Фредерик Пол. За синим горизонтом событий (engl)
Frederik Pohl. Beyond the blue event horizon
© Frederik Pohl. Beyond the blue event horizon (1980). GateWay #2.
© Фредерик Пол. За синим горизонтом событий.
SpellCheck by: GrAnD
Date: 16.07.2002
1 Wan
It was not easy to live, being young, being so completely alone. "Go to
the gold, Wan, steal what you want, learn. Don't be afraid," the Dead Men
told him. But how could he not be afraid? The silly but worrisome Old Ones
used the gold passages. They might be found anywhere in them, most likely
at the ends of them, where the gold skeins of symbols ran endlessly into
the center of things. That is, exactly where the Dead Men kept coaxing him
to go. Perhaps he had to go there, but he could not help being afraid.
Wan did not know what would happen if the Old Ones ever caught him. The
Dead Men probably knew, but he could not make any sense out of their
ramblings on the subject. Once long ago, when Wan was tiny-when his
parents were still alive, it was that long ago-his father had been caught.
He had been gone for a long time and then had come back to their green-lit
home. He was shaking, and two-year-old Wan had seen that his father was
afraid and had screamed and roared because that was so frightening to him.
Nevertheless he had to go to the gold, whether the grave old frog-jawed
ones were there or not, because that was where the books were. The Dead
Men were well enough. But they were tedious, and touchy, and often
obsessed. The best sources of knowledge were books, and to get them Wan
had to go where they were.
The books were in the passages that gleamed gold. There were other
passages, green and red and blue, but there were no books there. Wan
disliked the blue corridors, because they were cold and dead, but that was
where the Dead Men were. The green was used up. He spent most of his time
where the winking red cobwebs of light were spread against the walls and
the hoppers still held food; he was sure to be untroubled there, but he
was also alone. The gold was still in use, and therefore rewarding, and
therefore also perilous. And now he was there, cursing fretfully to
himself-but under his breath-because he was stuck. Bloody damn Dead Men!
Why did he listen to their blathering?
He huddled, trembling, in the insufficient shelter of a berry bush,
while two of the foolish Old Ones stood thoughtfully plucking berries from
its opposite side and placing them precisely into their froggy mouths. It
was unusual, really, that they should be so idle. Among the reasons Wan
despised the Old Ones was that they were always busy, always fixing and
carrying and chattering, as though driven. Yet here these two were, idle
as Wan himself.
Both of them had scraggly beards, but one also had breasts. Wan
recognized her as a female he had seen a dozen times before; she was the
one who was most diligent in pasting colored bits of something-paper?
plastic?-onto her sari, or sometimes onto her sallow, mottled skin. He did
not think they would see him, but he was greatly relieved when, after a
time, they turned together and moved away. They did not speak. Wan had
almost never heard any of the grave old frog-jaws speak. He did not
understand them when they did. Wan spoke six languages well-his father's
Spanish, mother's English, the German, the Russian, the Cantonese and the
Finnish of one or another of the Dead Men. But what the frog-jaws spoke he
did not comprehend at all.
As soon as they had retreated down the golden corridor-quick, run,
grab! Wan had three books and was gone, safely back in a red corridor. It
might be that the Old Ones had seen him, or perhaps not. They did not
react quickly. That was why he had been able to avoid them so long. A few
days in the passages, and then he was gone. By the time they had become
aware he was around, he wasn't; he was back in the ship, away.
He carried the books back to the ship on top of a pannier of food
packets. The drive accumulators were nearly recharged. He could leave
whenever he liked, but it was better to charge them all the way and he did
not think there was any need to hurry. He spent most of an hour filling
plastic bags with water for the tedious journey. What a pity there were no
readers in the ship to make it less tedious! And then, wearying of the
labor, he decided to say good-bye to the Dead Men. They might, or might
not, respond, or even care. But he had no one else to talk to.
Wan was fifteen years old, tall, stringy, very dark by nature and
darker still from the lights in the ship, where he spent so much of his
time. He was strong and self-reliant. He had to be. There was always food
in the hoppers, and other goods for the taking, when he dared. Once or
twice a year, when they remembered, the Dead Men would catch him with
their little mobile machine and take him to a cubicle in the blue passages
for a boring day during which he was given a rather complete physical
examination. Sometimes he had a tooth filled, usually he received some
long-acting vitamin and mineral shots, and once they had fitted him with
glasses. But he refused to wear them. They also reminded him, when he
neglected it too long, to study and learn, both from them and from the
storehouses of books. He did not need much reminding. He enjoyed learning.
Apart from that, he was wholly on his own. If he wanted clothes, he went
into the gold and stole them from the Old Ones. If he was bored, he
invented something to do. A few days in the passages, a few weeks on the
ship, a few more days in the other place, then back to repeat the process.
Time passed. He had no one for company, had not had since he was four and
his parents disappeared, and had almost forgotten what it was like to have
a friend. He did not mind. His life seemed complete enough to him, since
he had no other life to compare it with.
