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what they had been up to, decided against it. Paul was, in any event, more
interested in what they had just discovered.
He said, "Hey, kids, listen to this." He dialed Henrietta's number, waited
until her weepy voice said a tentative hello and then asked: "Who are you?"
The voice strengthened. "I am a computer analog," it said firmly. "When I was
alive I was
Mrs. Arnold Meacham of mission Orbit Seventy-four, Day Nineteen. I have a
bachelor of science and master's from Tulane and the Ph.D. from the University
of Pennsylvania, and my special discipline is astrophysics. After twenty-two
days we docked at an artifact and were subsequently captured by its occupants.
At the time of my death I was thirty-eight years old, two years younger than-"
the voice hesitated, "than Doris Filgren, our pilot, who-" it hesitated again,
"who-who my husband seemed to-who had an affair with- who-" The voice was
sobbing now, and Paul turned it off.
"Well, it doesn't last," he said, "but there it is. Poor dumb old Vera has
sorted out some kind of a connection with reality for her. And not just for
her. Do you want to know your mother's name, Wan?"
The boy was staring at him, pop-eyed. "My mother's name?" he shrilled.
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"Or anybody else's. Tiny Jim, for instance. He was actually an airbody pilot
from Venus
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederi...0-%20Beyond%20The%20Blue%20Ev
ent%20Horizon.txt (52 of 121) [1/15/03 6:32:56 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%202%20-%20Beyond
%20The%20Blue%20Event%20Horizon.txt who got to Gateway, and then here. His
name is James Cornwell. Willard was an English teacher. He embezzled money
from the students' fund to pay his way to Gateway-didn't get much out of it,
of course. His first flight brought him here. The downlink computers wrote an
interrogation program for Vera, and she's been working at it all along,
and-what's the matter, Wan?"
The boy licked his lips. "My mother's name?" he repeated.
"Oh. Sorry," Paul apologized, reminded to be kind. It had not occurred to him
that Wan's emotions would be involved. "Her name was Elfega Zamorra. But she
doesn't seem to be one of the
Dead Men, Wan. I don't know why. And your father-well, that's a funny thing.
Your real father was dead before she came here. The man you talk about must
have been somebody else, but I don't know who. Any idea why that is?" Wan
shrugged. "I mean, why your mother or, I guess you'd call him, your
step-father doesn't seem to be stored?" Wan spread his hands.
Lurvy moved closer to him. The poor kid! Responding to his distress, she put
her arm around him and said, "I guess this is a shock to you, Wan. I'm sure
we'll find out a lot more."
She gestured at the mare's nest of recorders, encoders and processors that
littered the once bare room. "Everything we find out gets transmitted back to
Earth," she said. He looked up at her politely, but not entirely
comprehendingly, as she tired to explain the vast complex of
information-handling machinery on Earth, and how it systematically analyzed,
compared, collated, and interpreted every scrap from Heechee Heaven and the
Food Factory-not to mention every other bit of data, wherever derived. Until
Janine intervened.
"Oh, leave him alone. He understands enough," she said wisely. "Just let him
live with it for a while." She rummaged through the case of rations for one of
the slate-green packages, and then said casually, "By the way. Why is that
thing beeping at us?"
Paul listened, then sprang to his clutter of gadgets. The monitor slaved to
their portable cameras was emitting a faint Queep. Queep. Queep. He spun it
around so they could all see, swearing to himself.
It was the camera they had left by the berryfruit bush, set patiently to
record the unchanging scene and to sound an alarm whenever it detected
movement.
It had. There was a face scowling out at them.
Lurvy felt a thrill of terror. "Heechee," she breathed.
But if so, the face showed no evidence of concealing a mind that could
colonize a galaxy.
It seemed to be down on all fours, peering worriedly at the camera, and behind
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