See, I didn’t have the zippy perceptors and actuators that were part of the real me, back on the True Love. I had a simple piezovision cominset, the kind people put in their living rooms. They’re designed to be used by meat people. Therefore they are meat-people slow. They don’t have to be fast, because meat people aren’t. The commset’s scanning system takes a look at what is before it, point by point. One by one it examines each of those points and registers its properties-so much luminance, at such-and-such a wavelength-and then, one by one, it plots them in its memory store for transmission.
We were not about to let the set transmit, of course. The only transmissions from that room went from doppel-me to real-me 100,000 kilometers out in space.
The set’s scanners were quick enough for the purpose, by meat-person standards. They looked at every point twenty-four times a second, and meat persistence of vision filled in the gaps. What meat people saw was the illusion of real-time presence.
I did not. What both doppel-me and real-me saw was this painfttl building-up of images, point by point. We were on gigabit time, orders of magnitude faster. We could see each individual data point come in. It looked as though someone were filling in a paint-by-number canvas in each one-twenty-fourth of a second, a dot of red here, a darker scarlet next to it, another scarlet, and so, painstakingly, point by point, we saw displayed a single line of Oniko’s red skirt. Then there were a thousand points for the next line, and the next, and the next, while I and doppel-I sat fidgeting and metaphorically gnawing our metaphorical thumbnails, waiting for the whole picture to show.
Sound was no better. The median frequency of human speech, say the middle A, is 440 hertz. So what I “heard” (perceived as pressure pulses, actually) was a putt . . . putt . . . putt of sound, each individual putt coming a couple of milliseconds after the last. Whereupon I had to take note of the amplitude of each pulse and the elapsed time between them, less or more as the tone was raised or lowered, and identify them as frequencies, and constitute them as sound spectrograms, and translate them into syllables and finally words. Oh, I could interpret them, all right. But, my God, it was tedious.
It was frustrating in all the ways there were to be frustrating, because it was urgent.
The urgency was the Foe, to be sure, but I had some private urgencies of my own. Curiosity, for instance. This crazy old man named Heimat, I well knew, had tried very hard to murder both me and my wife. I really wanted to talk to him about that. Then there were the kids. They were a very special urgency, because I had a clear picture of what they had been through and how terrified, worn out, and demoralized they had to be. I wanted to rescue them from that ordeal within the next millisecond, no time for meat-person haggling and deal-making with the old killers; and I couldn’t.
I also couldn’t wait, so while Heimat and Basingstoke were still opening their mouths, expressions shattered in astonishment, I cut in to say directly to the kids: “Oniko, Sneezy, Harold: You’re safe now. These two men can’t hurt you.”
And where we all sat in the control room of the True Love, Albert sucked his pipe meditatively and said, “I don’t blame you for that, Robin, but please don’t forget that the Foe are the first order of business.”
I didn’t get a chance to answer. Essie was in there before me, crying indignantly, “Albert! Are just a machine, after all? These poor children are scared out of wits!”
“He’s right, though,” argued Cassata. “The children will be all right. The Papeete police are on their way—”
“And will arrive when?” demanded Essie. It was a rhetorical question; we all knew the answer. She furnished it: “About one million milliseconds, is not right? How much can happen, even in meat-person time?”
My doppel was just finishing saying, “—o-u-’-r-e s-a-f-e,” so there was plenty of time for debate. I said to Albert: “What do you think Heimat will do?”
“He has that gun,” said Albert judiciously. “He will think, perhaps, of using Oniko as a hostage.”
“That we can take care of,” Cassata said grimly.
“No way, Julio!” I said. “You crazy? If you go throwing beam weapons around in that little room somebody could get hurt.”
“Only the somebody we aim at!”
Albert coughed deprecatingly. “The accuracy of your weapons is undoubted, General. However, there is also the question of the integrity of the Faraday cage. We have that space completely isolated except for the single channel between Mr. Broadhead and his doppel. If you puncture it, what will happen with the stowaways?”
Cassata hesitated. We all hesitated, because that was, really, where the ultimate worry was. The stowaways. The Foe!
Looking at three decent little kids held hostage by two ancient thugs, you almost forgot where the real terror lay. Heimat and Basingstoke were amateurs! Between the two of them they had murdered a few tens of thousands, maybe, of innocent men, women, and children, wrecked some billions of dollars worth of property, upset the lives of tens of millions of people . . . why, how trivial they were, when you compared them with the race that shifted stars, annihilated whole planets, dared disturb the immense universe itself! Terror? No human terrorist was more than a naughty pipsqueak brat compared with the Foe-not these two, no, nor Hitler, nor Jenghiz Khan, nor Assurbanipal.
And there were Foe there in that room, and I was proposing to try to confront them.
My doppel finally finished its reassurance to the children. Cyril Basingstoke opened his mouth to say something. Through my doppel I could see his expression. His eyes were on me, with curiosity and a kind a respect. It was the sort of respect one gladiator might give another when they met in the arena-a gladiator who recognized the difference in weapons between his opponent’s and his own, but still thought there was a pretty good chance that his trident could prevail over the other guy’s net.
It was not at all the kind of look you would expect from someone ready to concede defeat.
Measured by the slow tick of meat-person clocks, what happened next must have seemed to happen very fast. The two ancient outlaws were way past their prime, but there were a lot of new parts in their organs and musculature, and the wicked old brains were still alert. “Beaupre!” Basingstoke snapped. “Cover the girl!” And he himself made a dash for the table where the spring-loaded spear gun had been sitting all this while.
From the screen I called anxiously: “Hold everything! We can make a deal with you!”
Heimat, already with one hand wrapped in Oniko’s hair and the other pressing the fish-killer gun against her temple, snarled triumphantly, “You damn well will! You want to hear our terms? Freedom! Complete freedom, transportation to a planet of our choice, and-and a million dollars each!”
“And more guns, man,” added Cyril Basingstoke practically. He was always the shrewder of the two, I thought with a certain amount of admiration. And I really admired the quick thinking and precise actions of the two old monsters. I mean, consider! They must have been startled considerably by my sudden appearance on the commset screen; it had taken them no more than ten seconds to answer, make a plan, and carry it out, so that now they had the children covered and their demands stated.
Ten seconds, however, are ten thousand milliseconds.
I said from the screen, “Freedom you can have, both of you. That is, you can be out of prison, and you can be set free on another planet-not Earth, not Peggys, but a rather nice one. The only thing is, you’ll be the only two people there.” It was a sound and fair offer. I even had a specific planet in mind, because Albert had found a good one. True, it was inside the core, one of the extras the Heechee had prudently included for expansion purposes, but it was certainly a livable place. They could do what they liked there-especially since, being in the core, they would be doing it forty thousand times slower than on the Earth.