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keeping an eye on a developing civilization. Evolution takes a long time, so
you don't want to just sit there and watch. What you'd like to do is get a
quick estimate, maybe every thousand years or so, sort of a spot check. Well,
given something like the cocoon, you could just send somebody over to the Food
Factory every once in a while, maybe every thousand years or more; climb in
the couch, get an instant feel for what was happening. It would take only
minutes." He paused consideringly for a moment, before going on. "Then-but
this is a speculation on top of a conjecture; I wouldn't even assign a
probability rating to it at all-then, if you found anything interesting, you
could explore further. You could even do something else. This is really far
out, Robin. You might even suggest things. The cocoon transmits as well as
receives, that's what the fevers came from.
Perhaps it can also transmit concepts. We know that in human history many of
the great inventions sprang up all over the world, apparently independently,
maybe simultaneously. Are they Heechee suggestions, via the couch?"
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He sat there, puffing his pipe and smiling at me, while I thought about that.
All the thinking in the world didn't make it good, clean fun. Thrilling,
maybe. But nothing you could relax to. The world had changed in fundamental
ways since the first astronauts discovered Heechee diggings on Venus, and the
more we explored the bigger the changes got. A lost kid, playing with
something he didn't understand, had plunged the whole human race into
recurring madness for more than a decade. If we kept on playing with things we
didn't understand, what were the Heechee going to give us for an encore?
To say nothing of the queasiness of Albert's suggestion that these creatures
had been spying on us for hundreds of thousands of years-maybe even throwing
us a crumb, now and then, to see what we would make of it.
I told Albert to bring me up to date on everything else he knew about what was
going on in the Food Factory, and while he was running through the physical
facts I called up Harriet. She appeared in one corner of the tank, looking
questioning, and took my order for dinner while Albert kept right on with his
show and tell. He was continuously monitoring all the transmissions even as he
was reporting on them, and be showed me selected scenes of the boy, the
Herter-Hall party, the interiors of the artifact. The damn thing was still
determined to go its own way. Best course estimates suggested that it was
moving toward a new cluster of comets, several million miles away-
at present rates, it would get there in a few months. "Then what?" I demanded.
Albert shrugged apologetically. "Presumably it will then stay there until it
has mined them of all the CHON ingredients, Robin."
"Then can we move it?"
"No evidence, Robin. But it's possible. Speaking of which, I have a theory
about the controls of the Heechee ships. When one of them reaches an operating
artifact-the Food Factory, Gateway, whatever-its controls unlock and it can
then be redirected. At any rate, I think that may be what happened to Ms.
Patricia Bover-and that, too, has certain obvious implications," he twinkled.
I don't like to let a computer program think it's smarter than I am. "You mean
that there may be a lot of stranded Gateway astronauts all over the Galaxy,
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because their controls unlocked and they didn't know how to get back?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said approvingly. "That may account for what Wan calls
the `Dead
Men'. We've received some conversations with them, by the way. Their responses
are sometimes quite nonrational, and of course we're handicapped by not being
able to interact. But it does appear that they are, or were, human beings."
"Are you telling me they were alive?"
"Sure thing, Robin, or at least in the sense that Enrico Caruso's voice on a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
