According to Albert, Russell didn’t turn a hair. He simply replied, “I would say, ‘God, You should have given me better evidence. ‘
So when I said to Albert, “Do you really think you’ve given me enough evidence?” he simply nodded, understanding the reference, and leaned down to scratch his ankle, and said, “I thought you’d come back to that, Robin. No. I haven’t given you any evidence at all. The only evidence, one way or the other, is in the universe itself”
“Then you’re not God?” I burst out, finally daring.
He said gravely, “I wondered when you were going to ask me that.”
“And I wonder when you’re going to answer!”
“Why, right now, Robin,” he said patiently. “If you are asking if the display you interacted with came from the same datastores as the simulation I generally display, why, yes. In that limited sense. But if you are asking a larger question, that’s harder. What’s God? More specifically, what is your God, Robin?”
“No, no,” I snarled. “I’m the one who’s asking the questions here.”
“Then I must try to answer for you, mustn’t I? Very well.” He pointed the pipestem at me. “I would take God, in your sense, to be a sort of vector sum of all the qualities you believe to be ‘just’ and ‘moral’ and ‘loving.’ And I suppose that among all sentient beings, humans and Heechee and machine intelligences and all, there is a sort of consensus of what these virtuous things are, and that a mutually shared ‘God’ would be a sum of all the vectors. Does that answer your question?”
“Not a bit!”
He smiled again, glancing at the viewscreen. All it showed was the usual pebbly gray nothing of a ship in faster-than-light travel. “I didn’t think it would, Robin. It doesn’t satisfy me, either, but then the universe is not necessarily in business to make us happy. Now.”
I opened my mouth to ask him the next question, but it took me a moment to formulate it and by then he was ahead of me. “With your permission, Robin,” he said. “We are really almost back into normal space now, and I am sure we would both like to look.”
And he didn’t wait for that permission. He was gone; but first he gave me one of those sweet, sad, compassionate smiles that, like so much else about my very dear friend Albert Einstein, drives me ape.
But of course he was right.
I showed him who was boss, though. I didn’t follow right away. I took, oh, maybe eight or nine milliseconds to-well, to do what Essie would have called “be gloopy,” but what I thought of as pondering what he had said.
There wasn’t all that much to ponder. Or, more accurately, there was one hell of a huge lot to ponder, but not enough detail to make pondering on it satisfactory. Maddening old Albert! If he made up his mind to play God-even an admitted imitation God-he could at least have been specific. I mean, that was what the rules called for! When Jehovah spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, when the Angel Morom handed over graven tablets-they said what they expected.
I had, I felt with aggravation, a right to specifics from my very own source of all wisdom.
But I obviously wasn’t going to get any, so I sulkily followed . just about in time.
The pebbly gray nothing was splotching and curdling even as I slid into the ship’s sensors, and in only another millisecond or two the splotches froze up into sharp detail.
I could feel Essie’s hand steal into mine as we looked in all directions at once. The old vertigo hit me, but I put it behind me.
There was too much to see. More spectacular than the Alaskan fjords, more awe-inspiring than anything I had ever perceived.
We were well out beyond the good old Galaxy itself-not just the fried-egg galactic disk, with its pearly lump of yolk in the middle, but way out past even the tenuous halo. “Below” us was a thin scattering of halo stars, like sparse little bubbles popping out of the galactic wine. “Above” was black velvet that someone had spilled tiny, faint curls of luminous paint on. Very near to us were the bright lights of the Watch Wheel, and off to one side were the dozen sulfur-yellow blobs of the kugelblitz.
They didn’t look dangerous. They just looked nasty, like some unattractive little mess left on a living-room floor that somebody should get busy and clean up.
I wished I knew how to do that.
Cried Essie triumphantly: “Look, dear Robin! No hooligan JAWS ships on Wheel! Have beat them here!”
And when I looked at the Wheel, it seemed she was right. The Wheel rolled silently in solitude, not a single ship in its dock, not a JAWS cruiser anywhere around it. But Albert sighed, “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Broadhead.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Cassata demanded. I couldn’t see him-none of us were bothering with visual simulations-but I could feel him bristling.
“Only that we have not beat them here, General Cassata,” said Albert. “We really could not, you know. The True Love is an admirable spacecraft, but it does not have the speed of a JAWS vessel. If they are not here, it is not that they have not yet arrived; it is that they have been here and left already.”
“Left where?” I barked.
He was silent for a moment. Then the vista before us began to swell. Albert was readjusting the ship’s sensors. The “below” grew shadowy. The “above”—the direction toward the kugelblitz itself-grew closer. “Tell me,” said Albert thoughtfully, “have you ever formed a visual impression of what it might be like when the Foe came out? I don’t mean a rational conjecture. I mean the sort of half-dozing fantasy a person might have, imagining that moment.”
“Albert!”
He disregarded me. “I think,” he said, “that somewhere in everybody lurks a kind of primitive notion that they might suddenly erupt from the kugelblitz in a fleet of immense, invulnerable space battleships, conquering everything before them. Irresistible. Rays blazing. Missiles pouring out—”
“Damn you, Albert!” I yelled.
He said somberly, “But Robin. See for yourself.”
And as the magnification increased . . . we did.
19
THE LAST SPACE FIGHT
Even when you see for yourself, you don’t always believe what you’re seeing. I didn’t. It was insane.
But it was there. The JAWS ships, in STL flight, hurtling toward the kugelblitz; and, from the kugelblitz, hurtling toward them, little bits of somethings that spurted out of the swirling, mustard-colored blurs. The little somethings were not blurred at all. They were bright metal.
They looked very much like spaceships.
There really could not be very much doubt of that. We were at extreme range for such tiny objects, but the True Love had first-rate instrumentation. What we saw we saw in optical and IR and X-ray and all the other photon frequencies there were, and we “saw” it as well through magnetometers and gray-detectors; and all confirmed unmistakably the terrible fact:
The kugelblitz had launched an armada.
I might have expected almost anything else, but not that. I mean, what use did the Foe have for spaceships? I could not answer that question, but ships they were. Big ones! Armored ones! A thousand and more of them, it looked like, and every one of them slipping into an immense cone formation and bearing directly down on the game, tiny, hopelessly outnumbered clutch of JAWS cruisers.
“Blow their goddamn rocks off,” yelled General Julio Cassata, and, you know, I yelled along with him.