He was shaking his head. “No, Robin. We have detected one. The only reason we did is that the Foe used the standard Earth communications facilities, and so that particular burst transmission, which the children on Moorea originated, turned up on the logs as an anomaly. But we don’t monitor everything, Robin. If there were Foe on, say, Peggys Planet, where things are a lot looser, would anyone have noticed one more transmission? Or from a ship in space? Or, for that matter, from the Watch Wheel itself, say a few months ago, before we tightened everything up? I don’t think so, Robin. I think we have to assume that all the ‘false alarms’ on the Wheel were not false; that the Foe penetrated it some time ago; that they have gone wherever they wanted to go in our space and seen everything they wanted to see, and no doubt reported back to the kugelblitz. That,” he said, smiling cheerfully, “is what I meant by ‘The cat is among the pigeons.’ Why,” he finished, looking around in mild curiosity, “it would not surprise me a bit if there were a few of them right here with us on the True Love.”
I jumped.
I couldn’t help it. I was still bruised and shaken from that terrible, hurtful experience. I looked around wildly, and Albert chided, “Oh, you wouldn’t see them, Robin.”
“I don’t expect to see them,” I snarled. “But where could they hide?” He shrugged. “If I were forced to speculate,” he said, “why, I would try to put myself in their place. Where could I hide if I wanted to stow away on the True Love without being seen? It would not be difficult. We have a great deal of stored data here. There are thousands of files that we haven’t opened. Any one of them might have a couple of stowaways—or a thousand of them. I mean, assuming the concept of ‘number’ of individuals has any meaning to what may well be a collective intelligence. Robin,” he said seriously, “I do not think that creatures capable of reversing the expansion of the universe can be discounted lightly. If I can think of one place to hide-in the programs for penetrating black holes, for example, or in some of the subroutines for translating, say, Polish into Heechee-believe me, they will no doubt be able to think of thousands. I would not even assume they were destroyed on Tahiti simply because you—” He stopped and cleared his throat, glancing apologetically at me.
“Go on,” I growled. “You don’t have to worry about reminding me that I died. I haven’t forgotten.”
He shrugged. “At any rate,” he finished, “as to whether some of them are watching us right now, we simply have no evidence at all.”
“So we search the ship!” shouted General Cassata, who had been listening without talking for a long time. “Mrs. Broadhead, most of these programs are yours, aren’t they? Fine! You tell us what to do, and—”
She was looking at Albert as she said, “Moment, please, General. Tricky weird program has not finished its fooling-around report, I think.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Broadhead.” Albert beamed. “Perhaps you have forgotten the other main heading in my brief synoptic report. ‘The dog did not bark.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, hell, Albert,” I said, “you’ll be the death of me, with your silly literary references. What’s that, Sherlock Holmes? Meaning the important thing is that something did not happen? And what something is that?”
“Why, simply that we’re still here, Robin,” he said, smiling approvingly at me for my sagacity.
I stopped laughing. I did not think I understood him exactly, and was afraid that perhaps I did.
“That is to say,” he amplified, comfortably sucking on his pipe, “although we must assume that the Foe have been able to roam more or less at will around the Galaxy for some time, and although they certainly have the capacity to wipe out entire civilizations at will, since they have done so in the past, and although we have no effective way known to me of interfering with this if they should choose to do it-we have not been wiped out.”
I was sitting straight up by then, and laughter was nowhere in my feelings. “Go on!” I barked.
He looked mildly surprised. “Why, Robin,” he said peaceably, “I think the conclusion follows rather inescapably from all of that.”
“Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it,” I said-or whimpered, because, to be truthful, I was no longer feeling even as good as I had when the discussion began.
“Yes, that’s possible,” he said solemnly, sucking on his pipe.
“Then, for God’s sake,” I yelled, “what the hell have you got to look cheerful about?”
He said gently, “Robin, I know this is upsetting to you, but do try to think it out logically. If they have the intention of wiping us out and we have no way of preventing it, then what is there for us to do? Nothing at all; it is a fruitless hypothesis, because it does not lead to any useful course of action. I prefer the opposite assumption.”
“Which is what?”
“That they have, at least, reserved decision,” he said. “That at some future point we may be able to take some action we don’t yet know about. Until then, I think we might as well just relax and enjoy ourselves, don’t you, Mrs. Broadhead?”
“Wait a God-damned minute,” I yelled. “What kind of future action are we talking about? Why are we going out to the kugelblitz, anyway? You don’t for one moment think that one of us is going to try to get into the kugelblitz and talk to these—”
I stopped. They were all looking at me with an expression I recognized.
I had seen it a long, long time ago, on the Gateway asteroid. It was the kind of look the other prospectors gave you after you had signed up for a mission that might make you rich and was a lot more likely to kill you dead. But I didn’t even remember volunteering.
We had at that point, I guess, been on the way for maybe an hour or so, meat time; and already it had been a long, long trip.
See, although all this was—was—I guess the only way I can say it is, was a great pain in the ass, it wasn’t unique in human history.
Human beings had gotten out of the habit of long travel times, that’s all. We had to learn about them all over again.
Our ancestors of a couple of centuries back wouldn’t have had that problem. They knew all about the relationship between space and time long before Albert Einstein. Go a long space, take a long time. That was the rule. It wasn’t until jet airplanes came in that people began to forget it. (And had to remember again when they started into space.) Think of Admiral Nelson playing one last game of bowls before getting into his ship to meet the Spanish Armada. Napoleon invading Russia like a package tour, with a dinner, a ball, and an entertainment at every night’s stop-oh, that was the way to fight a war! Old ways were best. When Alexander the Great came out of Macedonia to conquer the world, it wasn’t any blitzkrieg. He took his time. He stopped off here to sit out the winter, there to set up a puppet government, this other place to get some lovely local lady pregnant-often enough, hanging around until the baby was born. If you’ve been in a battle and then are sitting around your troop transport to dawdle toward the next one, you’ve got a weird, unreal time in between.
We weren’t fighting a war, exactly. At least, we hoped we weren’t. But we were on our way to something just as decisive and dangerous, and, oh!, did we have time! Do you know how long fifty days is? It is roughly 4,000,000,000 milliseconds, and we spent them the way our distinguished predecessors did. We feasted, feted, and fucked our way across the Galaxy.
We did it in all the style of any Napoleon or Alexander, too, because Albert Einstein has great resources. He provided us with some of the neatest surrounds I have ever seen. For hours Essie and I hid away from our traveling companions, sunbathing and snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. We dragged ourselves out of the soft, salt shallows onto a quarter-hectare sand island, where we made love in a shady silk tent with its skirts raised to let the breezes through. There was a bar and a picnic table and a hot freshwater Jacuzzi, and that’s how we passed the first “day.”