Heechee Rendezvous

By Frederik Pohl

Third book in the Heechee series, this one finds Broadhead in his last days and mostly referred to in the book as Robin. He is happily married to his second wife and they are tremendously wealthy. But all his wealth is not enough to stave off death, as his body is slowly breaking down, despite the many transplants he has had.
Meanwhile, the Heechee have just been told about the human adventures in space and they are alarmed. The Heechee hid themselves out of fear of a race of immaterial beings they call the Assassins. The Assassins destroy all technological societies that they find and are in the process of attempting to change the universe to suit them better than the current universe. However this will take them billions of years.
The Heechee are worried and frightened that all the human activity will attract the attention of the Assassins and bring destruction down not only on humanity but on the Heechee too. The Heechee emissary and his crew are racing to prevent this from happening. The first human-crewed ship they encounter is that of Wan and his passenger, Gelle, Robin Broadhead's first wife, whom he believes has been dead for thirty years. Instead, she was stuck in a black hole where time passed extremely slowly until she was found by Wan.
When Robin finds out this first wife is alive, he is in a pother what to do about it. He loved and missed his first wife but he also dearly loves his second wife, Essie. Meanwhile, his body is giving out on him, a fact he hides from everyone until it is too late. Which totally solves his wife dilemma.

This was an OK read. I found myself skipping much of the parts that deal with Robin and his aches and pains and his dialogues with his computer-generated companion, Albert. Albert gets to stick his two cents worth into the story with several short interruptions that too often deal with subject matter a bit too esoteric for me to enjoy:

The energy density of black-body radiation goes up as the cube of the temperature—that's the old Stefan-Bolzmann [sic] law—but the number of photons goes up linearly with the temperature, too, so effectively it's a fourth-power increase inside the kugelblitz. At one Kelvin it's 4.72 electron-volts per liter. At three million it's three million to the fourth power times that—oh, say about 382,320,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000 ev/liter.

 I mean, really. I don't need to know that or read that. But a lot of science fiction writers like to stick that kind of stuff in their stories. Just goes over my head though. I usually just skip those parts.
Also, I thought kugelblitz was a term made up by the author. Turns out it is not. A kugelblitz is a "black hole" made of light. Huh? Nevermind!

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