Sometimes he thought it would be nice to settle in one place or
another, but this was only dreaming. It never reached the stage of
intention. For more than eleven years he had been shuttling back and forth
like this. The other place had things that civilization did not. It had
the dreaming room, where he could lie fiat and close his eyes and seem not
to feel alone. But he could not live there, in spite of plenty of food and
no dangers, because the single water accumulator produced only a trickle.
Civilization had much that the outpost did not have: the Dead Men and the
books, scary exploring and daring raids for clothes or trinkets, something
happening. But he could not live there either, because the frog-jaws would
surely catch him sooner or later. So he commuted.
The main lobby door to the place of the Dead Men did not open when Wan
stepped on the treadle. He almost bumped his nose. Surprised, he stopped
and then gingerly pushed against the door, then harder. It took all his
strength to force it open. Wan had never had to open it by hand before,
though now and then it had hesitated and made disturbing noises. That was
an annoyance. Wan had experienced machines that broke down before; it was
why the green corridors were no longer very useful. But that was only food
and warmth, and there was plenty of that in the red, or even the gold. It
was worrisome that anything should go wrong around the Dead Men, because
if they broke down he had no others.
Still, all looked normal; the room with the consoles was brightly
fluoresced, the temperature was comfortable and he could hear the faint
drone and rare click of the Dead Men behind their panels as they thought
their lonely, demented thoughts and did whatever they did when he was not
speaking to them. He sat in his chair, shifting his rump as always to
accommodate to the ill-designed seat, and pulled the headset down over his
ears.
"I am going to the outpost now," he said.
There was no answer. He repeated it in all of his languages, but no one
seemed to want to talk. That was a disappointment. Sometimes two or three
of them would be eager for company, maybe even more. Then they could all
have a nice, long chat, and it would be as though he were not really alone
at all. Almost as though he were part of a "family", a word he knew from
the books and from what the Dead Men told him, but hardly remembered as a
reality. That was good. Almost as good as when he was in the dreaming
place, where for a while he could have the illusion of being part of a
hundred families, a million families. Hosts of people! But that was more
than he could handle for very long. And so, when he had to leave the
outpost to return for water, and for the more tangible company of the Dead
Men, he was never sorry. But he always wanted to come back to the cramped
couch and the velvety metal blanket that covered him in it, and to the
dreams.
It was waiting for him; but he decided to give the Dead Men another
chance. Even when they were not eager for talk, sometimes they were
interestable if addressed directly. He thought for a moment, and then
dialed number fifty-seven.
A sad, distant voice in his ear was mumbling to itself: "...tried to
tell him about the missing mass. Mass! The only mass on his mind was
twenty kilos of boobs and ass! That floozy, Doris. One look at her and,
oh, boy, forget about the mission, forget about me...
Frowning, Wan poised his finger to cancel. Fifty-seven was such a
nuisance! He liked to listen to her when she made sense, because she
sounded a little like the way he remembered his mother. But she always
seemed to go from astrophysics and space travel and other interesting
subjects directly to her own troubles. He spat at the point in the panels
behind which he had elected to believe fifty-seven lived-a trick he had
learned from the Old Ones-hoping she would say something interesting.
But she didn't seem to intend to. Number fifty-seven-when she was
coherent she liked to be called Henrietta-was babbling on about high
redshifts and Arnold's infidelities with Doris. Whoever they were. "We
could have been heroes," she sobbed, "and a ten-million-dollar grant,
maybe more, who knows what they'd pay for the drive? But they kept on
sneaking off in the lander, and "Who are you?"
"I'm Wan," the boy said, smiling encouragingly even though he did not
think she could see him. She seemed to be coming into one of her lucid
times. Usually she didn't know he was speaking to her. "Please keep on
talking."
There was a long silence, and then, "NGC 1199," she said. "Sagittarius
A West."
Wan waited politely. Another long pause, and then she said, "He didn't
care about proper motions. He made all his moves with Doris. Half his age!
And the brain of a turnip. She should never have been on the mission in
the first place..."
Wan wobbled his head like a frog-jawed Old One. "You are very boring,"
he said severely, and switched her off. He hesitated, then dialed the
professor, number fourteen: although Eliot was still a Harvard
undergraduate, his imagery was that of a fully mature man. And a genius at
that. 'I should have been a pair of ragged claws.' The self-deprecation of
mass man carried to its symbolic limit. How does he see himself? Not
merely as a crustacean. Not even as a crustacean, only the very
abstraction of a crustacean: claws. And ragged, at that. In the next line
we see..."
Wan spat again at the panel as he disconnected; the whole face of the
wall was stained with the marks of his displeasure. He liked when Doc
recited poetry, not so much when he talked about it. With the craziest of
the Dead Men, like fourteen and fifty-seven, you didn't have any choice
about what happened. They rarely responded, and almost never in a way that
seemed relevant, and you either listened to what they happened to be
saying or you turned them off.
It was almost time for him to go, but he tried one more time: the only
one with a three-digit number, his special friend, Tiny Jim. "Hello, Wan."
The voice was sad and sweet. It tingled in his mind, like the sudden
frisson of fear that he felt near the Old Ones. "It is you, Wan, isn't
it?"
"That is a foolish question. Who else would it be?"
