Heechee Rendezvous Part 2

Of course, Dolly had had a hard life. A Kentucky girl with no money, no family, no job-no skills, either, and perhaps none too much brainpower-such a girl had to use all the a.s.sets she had if she wanted to get out of coal country. Dolly's one commercial a.s.set was looks. Good looks, though flawed. Her figure was slim, her eyes were bright, but her teeth were buck. At fourteen she got work as a bartop dancer in Cincinnati, but it didn't pay enough to live on unless you hustled on the side. Dolly didn't want to do that. She was saving herself She tried singing, but she didn't have the voice for it. Besides, trying to sing without moving her lips and exposing her Bugs Bunny teeth made her look like a ventriloquist ... And when a customer, trying to hurt her because she'd turned his advances down, told her that, the light dawned over Dolly's head. The M.C. considered himself a comic in that particular club. Dolly traded laundry and sewing for some old, used comedy routines, made herself some hand puppets, studied every puppet act she could find on PV or fantape, and tried out the act at the last show on a Sat.u.r.day night when another singer was coming in to replace her on Sunday. The act was not boffo, but the new girl singer was even worse than Dolly, so she got a reprieve. Two weeks in Cincinnati, a month in Louisville, nearly three months in little clubs outside Chicago-if the engagements bad been consecutive she would have been well enough off, but there were weeks and months between them. She did not, however, actually starve. By the time Dolly got to Peggy's Planet the jagged corners of The Act had banged against so many hostile audiences or drunk ones that it had worn into some sort of serviceable shape. Not good enough for a real career. Good enough to keep her alive. Getting to Peggy's Planet was a desperation move, because you had to sign your life away for the pa.s.sage. There was no stardom here, but she wasn't any worse off, either. And if she was no longer saving herself, exactly, at least she didn't spend herself very profligately. When Audee Walthers, Jr., came along, he offered a higher price than most others had proposed-marriage. So she did it. At eighteen. To a man twice her age.

Dolly's hard life, though, wasn't really that much harder than anyone else's on Peggy's-not counting, of course, people like Audee's oil prospectors. The prospectors paid full fare to get to Peggy's Planet, or their companies did, and every one of them surely had a paid-up return ticket in his pocket.

It did not make them more cheerful. It was a six-hour flight to the point on West Island they had chosen for a base camp. By the time they had eaten and popped their shelters and said their prayers a time or two, not without arguments about which direction to face in, their hangovers were pretty well dissipated, but it was also pretty well too late to get anything done that day. For them. Not for Walthers. He was ordered to fly crisscross strikes across twenty thousand hectares of billy scrub. As he was merely towing a ma.s.s sensor to measure gravitational anomalies, it did not matter that he had to do it in the dark. It did not matter to Mr. Luqman, at any rate, but it mattered a lot to Walthers, because it was precisely the sort of flying that he hated most; his alt.i.tude had to be quite low, and some of the hills were fairly high. So he flew with both radar and searchbeams going all the time, terrifying the slow, stupid animals that inhabited these West Island savannahs, and terrifying himself when he found himself dozing off and waking to claw for alt.i.tude as a shrub-topped hill summit rushed toward him.

He managed five hours' sleep before Luqman woke him to order a photographic reconnaissance of a few unclear sites, and when that was done he was set to dropping spikes all over the terrain. The spikes were not simple solid metal; they were geophones, and they had to be set in a receiving array kilometers in length. Moreover, they had to drop from at least twenty meters to be sure to penetrate the surface and stand upright so that their readings would be trustworthy, and each one bad to be placed within a circular error of two meters. It did Walthers no good to point out that these requirements were mutually contradictory, so it was no surprise to him that when the truck-mounted vibrators did their thing the petrological data were no use at all. Do it over, said Mr. Luqman, and so Walthers had to retrace his steps on foot, pulling out the geophones and hammering them in by hand.

