Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (14 page)

“Sure thing, Robin,” he said, cheerfully ignoring my temper. He wrinkled his furry eyebrows. “Ah-ha,” he said. “Uh-huh. Well, let’s see.”

“Is that a hard question for you?” I asked, more surprised than sarcastic.

“Of course not, Robin. I was just thinking how far back I should start. Well, let’s start with light. You know that light is made up of particles called photons. It has mass, and it exerts pressure-“

“Not that far back, Albert, please.”

“All right. But the way a black hole begins starts with a failure of light pressure. Take a big star-a blue Class-O, say. Ten times as massive as the sun. Burns up its nuclear fuel so fast that it only lives about a billion years. What keeps it from collapsing is the radiation pressure-call it the ‘light pressure’-from the nuclear reaction of hydrogen fusing into helium inside it. But then it runs out of hydrogen. Pressure stops. It collapses. It does so very, very fast, Robin, maybe in only a matter of hours. And a star that used to be millions of kilometers in diameter is all of a sudden only thirty kilometers. Have you got that part, Robin?”

“I think so. Get on with it.”

“Well,” he said, lighting his pipe and taking a couple of puffs-I can’t help wondering if he enjoys it!-“that’s one of the ways black holes get started. The classical way, you might call it. Keep that in mind, and now go on to the next part: escape velocity.”

“I know what escape velocity is.”

“Sure thing, Robin,” he nodded, “an old Gateway prospector like you. Well. When you were on Gateway, suppose you threw a rock straight up from the surface. It would probably come back, because even an asteroid has some gravity. But if you could throw it fast enough-maybe forty or fifty kilometers an hour-it wouldn’t come back. It would reach escape velocity and just fly away forever. On the Moon, you’d have to throw it a lot faster still, say two or three kilometers a second. On the Earth, faster than that-better than eleven kilometers a second.

“Now,” he said, reaching forward to tap coals out of his pipe and light it again, “if you-“ tap, tap, “if you were on the surface of some object that has a very, very high surface gravity, the condition would be worse. Suppose the gravity were such that the escape velocity were up real high, say around three hundred and ten thousand kilometers a second. You couldn’t throw a rock that fast. Even light doesn’t quite go that fast! So even light-“ puff, puff, “can’t escape, because its velocity is ten thousand kilometers a second too slow. And, as we know, if light can’t escape, then nothing can escape; that’s Einstein. If I may be excused the vanity.” He actually winked at me over his pipe. “So that’s a black hole. It’s black because it can’t radiate at all.”

I said, “What about a Heechee spaceship? They go faster than light.”

Albert grinned ruefully. “Got me there, Robin, but we don’t know how they go faster than light. Maybe a Heechee can get out of a black hole, who knows? But we don’t have any evidence of one of them ever doing it.”

I thought that over for a moment. “Yet,” I said.

“Well, yes, Robin,” he agreed. “The problem, of going faster than light, and the problem of escaping from a black hole, are essentially the same problem.” He paused. A long pause. Then, apologetically, “I guess that’s about all we can profitably say on that subject, right now.”

I got up and refreshed my drink, leaving him sitting there, patiently puffing his pipe. Sometimes it was hard to remember that there was really nothing there, nothing but a few interference patterns of collimated light, backed up by some tons of metal and plastic. “Albert,” I said, “tell me something. You computers are supposed to be lightning-fast. Why is it that you take so long to answer sometimes? Just dramatic effect?”

“Well, Bob, sometimes it is,” he said after a moment, “like that time. But I am not sure you understand how difficult it is for me to ‘chat.’ If you want information about, say, black holes, I have no trouble producing it for you. Six million bits a second, if you like. But to put it in terms you can understand, above all to put it in the form of conversation, involves more than accessing the storage. I have to do word-searches through literature and taped conversations. I have to map analogies and metaphors against your own mind-sets. I have to meet such strictures as are imposed by your defined normatives for my behavior, and by relevance to the tone of the particular chat. ‘Tain’t easy, Robin.”

“You’re smarter than you look, Albert,” I said.