"One keeps on hoping, Wan." There was a pause, then Tiny Jim suddenly
cackled, "Have I told you the one about the priest, the rabbi and the
dervish who ran out of food on the planet made of pork?"
"I think you have, Tiny Jim, and anyway I don't want to hear any jokes
now."
The invisible loudspeaker clicked and buzzed for a moment, and then the
Dead Man said, "Same old thing, Wan? You want to talk about sex again?"
The boy kept his countenance impassive, but that familiar tingle inside
his lower abdomen responded. "We might as well, Tiny Jim."
"You're a raunchy stud for your age, Wan," the Dead Man offered; and
then, "Tell you about the time I almost got busted for a sex offense? It
was hot as hell. I was going home on the late train to Roselle Park, and
this girl came in, sat across the aisle from me, put her feet up, and
began to fan herself with her skirt.
Well, what would you do? I looked, you know. And she kept on doing it,
and I kept looking, and finally around Highlands she complained to the
conductor and he threw me off the train. Do you know what the funny thing
was?"
Wan was rapt. "No, Tiny Jim," he breathed.
"The funny thing was I'd missed my regular train. I had time to kill in
the city, so I went to a porn flick. Two hours of, my God, every
combination you could think of. The only way I could've seen more was with
a proctoscope, so why was I slouching out over the aisle to peek at her
little white panties? But you know what was funnier than that?"
"No, Tiny Jim."
"She was right! I was staring, all right. I'd just been watching acres
of crotches and boobs, but I couldn't take my eyes off hers! That wasn't
the funniest thing, though. Do you want me to tell you the funniest thing
of all?"
"Yes, please, Tiny Jim. I do."
"Why, she got off the train with me! And took me to her home, boy, and
we just made out over and over, all night long. Never did catch her name.
What do you say to that, Wan?"
"I say, is that true, Tiny Jim?"
Pause. "Aw. No. You take all the fun out of things."
Wan said severely, "I don't want a made-up story, Tiny Jim. I want to
learn facts." Wan was angry, and thought of turning the Dead Man off to
punish him, but was not sure whom he would be punishing. "I wish you would
be nice, Tiny Jim," he coaxed.
"Well..." The bodiless mind clicked and whispered to itself for a
moment, sorting through its conversational gambits. Then it said, "Do you
want to know why mallard drakes rape their mates?"
"No!"
"I think you really do, though, Wan. It's interesting. You can't
understand primate behavior unless you comprehend the whole spectrum of
reproductive strategies. Even strange ones. Even the Acanthocephalan
worms. They practice rape, too, and do you know what Moniliformis dubius
does? They not only rape their females, they even rape competing males.
With like plaster of Paris! So the poor Other Worm can't get it up!"
"I don't want to hear all this, Tiny Jim."
"But it's funny, Wan! That must be why they call him 'dubius'!" The
Dead Man was chuckling mechanically, a-heh! A-heh!
"Stop it, Tiny Jim!" But Wan was not just angry any more. He was
hooked. It was his favorite subject, as Tiny Jim's willingness to talk
about it, at length and in variety, was what made him Wan's favorite among
the Dead Men. Wan unwrapped a food packet and, munching, said, "What I
really want to hear is how to make out, Tiny Jim, please?"
If the Dead Man had had a face it would have shown the strain of trying
to keep from laughing, but he said kindly, "'Kay, sonny. I know you keep
hoping. Let's see, did I tell you to watch their eyes?"
"Yes, Tiny Jim. You said if their pupils dilate it means they are
sexually aroused."
"Right. And I mentioned the existence of the sexually dimorphic
structures in the brain?"
"I don't think I know what that means, exactly."
"Well, I don't, either, but it's anatomically so. They're different,
Wan, inside and out."
"Please, Tiny Jim, keep telling me about the differences!" The Dead Man
did, and Wan listened absorbedly. There was always time to go to the ship,
and Tiny Jim was unusually coherent. All of the Dead Men had their own
special subjects that they zeroed in to talk about, as though each had
been frozen with one big thought in his mind. But even on the favored
topics you could not always expect them to make sense. Wan pushed the
mobile unit that they used to catch him-when it was working-out of the way
and sprawled on the floor, chin in hands, while the Dead Man chattered and
reminisced and explained courtship, and gifting, and making your move.
It was fascinating, even though he had heard it before. He listened
until the Dead Man slowed down, hesitated, and stopped. Then the boy said,
to confirm a theory:
"Teach me, Tiny Jim. I read a book in which a male and a female
copulated. He hit her on the head and copulated her while she was
unconscious. That appears to me an efficient way to 'love', Tiny Jim, but
in other stories it takes much longer. Why is this?"
"That was not love, sonny. That was what I was telling you about. Rape.
Rape is a bad idea for people, even if it works for mallard ducks."
Wan nodded and urged him on: "Why, Tiny Jim?"
Pause. "I will demonstrate it for you mathematically, Wan," the Dead
Man said at last. "Attractive sex objects may be defined as female, no
more than five years younger than you are, no more than fifteen years
older. These figures are normalized to your present age, and are also only
approximate. Attractive sex objects may further be characterized by
visual, olfactory, tactile, and aural qualities stimulating to you, in
descending weighted order of significance plotted against probability of
access. Do you understand me so far?"
