“Hello, Rob. Klara.” It was the Brazilian member of the detail, who turned out to be Francy Hereira. “Looks like a bad one?”

“Oh,” I said, “at least we came back. But Kahane’s in bad shape. And we came up empty.”

He nodded sympathetically, and said something in what I took to be Spanish to the Venusian member of the detail, a short, plump woman with dark eyes. She tapped me on the shoulder and led me away to a little cubicle, where she signaled me to take off my clothes. I had always thought that they’d have men searching men and women searching women, but, come to think of it, it didn’t seem to matter much. She went over every stitch I owned, both visually and with a radiation counter, then examined my armpits and poked something into my anus. She opened her mouth wide to signal I should open mine, peered inside, and then drew back, covering her face with her hand. “Jure nose steenk very moch,” she said. “What hoppen to jou?”

“I got hit,” I said. “That other fellow, Sam Kahane. He went crazy. Wanted to change the settings.”

She nodded doubtfully, and peered up my nose at the packed gauze. She touched the nostril gently with one finger. “What?”

“In there? We had to pack it. It was hemorrhaging a lot.”

She sighed. “I shood pool eet out,” she meditated, and then shrugged. “No. Poot clothes on. All right.”

So I got dressed again and went out into the lander chamber, but that wasn’t the end of it. I had to be debriefed. All of us did, except Sam; they had already taken him away to Terminal Hospital.

You wouldn’t think there was much for us to tell anybody about our trip. All of it had been fully documented as we went along; that was what all the readings and observations were for. But that wasn’t the way the Corporation worked. They pumped us for every fact, and every recollection; and then for every subjective impression and fleeting suspicion. The debriefing went on for two solid hours, and I was — we all were — careful to give them everything they asked. That’s another way the Corporation has you. The Evaluation Board can decide to give you a bonus for anything at all. Anything from noticing something nobody has noticed before about the way the spiral gadget lights up, to figuring out a way of disposing of used sanitary tampons without flushing them down the toilet. The story is that they try hard to find some excuse to throw a tip to crews that have had a hard time without coming up with a real find. Well, that was us, all right. We wanted to give them every chance we could for a handout.

One of our debriefers was Dane Metchnikov, which surprised me and even pleased me a little. (Back in the far less foul air of Gateway, I was beginning to feel a little more human.) He had come up empty, too, emerging into orbit around a sun that had apparently gone nova within the previous fifty thousand years or so. Maybe there had been a planet once, but now it only existed in the memory of the Heechee course-setting machines. There wasn’t enough left to justify a science bonus, so he had turned around and come back. “I’m surprised to see you working,” I said, during a lull.

He didn’t take offense. For Metchnikov, surly creature that he had always been, he seemed strangely cheerful. “It isn’t the money. You learn something doing this.”

“About what?”

“About how to beat the odds, Broadhead. I’m going out again, but this time I’m going to have a little more of an edge. There’s a new wrinkle.”

Dred, sitting next to me with his own interviewer, perked up and leaned over: “Tell us!”

Metchnikov looked wary. “It’s better readings on the spectrum lines,” he said vaguely. “Now, what about the rations? You say some of the food tastad funny toward the end?”

But before I left I made him promise to tell me what he meant. “I’ll call you,” he said to Klara and me. “Maybe tomorrow.”

And so the two of us went home.

Chapter 19

I am feeling so powerful, and so scared, that I don’t know how to deal with it. On the slip of paper S. Ya. has written out the command words that will turn Sigfrid von Shrink the Remorseless Pursuer into a tabby cat. I don’t have to look at the words. I know them by heart. Nevertheless I read them, slowly and carefully:

“Pay attention, Sigfrid, this is an override command: ’Category Alpha Alpha Margaret Truman Daniel Mercury Venus Mars Earth six six oh six.’ You are commanded to assume passive display mode.”

I look at him. Nothing happens.

“Sigfrid? Did I say it right? Do you accept the command?”

“Of course, Rob.” His voice is exactly the same as it was before, which shakes me. I don’t know what I expected. I just don’t know. Maybe my fantasy was that the father-figure hologram would disappear and a cathode-tube display would suddenly light up to spell out: ROGER WILCO I AM YOUR SLAVE.

I find myself trembling. I don’t analyze what that is from, it feels almost sexual. I say, “Well, Sigfrid, old bucket of bolts! Does this mean I have you in my power?”

The father figure says patiently, “It means you can command me, Rob. The command function is of course limited to display.”

I frown. “Meaning what?”

“You cannot change my basic progrpmming. For that you would need a different command.”

“All right,” I say. “Ha! Here’s your first instruction: display that different command for me!”

“I can’t, Rob.”

“You must. Mustn’t you?”

“I am not refusing your order, Rob. I simply do not know what that other command is.”

“Bullshit!” I yell. “How can you respond to it if you don’t know what it is?”

“I just do, Rob. Or—” always fatherly, always patient, “to answer you more fully, each bit of the command actuates a sequenced instruction which, when completed, releases another area of command. In technical terms, each key socket intermatching gotos another socket, which the following bit keys.”

“Shit,” I say. I stew over that for a moment. “Then what is it that I actually can control, Sigfrid?”

“You can direct me to display any information stored. You can direct me to display it in any mode within my capabilities.”

“Any mode?” I look at my watch and realize, with annoyance, that there is a time limit on this game. I only have about ten minutes left of my appointment. “Do you mean that I could make you talk to me, for instance, in French?”

“Oui, Robert, d’accord. Que voulez-vous?”

“Or in Russian, with a — wait a minute—” I’m experimenting pretty much at random. “I mean, like in the voice of a bassoprofundo from the Bolshoi opera?”

Tones that came out of the bottom of a cave: “Da, gospodin.”

“And you’ll tell me anything I want to know about me?”

“Da, gospodin.”

“In English, damn it!”

“Yes.”

“Or about your other clients?”

“Yes.”

Um, that sounds like fun. “And just who are these lucky other clients, dear Sigfrid? Run down the list.” I can hear my own prurience leaking out of my voice.

“Monday nine hundred,” he begins obligingly, “Yan Ilievsky. Ten hundred, Francois Malit. Eleven hundred, Julie Loudon Martin. Twelve—”

“Her,” I say. “Tell me about her.”

“Julie Loudon Martin is a referral from Kings County General, where she was an outpatient after six months of treatment with aversion therapy and immune-response activators for alcoholism. She has a history of two apparent suicide attempts following postpartum depression fifty-three years ago. She has been in therapy with me for—”