What he had signed on to do was pilot, but Mr. Luqman took a broader view. Not just trudging around with the geophone spikes. One day they had him digging for the tick-like creatures that were the Peggy's equivalent of earthworms, aerating the soil. The next they gave him a thing like a Roto-Rooter, which dug itself down into the soil a few dozen meters and pulled out core samples. They would have had him peeling potatoes if they had eaten potatoes, and did in fact try to lumber him with all the dishwashing-backing off only to the extent that it was finally agreed to do it in strict rotation. (But Walthers noticed that Mr.

Luqman's turn never seemed to come.) Not that the ch.o.r.es weren't interesting. The tick-like bugs went into a jar of solvent and the soup that resulted became a smear on an electroph.o.r.esis sheet of filter paper. The cores went into little incubators with sterile water, sterile air, and sterile hydrocarbon vapors. They were both tests for oil. The bugs, like termites, were deep diggers. Some of what they dug through came back to the surface with them, and electroph.o.r.esis would sort out what it was that they carried back. The incubators tested for the same thing in a different way. Peggy's, like Earth, had in its soil microorganisms that could live on a diet of pure hydrocarbons. So if anything grew on the pure hydrocarbons in the incubators, that sort of bug had to be what was growing there, and it would not have existed without a source of free hydrocarbons in the soil.

In either case, there would be oil.

But for Walthers the tests were mostly stoop-labor drudgery, and the only surcease from them was to be ordered back into the aircraft to tow the magnetometer again or to drop more spikes. After the first three days he retired to his tent to pull out his contract printout and make sure he was required to do all these things. He was. He decided to have a word with his agent when he got back to Port Hegramet; after the fifth day he was reconsidering. It seemed more attractive to kill the agent ... But all the flying had one beneficial effect. Eight days into the three-week expedition, Walthers reported gladly to Mr. Luqman that he was running low on fuel and would have to make a flight back to base for more hydrogen.

When he got to the little apartment it was dark; but the apartment was neat, which was a pleasant surprise; Dolly was home, which was even better; best of all, she was sweetly, obviously delighted to see him.

The evening was perfect. They made love; Dolly fixed some dinner; they made love again, and at midnight they sat on the opened-out bed, backs propped against the cushioning, legs outstretched before them, holding hands and sharing a bottle of Peggy's wine. "I wish you could take me back with you," Dolly said when he finished telling her about the New Delaware charter. Dolly wasn't looking at him; she was idly fitting puppet heads on her free hand, her expression easy.

"No chance of that, darling." He laughed. "You're too good-looking to take out in the bush with four h.o.r.n.y Arabs. Listen, I don't feel all that safe myself."

She raised her hand, her expression still relaxed. The puppet she wore this time was a kitten face with bright red, luminous whiskers. The pink mouth opened and her kitten voice lisped, "Wan says they're really rough. He says they could've killed him, just for talking about religion with them. He says he thought they were going to."

"Oh?" Walthers shifted position, as the back of the daybed no longer seemed quite so comfortable. He didn't ask the question on his mind, which was Oh, have you been seeing Wan? because that would suggest that he was jealous. He only said, "How is Wan?" But the other question was contained in that one, and was answered. Wan was much better. Wan's eye was hardly black at all now. Wan had a really neat ship in orbit, a Heechee Five, but it was his personal property and it had been fixed up special-so he said; she hadn't seen it. Of course. Wan had sort of hinted that some of the equipment was old Heechee stuff, and maybe not too honestly come by. Wan had sort of hinted that there was plenty of Heechee stuff around that never got reported, because the people that found it didn't want to pay royalties to the Gateway Corporation, you know? Wan figured he was ent.i.tled to it, really, because he'd had this unbelievable life, brought up by practically the Heechee themselves- Without Walthers willing it, the internal question externalized itself.