"Not really."
Pause. "Well, that's all right for now. Now pay attention. On the basis
of those four preliminary traits, some females will attract you. Up to the
point of contact you will not know about other traits which may repel,
harm or detumesce you. 5/28 of subjects will be menstruating. 3/87 will
have gonorrhea, 2/95 syphilis. 1/17 will have excessive bodily hair, skin
blemishes or other physical deformities concealed by clothing. Finally,
2/71 will conduct themselves offensively during intercourse, i/i6 will
emit an unpleasant odor, 3/7 will resist rape so extensively as to
diminish your enjoyment; these are subjective values quantified to match
your known psychological profile. Cumulating these fractions, the odds are
better than six to one that you will not receive maximum pleasure from
rape."
"Then I must not copulate a woman without wooing?"
"That's right, boy. Not counting it's against the law."
Wan was thoughtfully silent for a moment, then remembered to ask, "Is
all this true, Tiny Jim?"
Cackle of glee. "Got you that time, kid! Every word."
Wan pouted like a frog-jaw. "That was not very exciting, Tiny Jim. In
fact, you have detumesced me."
"What do you expect, kid?" Tiny Jim said sullenly. "You told me not to
make up any stories. Why are you being so unpleasant?"
"I am getting ready to leave. I do not have much time."
"You don't have anything else!" cackled Tiny Jim.
"And you have nothing to say that I want to hear," said Wan cruelly. He
disconnected them all, and angrily he went to the ship and squeezed the
launch control. It did not occur to him that he was being rude to the only
friends he had in the universe. It had never occurred to him that their
feelings mattered.
2 On the Way to the Oort Cloud
On the twelve hundred and eighty-second day of our all-expense-paid
joyride on the way to the Oort Cloud, the big excitement was the mail.
Vera tinkled joyously and we all came to collect it. There were six
letters for my horny little half-sister-inlaw from famous movie
stars-well, they're not all movie stars. They're just famous and
good-looking jocks that she writes to, because she's only fourteen years
old and needs some kind of male to dream about, and that write back to
her, I think, because their press agents tell them it's going to be good
publicity. A letter from the old country for Payter, my father-in-law. A
long one, in German. They want him to come back to Dortmund and run for
mayor or Blirgermeister or something. Assuming, of course, that he is
still alive when he gets back, which is only an assumption for any of the
four of us. But they don't give up. Two private letters to my wife, Lurvy,
I assume from ex-boyfriends. And a letter to all of us from poor Trish
Bover's widower, or maybe husband, depending on whether you considered
Trish alive or dead:
Have you seen any trace of Trish's ship?
Hanson Bover
Short and sweet, because that's all he could afford, I guess. I told
Vera to send him the same reply as always-"Sorry, no." I had plenty of
time to take care of that correspondence, because there was nothing for
Paul C. Hall, who is me.
There is usually not much for me, which is one of the reasons I play
chess a lot. Payter tells me I'm lucky to be on the mission at all, and I
suppose I wouldn't be if he hadn't put his own money into it, financing
his whole family. Also his skills, but we've all done that. Payter is a
food chemist. I'm a structural engineer. My wife, Dorema-it's better not
to call her that, and we mostly call her "Lurvy"-is a pilot. Damn good
one, too. Lurvy is younger than I am, but she was on Gateway for six
years. Never scored, came back next to broke, but she learned a lot. Not
just about piloting. Sometimes I look at Lurvy's arms with the five Out
bangles, one for each of her Gateway missions; and her hands, hard and
sure on the ship controls, warm and warming when we touch... I don't know
much about what happened to her on Gateway. Perhaps I shouldn't.
And the other one is her little jailbait half-sister, Janine. Ak,
Janine! Sometimes she was fourteen years old, and sometimes forty. When
she was fourteen she wrote her gushy letters to her movie stars and played
with her toys-a ragged, stuffed armadillo, a Heechee prayer fan (real) and
a fire-pearl (fake) which her father had bought her to tempt her onto the
trip. When she was forty what she mostly wanted to play with was me. And
there we are. In each other's pockets for three and a half years. Trying
not to need to commit murder.
We were not the only ones in space. Once in a great while we would get
a message from our nearest neighbors, the Triton base or the exploring
ship that had got itself lost. But Triton, with Neptune, was well ahead of
us in its orbit-round-trip message time, three weeks. And the explorer had
no power to waste on us, though they were now only fifty light-hours away.
It was not like a friendly natter over the garden hedge.
So what I did, I played a lot of chess with our shipboard computer.
There's not an awful lot to do on the way to the Oort except play
games, and besides it was a good way to stay noncombatant in The War
Between Two Women that continually raged in our little ship. I can stand
my father-in-law, if I have to. Mostly he keeps to himself, as much as he
can in four hundred cubic meters. I can't always stand his two crazy
daughters, even though I love them both.
All this would have been easier to take if we had had more room-I told
myself that-but there is no way to go for a cooling-down walk around the
block when you are in a spaceship. Once In a while a quick EVA to check
the side-cargos, yes, and then I could look around-the sun still the
brightest star in its constellation, but only just; Sirius ahead of us was
brighter, and so was Alpha Centauri, off below the ecliptic and to the
side. But that was only an hour at a time, and then back inside the ship.
