Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (7 page)

“Wan? Is that you?”

“Of course it is me, Tiny Jim. I want to hear about gosh numbers.”

“Very well, Wan. Gosh numbers are numbers which represent more than one quantity, so that when you perceive the coincidence you say, ‘Gosh.’ Some gosh numbers are trivial. Some are perhaps of transcendental importance. Some religious persons count gosh numbers as a proof of the existence of God. As to whether or not God exists, I can give you only a broad outline of-“

“No, Tiny Jim. Please stick to gosh numbers now.”

“Yes, Wan. I will now give you a list of a few of the simplest gosh numbers. Point-five degrees. Minus-forty degrees. One thirty-seven. Two thousand and twenty-five. Ten to the 39
^th
. Please write one paragraph on each of these, identifying the characteristics which make them gosh numbers and-“

“Cancel, cancel,” Wan squeaked, his voice rising higher because it smarted so. “This is not a class.”

“Oh, well,” said the Dead Man gloomily, “all right. Point-five degrees is the angular diameter of both the sun and the Moon as seen from Earth. Gosh! How strange that they should be the same, but also how useful, because it is partly because of this coincidence that Earth has eclipses. Minus-forty degrees is the temperature which is the same in both Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. Gosh. Two thousand twenty-five is the sum of the cubes of the integers, one cubed plus two cubed plus three cubed and so on up to nine cubed, all added together. It is also the square of their sum. Gosh. Ten to the thirty-ninth is a measure of the weakness of the gravitational force as compared with the electromagnetic. It is also the age of the universe expressed as a dimensionless number. It is also the square root of the number of particles in the observable universe, that is, that part of the universe relative to Earth in which Hubble’s constant is less than point-five. Also-well, never mind, but gosh! Gosh, gosh, gosh. On these goshes P.A.M. Dirac constructed his Large Numbers Hypothesis, from which he deduced that the force of gravity must be weakening as the age of the universe increased. Now, there is a gosh for you!”

“You left out one thirty-seven,” the boy accused.

The Dead Man cackled. “Good for you, Wan! I wanted to see if you were listening. One thirty-seven is Eddington’s fine structure constant, of course, and turns up over and over in nuclear physics. But it is more than that. Suppose you take the inverse, that is one over one thirty-seven, and express it as a decimal. The first three digits are Double Ought Seven, James Bond’s identification as a killer. There is the lethality of the universe for you! The first eight digits are Clarke’s Palindrome, point oh seven two nine nine two seven oh. There is its symmetry. Deadly, and two-faced, that is the fine structure constant! Or,” he mused, “perhaps I should say, there is its inverse. Which would imply that the universe itself is the inverse of that? Namely kind and uneven? Help me, Wan. I am not sure how to interpret this symbol.”

“Oh, cancel, cancel,” said Wan angrily. “Cancel and out.” He was feeling irritable and shaky, as well as more ill than he had ever been, even when the Dead Men had given him shots. “He goes on like that,” he apologized to the others. “That’s why I don’t usually speak to him from here.”

“He doesn’t look well,” said Lurvy worriedly to her husband, and then to Wan, “Do you feel all right?” He shook his head, because he did not know how to answer.

Paul said, “You ought to rest. But-what did you mean, ‘from here.’ Where is, uh, Tiny Jim?”

“Oh, he is in the main station,” said Wan weakly, sneezing.

“You mean-“ Paul swallowed hard. “But you said it was forty-five days away by ship. That must be a very long way.”

The old man, Payter, cried: “Radio? Are you talking to him by radio? Faster-than-light radio?”

Wan shrugged. Paul had been right; he needed to rest, and there was the couch, which had always been the exact proper place to make him feel good and rested.

“Tell me, boy!” shouted the old man. “If you have a working FU radio- The bonus-“

“I am very tired,” said Wan hoarsely. “I must sleep.” He felt himself falling. He evaded their clutching arms, dove between them and plunged into the couch, its comforting webbing closing around him.