"It sounds like you've been seeing a great deal of Wan," he offered, trying to seem casual and hearing his own voice prove he was not. Indeed he was not casual; he was either angry or worried-more angry than worried, actually, because it made no sense! Wan was surely not good-looking. Or good-tempered. Of course, he was rich, and also a lot closer to Dolly's age "Oh, honey, don't be jealous," Dolly said in her own voice, sounding if anything pleased-which somewhat rea.s.sured Walthers. "He's going to go pretty soon anyway, you know. He doesn't want to be here when the transport gets in, and right now he's off ordering supplies for his next trip. That's the only reason he came here." She raised the puppeted hand again, and the childish kitten voice sang, "Junior's jealous of Vollee!"

"I am not," he said instinctively, and then admitted, "I am. Don't hold it against me, Doll."

She moved in the bed until her lips were near his ear, and he felt her soft breath, lisping in the kitten voice, "I promise I won't, Mr. Junior, but I'd be awful glad if you would ..." And as reconciliations went, it went very well; except that right in the middle of Round Four it was zapped by the snarling ring of the piezophone.

Walthers let it ring fifteen times, long enough to complete the task in progress, though not nearly as well as he had intended. When he answered the phone it was the duty officer from the airport. "Did I call you at a bad time, Walthers?"

"Just tell me what you want," said Walthers, trying not to show that he was still breathing hard.

"Well, rise and shine, Audee. There's a party of six down with scurvy, Grid Seven Three Poppa, coordinates a little fuzzy but they've got a radio beacon. That's all they've got. You're flying them a doctor, a dentist, and about a ton of vitamin C to arrive at first light. Which means you take off in ninety minutes tops."

"Ah, h.e.l.l, Carey! Can't it wait?"

"Only if you want them DOA. They're real bad. The shepherd that found them says there's two of them he don't think will make it anyway."

Walthers swore to himself, looked apologetically at Dolly, and then reluctantly began getting his gear together.

When Dolly spoke the voice was not a kitten's anymore. "Junior? Can't we go back home?"

"This is home," he said, trying to make it light.

"Please, Junior?" The relaxed face had tightened up, and the ivory mask was impa.s.sive, but he could hear the strain in her voice.

"Dolly, love," he said, "there's nothing there for us. Remember? That's why people like us come here. Now we've got a whole new planet why, this city by itself is going to be bigger than Tokyo, newer than New York; they're going to have six new transports in a couple of years, you know, and a Lofstrom loop instead of these shuttles-"

"But when? When I'm old?"

There might not have been a justifiable reason for the misery in her voice, but the misery was there all the same. Walthers swallowed, took a deep breath, and tried his joking best. "Sweet-pants," he said, "you won't be old even when you're ninety." No response. "Aw, but, honey," he cajoled, "it's bound to get better! They're sure to start a food factory out in our Oort pretty soon. It might even be next year! And they as much as promised me a piloting job for the construction-"

"Oh, fine! So then you'll be away a year at a time instead of just a month. And I'll be stuck in this dump, without even any decent programs to talk to."

"They'll have programs-"

"I'll be dead first!"

He was wide awake now, the joys of the night worn away. He said, "Look. If you don't like it here we don't have to stay. There's more on Peggy's than Port Hegramet. We can go out into the back country, clear some land, build a house-"

"Raise strong sons, found a dynasty?" Her voice was scornful.

"Well ... something like that, I guess."

She turned over in the bed. "Take your shower," she advised. "You smell like f.u.c.king."

And while Audee Walthers, Jr., was in the shower, a creature that looked quite unlike any of Dolly's puppets (though one of them was supposed to represent him) was seeing his first foreign stars in the thirty-one true years; and meanwhile one of the sick prospectors had stopped breathing, much to the relief of the shepherd who was trying, head averted, to nurse him; and meanwhile there were riots on Earth, and fifty-one dead colonists on a planet eight hundred light-years away .

And meanwhile Dolly had got up long enough to make him coffee and leave it on the table. She herself went back to bed, where she was, or pretended to be, sound asleep while he drank it, and dressed, and went out the door.