Not a luxury ship. A human-made antique of a spaceship that was never
planned for more than a six-month mission and that we had to stay cooped
up in for three and a half years. My God! We must have been crazy to sign
up. What good is a couple million dollars when getting it drives you out
of your head?
Our shipboard brain was a lot easier to get along with. When I played
chess with her, hunched over the console with the big headset over my
ears, I could shut out Lurvy and Janine. The brain's name was Vera, which
was just my own conceit and had nothing to do with her, I mean its,
gender. Or with her truthfulness, either, because I had instructed her she
could joke with me sometimes. When Vera was downlinked with the big
computers that were in orbit or back on Earth, she was very, very smart.
But she couldn't carry on a conversation that way, because of the 25-day
round-trip communications time, and so when she wasn't in link she was
very, very dumb-"Pawn to king's rook four, Vera."
"Thank you..." Long pause, while she checked my parameters to make sure
who she was talking to and what she was supposed to be doing. "Paul.
Bishop takes knight."
I could beat the ass off Vera when we played chess, unless she cheated.
How did she cheat? Well, after I had won maybe two hundred games from her
she won one. And then I won about fifty, and then she won one, and
another, and for the next twenty games we were about even and then she
began to clobber me every time. Until I figured out what she was doing.
She was transmitting position and plans to the big computers on Earth and
then, when we recessed games, as we sometimes did, because Payter or one
of the women would drag me away from the set, she would have time to get
Downlink-Vera's criticism of her plans and suggestions to amend her
strategies. The big machines would tell Vera what they thought my
strategies might be, and how to counteract them; and when Downlink-Vera
guessed right, Shipboard-Vera had me. I never bothered to make her stop. I
just didn't recess games any more, and then after a while we were so far
away that there just wasn't time for her to get help and I went back to
beating her every game.
And the chess games were about the only games I won, those three and a
half years. There was no way for me to win anything in the big one that
kept going on between my wife, Lurvy, and her horny fourteen-year-old
half-sister, Janine. Old Payter was a long time between begats, and Lurvy
tried to be a mother to Janine, who tried to be an enemy to Lurvy. And
succeeded. It wasn't all Janine's fault. Lurvy would take a few
drinks-that was her way of relieving the boredom-and then she would
discover that Janine had used her toothbrush, or that Janine had
unwillingly done as she had been told and cleaned up the food-preparation
area before it began to stink, but hadn't put the organics in the
digester. Then they were off. From time to time they would go through
ritualized performances of woman talk, punctuated by explosions-"I really
love those blue pants on you, Janine. Do you want me to tack that seam?"
"All right, so I'm getting fat, is that what you're saying? Well, it's
better than drinking myself stupid all the time!"-and then back to
blow-drying each other's hair. And I would go back to playing chess with
Vera. It was the only safe thing to do. Every time I tried to intervene I
achieved instant success by uniting them against me: "Fucking male
chauvinist pig, why don't you scrub the kitchen floor?"
The funny thing was, I did love them both. In different ways, of
course, though I had trouble getting that across to Janine.
We were told what we were getting into when we signed up for the
mission. Besides the regular long-voyage psychiatric briefing, all four of
us went through a dozen session hours on the problem during the preflight,
and what the shrink said boiled down to "do the best you can." It appeared
that during the refamilying process I would have to learn to parent.
Payter was too old, even if he was the biological father. Lurvy was
undomestic, as you would expect from a former Gateway pilot. It was up to
me; the shrink was very clear about that. It just didn't say how.
So there I was at forty-one, umpty zillion kilometers from Earth, way
past the orbit of Pluto, about fifteen degrees out of the plane of the
ecliptic, trying not to make love to my halfsister-in-law, trying to make
peace with my wife, trying to maintain the truce with my father-in-law.
Those were the big things that I woke up with (every time I was allowed to
go to sleep), just staying alive for another day. To get my mind off them,
I would try to think about the two million dollars apiece we would get for
completing the mission. When even that failed I would try to think about
the long-range importance of our mission, not just to us, but to every
human being alive. That was real enough. If it all worked out, we would be
keeping most of the human race from dying of starvation.
That was obviously important. Sometimes it even seemed important. But
it was the human race that had jammed us all into this smelly
concentration-camp for what looked like forever; and there were times
when-you know?-I kind of hoped they would starve.
Day 1283. I was just waking up when I heard Vera beeping and crackling
to herself, the way she does when there's an action message coming in. I
unzipped the restraining sheet and pushed myself out of our private, but
old Payter was already hanging over the printer.
He swore creakily. "Gott sel dammt! We have a course changing." I
caught hold of a rail and pushed myself over to see, but Janine, busily
inspecting her cheekbones for pimples in the wall mirror, got there ahead
of me. She ducked her head in front of Payter's, read the message, and
slid herself away disdainfully. Payter worked his mouth for a minute and
then said savagely, "This does not interest you?" Janine shrugged minutely
without looking at him.