He tapped his pipe out and looked up at me under his shaggy white mop. “Would you mind, Bob, if I said so are you?”

I let him go, saying, “You’re a good old machine, Albert.” I stretched out on the jelly-bed couch, half asleep with my drink in my hand. At least he had taken my mind off Essie for a while, but there was a nagging question in my mind. Somewhere, sometime, I had said the same thing to some other program, and I couldn’t remember when.

Harriet woke me up to say that there was an in-person call from our doctor-not the program, but the real live Wilma Liederman, M.D., who came to see us to make sure the machines were doing things right, every once in a while. “Robin,” she said, “I think Essie’s out of danger.”

“That’s-marvelous!” I said, wishing I had saved words like “marvelous” for when I really meant them, because they didn’t do justice to the way I felt. Our program had already accessed the Mesa General circuits, of course. Wilma knew as much about her condition as the little black man I had talked to-and, of course, had pumped all of Essie’s medical history back into the Mesa General store. Wilma offered to fly out herself if we wanted her to. I told her she was the doctor, not me, and she told me that she would get a Columbia classmate of hers in Tucson to look in on Essie instead.

“But don’t go to see her tonight, Robin,” she said. “Talk to her on the phone if you want to-I prescribe it-but don’t tire her out. By tomorrow-well, I think she’ll be stronger.”

So I called Essie, and talked to her for three minutes-she was groggy, but she knew what was happening. And then I let myself go back to sleep, and just as I was dropping off I remembered that Albert had called me “Bob”.

There was another program that I had been on friendly terms with, a long time ago, that sometimes called me “Robin” and sometimes “Bob” and even “Bobby”. I hadn’t talked to that particular program in quite a while, because I hadn’t felt the need of it; but maybe I was beginning to.

Full Medical is-well, it’s full medical. It’s everything. If there’s a way to keep you healthy, and especially to keep you alive, you’ve got it. And there are lots of ways. Full Medical runs to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Not too many people can afford it-something under one tenth of one percent even in the developed countries. But it buys a lot. Right after lunch the next day, it bought me Essie.

Wilma said it was all right, and so did everybody else. The city of Tucson had recovered enough for that sort of thing. The city had got over the emergency aspects of the fever. Its structures were back to business as usual, meaning that they once again had time to deliver what people paid for. So at noon a private ambulance trucked in bed, heart-lung machine, dialysis pack, and peripherals. At twelve-thirty a team of nurses moved into the suite across the hail, and at a quarter after two I rode up in the freight elevator with six cubic meters of hardware, in the heart of which was the heart of me, namely my wife.

Among the other things Full Medical bought were a trickle of pain-killers and mood-mediators, corticosteroids to speed healing and moderators to keep the corticosteroids from spoiling her cells, four hundred kilograms of plumbing under the framework of the bed to monitor all of what Essie did, and to intervene to help her do it when she couldn’t. Just transferring her from the travel machine to the one in the master bedroom took an hour and a half, with Wilma’s classmate supervising a team of interns and orderlies. They threw me out while that was going on, and I drank a couple of cups of coffee down in the hotel lobby, watching the teardrop-shaped elevators climb up and down the interior walls. When I figured I was allowed back I met the doctor from the hospital in the hail. He had managed to get a little sleep and he was wearing granny glasses instead of the contacts. “Don’t tire her out,” he said.

“I’m getting tired of hearing that.”

He grinned and invited himself to share a third cup of coffee with me. He turned out to be quite a nice guy, as well as the best short basketball center Tempe had ever had, when he was an Arizona State undergraduate. There is something I like about a man of a hundred and sixty centimeters who goes out for the basketball team, and we parted friends. That was the most reassuring thing of all. He wouldn’t have let that happen if he hadn’t been pretty sure Essie was going to make it.

I did not then appreciate how much “making it” she was going to have to do.