When I look at Audee, from this very great distance that separates us now, I am saddened to see that he looks so much like a wimp. He wasn't, really. He was quite an admirable person. He was a first-rate pilot, physically brave, rough-and-tumble tough when he had to be, kind when he had a chance. I suppose everybody looks wimpy from inside, and of course from inside is how I see him now-from a very great distance inside, or outside, depending on what a.n.a.log of geometry you choose to apply for this metaphor. (I can hear old Sigfrid sighing, "Oh Robin! Such digressions!" But then Sigfrid was never vastened.) We all have some areas of wimpiness, is what I am trying to say. It would be kinder to call them areas of vulnerability, and Audee simply happened to be extremely vulnerable where Dolly was concerned.

But wimpiness was not Audee's natural state. For the next little bit of time he was all the good things a person needed to be-resourceful, succoring the needy, tireless. He needed to be. Peggy's Planet had some traps concealed beneath its gentle facade.

As non-Terran worlds go, Peggy's was a jewel. You could breathe the air. You could survive the climate. The flora did not usually give you hives, and the fauna was astonishingly tame. Well-not exactly tame. More like stupid. Walthers wondered sometimes what the Heechee had seen in Peggy's Planet. The. thing was, the Heechee were supposed to be interested in intelligent life-not that they seemed to have found much- and there was certainly not much of that on Peggy's. The smartest anims~1 was a predator, fox-sized, mole-slow. It had the IQ of a turkey, and proved it by being its own worst enemy. Its prey was dumber and slower than it was-so it always had plenty to eat-and its biggest single cause of death was strangulation on food particles when it threw up what it had eaten too much of. Human beings could eat that predator if they wanted to, and most of its prey, and a lot of the biota in general ... as long as they were careful.

The ragged-a.s.s uranium prospectors hadn't been careful. By the time the violent tropical sunrise exploded over the jungle, and Walthers set his aircraft down in the nearest clearing, one of them had died of it.

The medical team had no time for a DOA, so they flocked around the barely living ones and sent Walthers off to dig a grave. For a time he had hopes to pa.s.s the ch.o.r.e on to the sheepherders, but their flocks were scattered all over. As soon as Walthers' back was turned, so were the shepherds.

The DOA looked at least ninety and smelled like a hundred and ten, but the tag on his wrist described him as Selini Yasmeneh, twenty-three, born in a shantytown south of Cairo. The rest of his life story was easy to read. So he had scrabbled for an adolescence in the Egyptian slums, hit the miracle odds-against chance of a pa.s.sage for a new life on Peggy's, sweltered in the ten-tiered bunks of the transport, agonized through the

Of course, you realize the "wimpiness" Robin is excusing here isn't that of Audee Walthers. Robin was never a wimp, except in the need to rea.s.sure himself from time to time that he wasn't. Humans are so strange!

landing in the deorbiting capsule-fifty colonists strapped into a pilotless pod, deorbited by a thrust from outside, shaken into terror on entry, the excrement jolted out of them as the parachutes popped open. Nearly all the capsules did in fact land safely. Only about three hundred colonists, so far, had been crushed or drowned. Yasmeneh was that lucky, at least, but when he tried to change careers from farming barley to prospecting heavy metals, his luck ran out because his party forgot to be careful. The tubers they'd fed themselves on when their store-bought food ran out contained, like almost every obvious food source on Peggy's, a vitamin C antagonist that had to be experienced to be believed. They hadn't believed even then. They knew about the risk. Everybody did. They just wanted one more day, and then another day, and another, while their teeth loosened and their breath grew foul, and by the time the sheepherders stumbled across their camp, it was too late for Yasmeneh, and pretty close to the same for the others.

Walthers had to fly the whole party, survivors and rescuers together, to the camp where someday the loop would be built, and already there were at least a dozen permanent habitations. By the time he got back at last to the Libyans, Mr. Luqman was furious. He hung on the door of Walthers' plane and shouted at him. "Thirty-seven hours away! It is outrageous! For the exorbitant charter we pay you we expect your services!"