Lurvy was coming out of the private after me, zipping up her skivvies.
"Leave her alone, Pa," she said. "Paul, go put some clothes on." It was
better to do what she said, besides which she was right. The best way to
stay out of trouble with Janine was to behave like a puritan. By the time
I fished my shorts out of the tangle of sheets, Lurvy had already read the
message. Reasonably enough; she was our pilot. She looked up, grinning.
"Paul! We have to make a correction in about eleven hours, and maybe it's
the last one! Back away," she ordered Payter, who was still hanging over
the terminal, and pulled herself down to work Vera's calculator keys. She
watched while the trajectories formed, pressed for a solution and then
crowed: "Seventy-three hours eight minutes to touchdown!"
"I myself could have done that," her father complained.
"Don't be grouchy, Pa! Three days and we're there. Why, we ought to be
able to see it in the scopes when we turn!"
Janine, back to picking at her cheekbones, commented over her shoulder,
"We could have been seeing it for months if somebody hadn't busted the big
scope."
"Janine!" Lurvy was marvelous at holding her temper in-when she was
able to do it at all-and this time she managed to stay in control. She
said in her voice of quiet reason, "Wouldn't you say this was an occasion
for rejoicing, not for starting arguments? Of course you would, Janine. I
suggest we all have a drink-you, too."
I stepped in quickly, belting my shorts-I knew the rest of that script.
"Are you going to use the chemical rockets, Lurvy? Right, then Janine and
I will have to go out and check the side-cargos. Why don't we have the
drink when we come back?"
Lurvy smiled sunnily. "Good idea, dear. But perhaps Pa and I will have
one short one now-then we'll join you for another round later, if you
like."
"Suit up," I ordered Janine, preventing her from saying whatever
inflammatory remark was in her mind. She obviously had decided to be
placatory for the moment, because she did as she was told without comment.
We checked each other's seals, let Lurvy and Payter double-check us,
crowded one by one into the exit and swung out into space on our tethers.
The first thing we both did was look toward home-not very satisfying; the
sun was only a bright star and I couldn't see the Earth at all, though
Janine usually claimed she could.. The second thing was to look toward the
Food Factory, but I couldn't see anything there. One star looks a lot like
another one, especially down to the lower limits of brightness when there
are fifty or sixty thousand of them in the sky.
Janine worked quickly and efficiently, tapping the bolts of the big
ion-thrusters strapped to the side of our ship while I inspected for
tightness in the steel straps. Janine was really not a bad kid. She was
fourteen years old and sexually excitable, true, but it was not at all her
fault that she had no satisfactory person to practice being a woman on.
Except me and, even less satisfactorily, her father. Everything checked
out, as of course we bad been pretty sure it would. She was waiting by the
stub of the big telescope's mounting by the time I finished, and a measure
of her good humor was that she didn't even say anything about who let it
crack loose and float away in the crazy time. I let her go back in the
ship first. I took an extra couple of minutes to float out there. Not
because I particularly enjoyed the view. Only because those minutes in
space were about the only time I had had in three and a half years to be
anything approaching alone.
We were still moving at better than three kilometers a second, but of
course you couldn't tell that with nothing around to compare. It felt a
lot as though we weren't moving at all. It had felt that way, a lot, for
all of the three and a half years. One of the stories we had all been
hearing for all that time from old Peter-he pronounces it "Pay-ter"-was
about his father, the S. S. Werewolf. The werewolf couldn't have been more
than sixteen when The Big One ended. His special job was transporting jet
engines to a Luftwaffe squadron that had just been fitted out with ME210s.
Payter says his daddy went to his death apologizing for not getting the
engines up to the squadron in time to cream the Lanes and the B-17s and
change the outcome of the war. We all thought that was pretty
funny-anyway, the first time we heard it. But that wasn't the real funny
part The real funny part was how the old Nazi freighted them. With a team.
Not horses. Oxen. Not even pulling a wagon-it was a sledge! The newest, up
to the minute, state of the art jet turbines-and what it took to get them
operational was a tow-headed kid with a willow switch, ankle deep in
cowflop.
Hanging there, creeping through space, on a trip that a Heechee ship
could have done in a day-if we had had one, and could have made it do what
we wanted it to-I felt a kind of a sympathy with Payter's old man. It
wasn't that different with us. All we were missing was the cowflop.
Day 1284. The course change went very smoothly, after we all struggled
into our life-support systems and wedged ourselves into our acceleration
seats, neatly fitted to our air and vital-signs packs. Considering the
tiny delta-V involved, it was hardly worth the effort. Not to mention that
there wouldn't be much use in life-support systems if anything went wrong
enough for us to need them, five thousand A. U. s from home. But we did it
by the book, because that was the way we had been doing it for three and a
half years.
And-after we had turned, and the chemical rockets had done their thing
and stopped and let the ion-thrusters take over again, and after Vera had
fumbled and clucked and hesitantly announced that it looked all right, as
far as she could tell, of course pending confirmation some weeks later
from Earth-we saw it! Lurvy was the first one out of her seat and at the
visuals, and she snapped it into focus in a matter of seconds.
We hung around, staring at it. The Food Factory!