Essie and I were water-skiing on the Tappan Sea when my neck radio buzzed to tell me that a stranger had turned up on the Food Factory. I ordered the boat to turn immediately and take us back to the long stretch of waterfront property owned by Robin Broadhead, Inc. before I told Essie what it was. “A boy, Robin?” she shouted over the noise of the hydrogen motor and the wind. “Where in hell a boy comes to Food Factory?”

“That’s what we have to find out,” I yelled back. The boat skillfully snaked us in to shallow water and waited while we jumped out and ran up the grass. When it recognized that we were gone, it purred down the shoreline to put itself away.

Wet as we were, we ran directly to the brain room. We had begun to get opticals already, and the holo tank showed a skinny, scraggly youth wearing a sort of divided kilt and a dirty tunic. He did not seem threatening in any way, but he sure as hell had no right to be there. ‘Voice,” I ordered, and the moving lips began to speak-queer, shrill, high-pitched, but good enough English to understand:

“-from the main station, yes. It is about seven seven-days- weeks, I mean. I come here often.”

“For God’s sake, how?” I could not see the speaker, but it was male and had no accent: Paul Hall.

“In a ship, to be sure. Do you not have a ship? The Dead Men speak only of traveling in ships, I do not know any other way.”

“Incredible,” said Essie over my shoulder. She backed away, not taking her eyes off the tank, and came back with a terrycloth robe to throw over my shoulders and one for herself. “What do you suppose is ‘main station’?”

“I wish to God I knew. Harriet?”

The voices from the tank grew fainter, and my secretary’s voice said, “Yes, Mr. Broadhead?”

“When did he get there?”

“About seventeen point four minutes ago, Mr. Broadhead. Plus transit time from the Food Factory, of course. He was discovered by Janine Herter. She did not appear to have had a camera with her, so we received only voice until one of the other members of the party arrived.” As soon as she stopped speaking the voice from the figure in the tank came up again; Harriet is a very good program, one of Essie’s best.

“-sorry if I behaved improperly,” the boy was saying. Pause. Then, old Peter Herter:

“Never mind that, by God. Are there other people on this main station?”

The boy pursed his lips. “That,” he said philosophically, “would depend, would it not, on how one defines ‘person’? In the sense of a living organism of our species, no. The closest is the Dead Men.”

A woman’s voice-Dorema Herter-Hall. “Are you hungry? Do you need anything?”

“No, why should I?”

“Harriet? What’s that about behaving improperly?” I asked. Harriet’s voice came hesitantly. “He, uh, he brought himself to orgasm, Mr. Broadhead. Right in front of Janine Herter.”

I couldn’t help it, I broke out laughing. “Essie,” I said to my wife, “I think you made her a little too ladylike.” But that wasn’t what I was laughing at. It was the plain incongruity of the thing. I had guessed-anything. Anything but this: a Heechee, a space pirate, Martians-God knows what, but not a horny teen-aged boy.

There was a scrabble of steel claws from behind and something jumped on my shoulder. “Down, Squiffy,” I snapped.

Essie said, “Just let him nuzzle neck for a minute. He’ll go away.”

“He isn’t dainty in his personal habits,” I snarled. “Can’t we get rid of him?”

“Na, na, galubka,” she said soothingly, patting the top of my head as she got up. ‘Want Full Medical, don’t you? Squiffy comes along.” She kissed me and wandered out of the room, leaving me to think about the thing that, to my somewhat surprise, was making all sorts of tiny but discomforting stirrings inside me. To see a Heechee! Well, we hadn’t-but what if we did?

When the first Venus explorers discovered the traces the Heechee had left, glowing blue-lined empty tunnels, spindle-shaped caves, it was a shock. A few artifacts, another shock-what were they? There were the scrolls of metal somebody named “prayer fans” (but did the Heechee pray, and if so to whom?) There were the glowing little beads called “fire pearls”, but they weren’t pearls, and they weren’t burning. Then someone found the Gateway asteroid, and the biggest shock of all, because on it were a couple of hundred working spaceships. Only you couldn’t direct them. You could get in and go, and that was it. . . and what you found when you got there was shock, shock, shock, shock.