"It was a matter of life or death, Mr. Luqman," Walthers said, trying to keep the irritation and fatigue out of his voice as he postflighted the plane.

"Life is the cheapest thing there is! And death comes to us all!"

Walthers pushed past him and sprang down to the ground. "They were fellow Arabs, Mr. Luqman-"

"No! Egyptians!"

"-well, fellow Moslems, anyway-"

"I would not care if they were my own brothers! Our time is precious!

Very large affairs are at stake here!"

Why try to restrain his own anger? Walthers snarled, "It's the law, Luqman. I only lease the plane; I have to provide emergency services when called on. Read your fine print!"

It was an unanswerable argument, and how infuriating it was when Luqman made no attempt to answer it but simply responded by heaping onto Walthers all the tasks that had acc.u.mulated in his absence. All to be completed at once. Or sooner. And if Walthers hadn't had any sleep, well, we would all sleep forever one day, would we not?

So, sleepless as he was, Walthers was flying magnetosonde traces within the next hour-p.r.i.c.kly, tetchy work, towing a magnetic sensor a hundred meters behind the plane and trying to keep the d.a.m.ned unwieldy thing from snagging in a tree or plunging itself into the ground. And in the moments of thought between the demands of, really, trying to fly two aircraft at once, Walthers thought somberly that Luqman had lied; it would have made a difference if the Egyptians had been fellow-Libyans, much less brothers. Nationalism had not been left back on Earth. There had been border clashes already, gauchos versus rice farmers when the cattle herds went looking for a drink in the paddies and trampled the seedlings; Chinese versus Mexicans when there was a mistake in filing land claims; Africans versus Canadians, Slays versus Hispanics for no reason at all that any outsider could see. Bad enough. What was worse was the bad blood that sometimes surfaced between Slav and Slav, between Latino and Latino.

And Peggy's could have been such a pretty world. It had everything- almost everything, if you didn't count things like vitamin C; it had Heechee Mountain, with a waterfall called the Cascade of Pearls, eight hundred meters of milky torrent coming right off the southern glaciers it had the cinnamon-smelling forests of the Little Continent with its dumb, friendly, lavender-colored monkeys-well, not real monkeys. But cute. And the Gla.s.s Sea. And the Wind Caves. And the farms-especially the farms! The farms were what made so many millions and tens of millions of Africans, Chinese, Indians, Latinos, poor Arabs, Iranians, Irish, Poles; so many millions of desperate people so willing to go so far from Earth and home.

"Poor Arabs," he had thought to himself but there were some rich ones, too. Like the four he was working for. When they talked about "very large affairs" they measured the scale in dollars and cents, that was clear. This expedition was not cheap. His own charter was in six figures, pity he couldn't keep more of it for himself! And that was almost the least part of what they had spent for pop-up tents and sound-poppers, for microphone ranging and rock samplers; for the lease of satellite time for their false-color pictures and radar contour-mapping; for the instruments they paid him to drag around the terrain ... and what about the next step? Next they would have to dig. Sinking a shaft to the salt dome they had located, three thousand meters down, would cost in the millions- Except, he discovered, that it would not, because they too had some of that illegal Heechee technology Wan had told Dolly about.

The first thing human beings had learned about the long-gone Heechee was that they liked to dig tunnels, because examples of their work lay all about under the surface of the planet Venus. And what they had dug the tunnels with was a technological miracle, a field projector that loosened the crystalline structure of rock, converted it to a sort of slurry; that pumped the slurry away and lined the shaft with that dense, hard, blue-gleaming Heechee metal. Such projectors still existed, but not in private hands.

They did, however, seem to be available to the hands of Mr. Luqman's party ... which implied not only money behind them but influence which implied somebody with muscle in the right places; and from casual remarks dropped in the brief intervals of rest and meals, Walthers suspected that somebody was a man named Robinette Broadhead.