It jiggled annoyingly in the speculum, hard to keep in focus. Even an
ion rocket contributes some vibration to a spaceship, and we were still a
long way off. But it was there. It gleamed faintly blue in the darkness
punctuated by stars, strangely shaped. It was the size of an office
building and more oblong than anything else. But one end was rounded, and
one side seemed to have a long, curved slice taken out of it. "Do you
think it's been hit by something?" Lurvy asked apprehensively.
"Ah, not in the least," snapped her father. "It is how it was
constructed! What do we know of Heechee design?"
"How do you know that?" Lurvy asked, but her father didn't answer that;
didn't have to, we all knew that he had no way to know, was only speaking
out of hope, because if it was damaged we were in trouble. Our bonuses
were good just for going out there, but our hopes for real payoff, the
only kind of payoff that would pay for seven round-trip years of misery,
rested on the Food Factory being operable. Or at least studyable and
copyable. "Paul!" Lurvy said suddenly. "Look at the side that's just
turning away-aren't those ships?"
I squinted, trying to make out what she saw. There were half a dozen
bulges on the long, straight side of the artifact, three or four smallish
ones, two quite large. They looked like pictures I had seen of the Gateway
asteroid, right enough, as far as I could tell. But-"You're the
ex-prospector," I said. "What do you think?"
"I think they are. But, my God, did you see those two end Ones? They
were huge. I've been in Ones and Threes, and I've seen plenty of Fives.
But nothing like that! They'd hold, I don't know, maybe fifty people! If
we had ships like that, Paul-If we had ships like that..."
"If, if," snarled her father. "If we had such ships, and if we could
make them go where we wanted, yes, the world would be ours! Let us hope
they still work. Let us hope any part of it works!"
"It will, Father," caroled a sweet voice from behind us, and we turned
to see Janine, propped with one knee under the digester hose, holding out
a squeeze bottle of our best home-made genuine recycled grain neutral
spirits. "I'd say this really calls for a celebration." She smiled.
Lurvy looked at her thoughtfully, but her control was in good shape and
she only said, "Why, that's a nice idea, Janine. Pass it around."
Janine took a ladylike small swig and handed it to her father. "I
thought you and Lurvy might like a nightcap," she said, after clearing her
throat-she had just graduated to drinking the hard stuff on her fourteenth
birthday, still did not like it, insisted on it only because it was an
adult prerogative.
"Good idea," Payter nodded. "I have been up now for, what is it, yes,
nearly twenty hours. We will all need our rest when we touch down," he
added, handing the bottle to my wife, who squeezed two ounces into her
well-practiced throat and said:
"I'm not really sleepy yet. You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to
play Trish Bover's tape again."
"Oh, God, Lurvy! We've all seen it a zillion times!"
"I know, Janine. You don't have to watch if you don't want to, but I
kept wondering if one of those ships was Trish's and-Well, I just want to
look at it again."
Janine's lips thinned, but the genes were strong and her control was as
good as her sister's when she wanted it to be-that was one of the things
we were measured on, before they signed us for the mission. "I'll dial it
up," she said, pushing herself over to Vera's keyboard. Payter shook his
head and retired to his own private, sliding the accordion-pleated barrier
into place to shut us out, and the rest of us gathered around the console.
Because it was tape we could get visual as well as sound, and in about ten
seconds it crackled on and we could see poor, angry Trish Bover talking
into the camera and saying the last words anybody would ever hear from
her.
Tragedy can only be tragic just so long, and we'd heard it all for
three and a half years. Every once in a while we'd play the tape, and look
at the scenes she had picked up with her handheld camera. And look at
them. And look at them, freeze-frame and blowup, not because we thought
we'd get any more information out of them than Gateway Corporation's
people already had, although you never knew. Just because we wanted to
reassure ourselves it was all worth it. The real tragedy was that Trish
didn't know what she had found.
"This is Mission Report Oh-Seventy-Four Dee Nineteen," she began,
steadily enough. Her sad, silly face was even trying to smile. "I seem to
be in trouble. I came out at a Heechee artifact kind of thing, and I
docked, and now I can't get away. The lander rockets work. But the main
board won't. And I don't want to stay here till I starve." Starve! After
the boffins went over Trish's photos they identified what the "artifact"
was-the CHON-Food Factory they had been looking for.
But whether it was worth it was still an open question, and Trish
surely didn't think it was worth it. What she thought was that she was
going to die there, and for nothing, not even going to cash in her awards
for the mission. And then at the end, what she finally did, she tried to
make it back in the lander.
She got into the lander and pointed it for the sun, and turned on the
motors, and took a pill. Took a lot of pills; all she had. And then she
turned the freezer up to max and got in and closed the door behind her.
"Defrost me when you find me," she said, "and remember my award."
And maybe somebody would. When they found her. If they found her. Which
would likely be in about ten thousand years. By the time her faint radio
message was heard by anybody, on maybe its five hundredth automatic
repetition, it was too late to matter to Trish; she never answered.
Vera finished playing the tape and quietly restowed it as the screen
went dark. "If Trish had been a real pilot instead of one of those Gateway
go-go prospectors, jump in and push the button and let the ship do its
thing," said Lurvy, not for the first time, "she would have known better.