She was still under the positive-pressure bubble, and that spared me from seeing quite how used up she looked. The dayduty nurse retreated to the sitting room, after telling me not to get Essie too tired, and we talked for a while. We didn’t say anything, really. S. Ya. is not your talkative type person. She asked me what the news was from the Food Factory, and when I had given her a thirty-second synoptic on that she asked what the news was about the fever. By the time I had given her four or five thousand-word answers to her one-sentence questions it began to dawn on me that talking was really quite a strain and that I shouldn’t tire her out.

But she was talking, and even talking coherently, and did not seem worried; and so I went back to my console and to work.

There was the usual raft of reports to get through and decisions to make. When that was done I listened to Albert’s latest reports from the Food Factory for a while and then realized it was time for me to go to sleep.

I lay in bed for quite a while. I wasn’t restless. I wasn’t exhausted. I was just letting the tensions drain out of me. In the sitting room I could hear the night nurse moving around. On the other side, from Essie’s room, came the constant faint sigh and hum and gurgle of the machines that were keeping my wife alive. The world had got well ahead of me. I was not taking it all in. I had not yet quite understood that forty-eight hours before, Essie had been dead. Kaput. Xed. No longer alive. If it hadn’t been for Full Medical, and a lot of luck, I would along about now have been selecting the clothes to wear to her funeral.

And inside my head there was a small minority of cells of the brain that understood that fact and was thinking, well, you know, maybe, it just might have been tidier all around if she hadn’t been brought back to life.

This had nothing to do with the fact that I loved Essie, loved her a lot, wished her nothing but well, had gone into shock when I heard she was hurt. The minority party in my brain spoke only for itself. Every time the question came up a thundering majority voted for loving Essie, whenever polled, however asked.

I have never been entirely sure what the word “love” means. Especially when applied to myself. Just before I fell asleep I thought for a moment of dialing Albert up and asking him to explain it. But I didn’t. Albert was the wrong program to ask, and I didn’t want to start up with the right one.

The synoptics kept coming in, and I watched the unfolding story of the Food Factory, and I felt like an anachronism. A couple of centuries ago the world-girdlers of England and Spain operated at a remove of a month or two from the action fronts. No cable, no satellites. Their orders went out on sailing ships, and replies came back when they could. I wished I could share their skills. The fifty days of round-trip time between us and the Herter-Halls seemed like forever. Here was I at Ghent, and there were they, Andy Jackson pounding the pee out of the British at New Orleans weeks after the war was over. Of course, I had sent out instant orders on how they were to conduct themselves. What questions they were to ask of the boy, Wan. What attempts they were to make to divert the Food Factory from its course. And five thousand astronomical units away, they were doing what occurred to them to do, and by the time my orders arrived all the questions would be moot.

As Essie mended, so did my spirits. Her heart pumped by itself. Her lungs kept her in air. They took the positive-pressure bubble off her and I could touch her and kiss her cheek, and she was taking an interest in what went on. Had been all along; when I said it was too bad she’d missed her conference she grinned up at me. “AU on tape, dear Robin; have been playing it back when you were busy.”

“But you couldn’t give your own paper-“

“You think? Why not? I wrote ‘Robinette Broadhead’ program for you, did you not know I also wrote one for me? Conference moved in full holographics and S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead projection gave complete text. To considerable approval. Even handled questions,” she boasted, “by borrowing your Albert program in drag.”

Well, she’s an astonishing person, as I have always known. The trouble is that I expect her to be astonishing, and when I talked to her doctor he brought me down. He was on the hop, between the suite and Mesa General, and I asked him if I could bring her home. He hesitated, peering up at me through the blue contacts. “Yes, probably,” he said. “But I’m not sure you understand how serious her injuries are, Mr. Broadhead. All that’s happening now is that she’s building up some reserves of strength. She’s going to need them.”

“Well, I know that, Doe. There’ll have to be another operation-“

“No. Not one, Mr. Broadhead. I think your wife will spend most of the next couple of months in surgery and convalescence. And I don’t want you assuming that the results are a foregone conclusion,” he lectured. “There’s a risk to every procedure, and she’s up against some hairy ones. Cherish her, Mr. Broadhead. We reanimated her after one cardiac arrest. I don’t guarantee it’ll happen every time.”