The Annals of the Heechee

I think I should review a little at this point.

When word of the transmission to the kugelblitz reached JAWS, they sprang into action. Programs and people in gigabit time tracked down the source of the message and located it on an island called Moorea in the Pacific Ocean, and that happened fast enough to suit even me.

Then they put the brakes on, because meat people had to make the next decision.

They did it as fast as meat people possibly could, I’ll give them that, but meat people just aren’t in the running when you want real speed. It took many, many milliseconds before they took the next step, and a lot longer than that before they could put it into effect. They isolated Moorea from the power grid. They cut off every kind of electromagnetic energy anywhere on the island. Moorea was in quarantine. No further messages could get out.

That was the right thing to do, and I agreed with them. But it took them so long! And then it took long, long, longer for the next step. Not to know what to do, because Albert and Essie and I figured that out for them in no time at all, but interminably long to convince the meat people we were right, and to get them to do the right thing about it.

It was clear from the beginning that there were Foe loose on Earth. Albert and I went round and round that for thousands of milliseconds, and there simply was no other explanation. Those “false alarms” on the Watch Wheel had not been false at all. We managed to spell that out, millisecond by millisecond, for the meat people. Damn their souls, they argued. “You don’t know that,” General Halverssen objected, and I yelled (as much as I can yell in meat-people time), “Of course we do!” and Albert put in reasonably (and oh! how slowly), “It is true, General Halverssen, that we do not know it for a certainty. But science is not built on certainties; it is only a question of probabilities, and the probability that this is an accurate statement of reality is overwhelming. Really, there is no more convincing competing hypothesis.”

Can you image how much time just that kind of thing took?

And then we had to convince them of the next statement: That the Foe had human beings working for them. There we got into a long hassle because the generals of JAWS got bogged down on whether any human being, however vile or insane, would cooperate with the enemies of all organic life everywhere. It took forever to explain to them that we didn’t mean voluntary cooperation. Well, what did we mean, then? Well, we didn’t know what we meant, only that the fact that the transmission had been in the English language, however speeded up, was an unarguable bit of evidence that some human being somewhere had interfaced between the Foe and the transmission. And of course the contents of the transmission further supported the theory that it was Foe-generated and Foe-aimed. “If you were a scout for the Foe on Earth,” Albert inquired politely, “what would you do? Your first mission would be to learn everything you could about what human beings, and Heechee, were like; about what sort of technology they had and where it was deployed; about everything that could be useful in the event of a conflict. That is precisely what the transmission contained, Generals. There can really be no doubt.”

The arguments didn’t just take milliseconds. They took minutes, and the minutes stretched into hours, because the meat generals were not spending all their time talking to us. They had other things on their minds. They were acting. Moorea was isolated so no message traffic could go in either direction; so their only way of establishing any sort of control there was to insert new warm bodies with instructions to take over. Take over what? we asked in vain. Take over the island, of course, was all the answer we got.