The salt dome was definite, the drilling sites were chosen, the main work of the expedition was done. All that remained was checking out a few other possibilities and completing the cross-checks. Even Luqman began to relax, and the talk in the evenings turned to home. Home for all four of them turned out not to be Libya or even Paris. It was Texas, where they averaged 1.75 wives each and about half a dozen children in all. Not very evenly distributed, as far as Walthers could tell, but they were, probably purposely, unclear about details. To try to encourage openness Walthers found himself talking about Dolly. More than he meant to. About her extreme youth. Her career as an entertainer. Her hand puppets. He told them how clever Dolly was, making all the puppets herself-a duck, a puppy, a chimp, a clown. Best of all, a Heechee. Dolly's Heechee had a receding forehead, a beaked nose, a jutting chin, and eyes that tapered back to the ears like an Egyptian wall painting. In profile the face was almost a single line slanting down-all imaginary, of course, since no one had ever seen a Heechee then.

The youngest Libyan, Fawni, nodded judiciously. "Yes, it is good that a woman should earn money," he declared.

"It isn't just the money. It helps keep her active, you know? Even so, I'm afraid she gets pretty bored in Port Hegramet. She really has no one to talk to."

The one named Shameem also nodded. "Programs," he advised sagely. "When I had but one wife I bought her several fine programs for company. She particularly liked the 'Dear Abby' and the 'Friends of Fatima,' I remember."

"I wish I could, but there's not much like that on Peggy's yet. It's very difficult for her. So I really can't blame her if sometimes when I'm, you know, feeling amorous and she isn't-" Walthers broke off, because the Libyans were laughing.

"It is written in the Second Sura"-young Fawzi guffawed-"that

Walthers' suspicion that Robin Broadhead financed the prospectors was well-founded. Walthers' opinion of Robin's motives-not so well-founded. Robin was a very moral man, but not normally a very legal one. He was also a man (as you see) who got a lot of pleasure out of dropping hints about himself, particularly when talking about himself in the third person.

woman is our field and we may go into our field to plow it when we will. So says Al-Baqara, the Cow."

Walthers, suppressing resentment, essayed a joke: "Unfortunately my wife is not a cow."

"Unfortunately your wife is not a wife," the Arab scolded. "Back home in Houston we have for such as you a term: p.u.s.s.y-whipped. It is a shameful state for a man."

"Now, listen," Walthers began, reddening; and then clamped down again on his anger. Over by the cooking tent Luqman looked up from his meticulous measuring of the day's brandy ration and frowned at the sound of the voices. Walthers forced a rea.s.suring smile. "We shall never agree," he said, "so let's be friends anyway." He sought to change the subject. "I've been wondering," he said, "why you decided to look for oil right here on the equator."

Fawzi's lips pursed and he studied Walthers' face closely before he replied. "We have had many indications of appropriate geology."

"Sure you have-all those satellite photos have been published, you know. They're no secret. But there's even better-looking geology in the northern hemisphere, around the Gla.s.s Sea."

"That is enough," Fawzi interrupted, his voice rising. "You are not paid to ask questions, Walthers!"

"I was just-"

"You were prying where you have no business, that is what you were doing!"

And the voices were loud again, and this time Luqman came over with their eighty milliliters each of brandy. "Now what is it?" he demanded. "What is the American asking?"

"It does not matter. I have not answered."

Luqman glared at him for a moment, Walthers' brandy ration in his hand, and then abruptly he lifted it to his lips and tossed it down. Walthers stifled a growl of protest. It did not matter that much. He did not really want to be drinking companions with these people. And in any case it seemed Luqman's careful measuring of milliliters had not kept him from a shot or two in private, earlier, because his face was flushed and his voice was thick. "Walthers," he growled, "I would punish your prying if it was important, but it is not. You want to know why we look here, one hundred seventy kilometers from where the launch loop will be built? Then look above you!" He thrust a theatrical arm to the darkened sky and then lurched away, laughing. Over his shoulder he tossed, "It does not matter anymore anyway!"

Walthers stared after him, then glanced up into the night sky.