I knew. I had had the shocks, on my three silly missions-No. Two silly missions. And then one terribly unsilly one. It had made me rich and deprived me of somebody I loved, and what is silly about either of those things?

And ever since then the Heechee, dead half a million years, not even a written word left to tell what they were up to, had permeated every part of our world. It was all questions, and not very many answers. We didn’t even know what they called themselves, certainly not “Heechee”, because that was just a name the explorers made up for them. We had no idea what these remote and godlike creatures called themselves. But we didn’t know what God called Himself, either. Jehovah, Jupiter, Baal, Allah-those were names people made up. Who knew by what name He was known to His buddies?

I was trying to let myself feel what I might have felt if the stranger in the Food Factory had actually been Heechee when the toilet flushed, Essie came out and Squiffy made a dash for the bowl. There are indignities to having Full Medical coverage, and a mobile bio-assay unit is one of them.

“You are wasting my program time!” Essie scolded, and I realized that Harriet had been sitting patiently in the tank, waiting to be told to get on with her information about the other claims on my attention. The report from the Food Factory was all being taped and stored in any case, so Essie went to her own office to deal with her own priorities, I told Harriet to start the cook on lunch, and then I let her do her secretarial duties.

“You have an appointment to testify before the Senate Ways and Means Committee tomorrow morning, Mr. Broadhead.”

“I know. I’ll be there.”

“You’re due for your next checkup this weekend. Shall I confirm the appointment?”

That’s one of the penalties of Full Medical, and besides Essie insists-she’s twenty years younger than I, and reminds me of it. “All right, let’s get it over with.”

“You are being sued by one Hanson Bover, and Morton wants to talk to you about it. Your consolidated statement for the quarter came in and is on your desk file-except for the food mine holdings, which will not be complete until tomorrow. And there are a number of minor messages-most of which I have already dealt with-for your review at your convenience.”

“Thank you. That’s all for now.” The tank went transparent and I leaned back in my chair to think.

I didn’t need to see the consolidated statement-I already pretty well knew what it would say. The real estate investments were performing nicely; the little bit I had left in sea farming was moving toward a record profit year. Everything was solid, except for the food mines. The last 130-day fever had cost us. I couldn’t blame the guys in Cody, they weren’t any more responsible than I was when the fever bit. But they had somehow let the thermal drilling get out of control, and five thousand acres of our shale were burning away underground. It had taken three months to get the mine back in operation at all, and we still didn’t know what it was going to cost. No wonder their quarterly statement was late.

But that was only an annoyance, not a disaster. I was too well diversified to be killed by any one sector going bad. I wouldn’t have been in the food mines except for Morton’s advice; the extraction allowance made it a really good thing, tax-wise. (But I’d sold most of my sea-farming holdings to buy in.) Then Morton figured out that I still needed a tax shelter, so we started The Broadhead Institute for Extra-Solar Research. The Institute owns all my stock, but I vote it, and I vote it for what I want to do. I got us into the coownership with the Gateway Corporation that financed probes to four detected but unvisited Heechee-metal sources in or near the solar system, and one of them had been the Food Factory. As soon as they made contact we spun off a separate exploitation company to deal with it-and now it was looking really interesting.

“Harriet? Let me have the direct from the Food Factory again,” I said. The holo sprang up, the boy still talking excitedly in his shrill, squeaky voice. I tried to catch the thread of what he was saying-something about a Dead Man (only it wasn’t a man, because its name was Henrietta) speaking to him (so it wasn’t dead?) about a Gateway mission she had been on (when? why hadn’t I heard of her?). It was all perplexing, so I had a better idea. “Albert Einstein, please,” I said, and the holo swirled to show the sweet old lined face peering at me.

“Yes, Robin?” said my science program, reaching for his pipe and tobacco as he almost always does when we talk.

“I’d like some best-guess estimates from you on the Food Factory and the boy that turned up there.”

“Sure thing, Robin,” he said, tamping the tobacco with his thumb. “The boy’s name is Wan. He appears to be between fourteen and nineteen years of age, probably toward the young end of the spread, and I would guess that he is fully genetically human.”