the merits of aborting the mission and returning to Earth as soon as he could summon the family back, and actually transmitted one or two of them. He wrote fierce and peremptory directives to his lawyer in Stuttgart, in code, arguing his position, demanding a revision to the contract. And most of all, he schemed. And about the Traumeplatz most of all.

It was seldom out of his thoughts, this dreaming place with its startling potential. When he was depressed and fretful, he thought how rightly it would serve Earth if he were to repair it and call Wan back to give them their fevers once again. When he was charged with force and determination he went to look at it, lid hanging from an ornamental projection on one wall, the joints and fasteners always with him in his coverall pouch. How easy it would be to bring in a cutting torch and lop it free, cram the ship full of that, and the communications system for the Dead Men, and whatever other goods and treasures he could find; and then cast loose in the rocket for Earth, start the long, slow downward spiral that would bring him-what would it bring him? God in heaven, what would it not! Fame! Power! Prosperity! All the things that were his due-yes, and his rightful property, too, if he only got back in time to enjoy them.

It made him ill to think about it. All the time the clock was ticking, ticking. Every minute he was one minute closer to the end of his life. Every second spent waiting was a second stolen from the happy time of greatness and luxury that he had earned. He forced himself to eat, sitting on the edge of his private and looking longingly at the ship’s controls. “The food has not improved, Vera!” he called accusingly.