A bright blue bead was sliding across the unfamiliar constellations. The transport! The interstellar vessel S. Ya. Broadhead had entered high orbit. He could read its course, jockeying to low orbit and parking there, an immense, potato-shaped, blue-gleaming lesser moon in the cloudless sky of Peggy's Planet. In nineteen hours it would be parked. Before then he had to be in his shuttle to meet it, to partic.i.p.ate in the frantic s.p.a.ce-to-surface flights for the fragile fractions of the cargo and for the favored pa.s.sengers, or nudging the free-fall deorbiters out of their paths to bring the terrified immigrants down to their new home.

Walthers thanked Luqman silently for stealing his drink; he could afford no sleep that night. While the four Arabs slept he was breaking down tents and stowing equipment, packing his aircraft, and talking with the base at Port Hegramet to make sure he had a shuttle a.s.signment. He had. If he was there by noon the following day they would give him a berth and a chance to cash in on the frantic round trips that would empty the vast transport and free it for its return trip. At first light he had the Arabs up, cursing and stumbling around. In half an hour they were aboard his plane and on the way home.

He reached the airport in plenty of time, although something inside him was whispering monotonously, Too late. Too late.

Too late for what? And then he found out. When he tried to pay for his fuel, the banking monitor flashed a red zero. There was nothing in the account he shared with Dolly.

Impossible!.-or not really impossible, he thought, looking across the field to where Wan's lander had been ten days earlier and was no more. And when he took time to race over to the apartment he was not really surprised by what he found. Their bank account was gone. Dolly's clothes were gone, the hand puppets were gone, and most gone of all was Dolly herself.

I was not thinking at all of Audee Walthers at that time. If I had been, I would surely have wept for him-or for myself. I would have thought that it was at least a good excuse for weeping. The tragedy of the dear, sweet lover gone away was one I knew well, my own lost love having locked herself inside a black hole years and years before.

But the truth is I never gave him a thought. I was concerned with self affairs. What occupied me most notably were the stabbings in my gut, but also I spent a lot of time thinking about the nastiness of terrorists threatening me and everything around me.

Of course, that was not the only nastiness around. I thought about my worn-out intestines because they forced me to. But meanwhile my store-bought arteries were slowly hardening, and every day six thousand cells were dying in my irreplaceable brain; and meanwhile stars slowed in their flight and the universe dragged itself toward its ultimate entropic death, and meanwhile-Meanwhile everything, if you stopped to think of it, was skidding downhill. And I never gave any of it a thought.

But that's the way we do it, isn't it? We keep going because we have schooled ourselves not to think of any of those "meanwhiles"-until, like my gut, they force themselves on us.

3 Senseless Violence

A bomb in Kyoto that incinerated a thousand thousand-year-old carved wooden Buddhas, a crewless ship that homed on the Gateway asteroid and released a cloud of anthrax spores when it was opened, a shooting in Los Angeles, and plutonium dust in the Staines reservoir for London- those were the things that were forcing themselves on all of us. Terrorism. Acts of senseless violence. "There's a queerness in the world," said I to my dear wife, Essie. "Individuals act sober and sensible, but in groups they are brawling adolescents-such childishness people exhibit when they form groups!"

"Yes," said Essie, nodding, "that is true, but tell me, Robin. How is your gut?"

"As well as can be expected," I said lightly, adding as a joke, "You can't get good parts anymore." For those guts were, of course, a transplant, like a sizable fraction of the accessories my body requires to keep itself moving along-such are the benefits of Full Medical Plus. "But I am not talking about my own sickness. I'm talking about the sickness of the world."

"And is right that you should do so," Essie agreed, "although is my opinion that if you got your gut relined you would talk about such things less often." She came up behind me and rested her palm on my forehead, gazing abstractedly out at the Tappan Sea. Essie understands instrumentation as few people do and has prizes to prove it, but when she wants to know if I have a fever she checks it the way her nurse did to her when she was a toddler in Leningrad. "Is not very hot," she said reluctantly, "but what does Albert say?"