She would have used what little delta-V she had in the lander to kill some
angular momentum instead of wasting it by pointing straight in."
"Thank you, expert rocket pilot," I said, not for the first time
either. "So she could've counted on being inside the asteroids a whole lot
sooner, right? Maybe in as little as six or seven thousand years."
Lurvy shrugged. "I'm going to bed," she said, taking a last squeeze
from the bottle. "You, Paul?"
"Aw, give me a break, will you?" Janine cut in. "I wanted Paul to help
me go over ignition procedures for the ionthrusters."
Lurvy's guard went up at once. "You sure that's what you want him to go
over? Don't pout, Janine. You know you've gone over it plenty already, and
anyway it's Paul's job."
"And what if Paul's out of action?" Janine demanded. "How do we know we
won't hit the crazy time just as we're doing it?"
Well, nobody could know that, and as a matter of fact I had been
forming the opinion that we would. It came in cycles of about a hundred
and thirty days, give or take a dozen. We were pushing it close. I said,
"Actually, I'm a little tired, Janine. I promise we'll do it tomorrow." Or
whenever one of the others was awake at the same time-the important thing
was not to be alone with Janine. In a ship with the total cubage of a
motel room, you'd be surprised how hard that is to arrange. Not hard.
Practically impossible.
But I really wasn't tired, and when Lurvy was tucked alongside me and
out of it, her breathing too quiet to be called anything like a snore, but
diagnostic of sleep all the same, I stretched against the sheets, wide
awake, counting up our blessings. I needed to do that at least once a day.
When I could find any to count.
This time I found a good one. Four thousand A. U. plus is a long
trip-and that's as the crow flies. Or, actually, as the photon fires,
because of course there aren't a lot of crows in near-interstellar space.
Call it half a trillion kilometers, near enough. And we were spiraling
out, which meant most of a revolution around the sun before we got there.
Our track wasn't just 25 light-days, it was more like 60. And, even
power-on the whole way, we weren't coming up to anything like the speed of
light. Three and a half years... and all the way we were thinking, Jeez,
suppose someone figures out the Heechee drive before we get there? It
wouldn't have helped us a bit. It would've been a lot more than three and
a half years before they got around to doing all the things they wanted to
do when that happened. And guess where on that list the job of coming
after us would have been?
So the good thing I found to dwell on was that at least we weren't
going to find the trip was for nothing, because we were almost there!
All that remained was to strap the big ion-thrusters onto it see if it
worked... start the slow return trip, shoving the thing back down toward
the Earth... and, somehow, survive till we got there. Call it, oh, another
four years; I went back to cherishing the fact that we were almost there.
The idea of mining comets for food wasn't new, it went back to Krafft
Ehricke in the 1950s anyway, only what he suggested was that people
colonize them. It made sense. Bring along a little iron and trace
elements-the iron to build a place to live in, the trace elements to turn
CHON-chow into quiche lorraine or hamburgers-and you can live indefinitely
on the food around you. Because that's what comets are made of. A little
bit of dust, a few rocks, and a hell of a lot of frozen gases. And what
are the gases? Oxygen. Nitrogen. Hydrogen. Carbon dioxide. Water. Methane.
Ammonia. The same four elements over and over again. CHON. Carbon,
hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and what does CHON spell?
Wrong. What comets are made of is the same thing you are made of, and
what C-H-O-N spells is "food."
The Oort cloud was made up of millions of megaton-sized servings of
chow. Back on Earth there were ten or twelve billion hungry people looking
toward it and licking their lips.
There was still a lot of argument about what comets were doing there,
out in the cloud. It was still arguable about whether they even came in
families. Opik a hundred years ago said more than half the comets ever
sighted fit into well-defined groups, so there, and so did his followers
ever since. Whipple said bullshit, there's not a group you can identify
that has more than three comets in it. And so did his followers. Then Oort
came along to try to make sense of it. His idea was that there was this
great shell of comets all the hell around the solar system, and every once
in a while the sun would reach out and pluck one out, and it would come
loping in to perihelion. Then we would have Halley's comet, or the one
that was supposed to have been the Star of Bethlehem, or whatever. Then a
bunch of the guys began kicking that around, asking why exactly that
should happen. It turned out it couldn't-not if you assume Maxwellian
distribution for the Oort cloud. In fact, if you assume normal
distribution, you also have to assume that there isn't any Oort cloud in
the first place. You can't get the observed nearly parabolic orbits out of
an Oort cloud; so said R. A. Lyttleton. But then somebody else said, well,
who says the distribution can't be non-Maxwellian? And so it proved. It's
all lumpy. There are clusters of comets, and great volumes of space with
almost none.
And while no doubt the Heechee had set their machine to graze in rich
comet pastures, that had been a lot of hundreds of thousands of years ago,
and it was now in a kind of cometary desert. If it worked, it had little
left to work on. (Maybe it had eaten them all up?)
I fell asleep wondering what CHON-food would taste like. It couldn't be
a lot worse than what we had been eating for three and a half years, which
was mainly recycled us.
Day 1285. Janine almost got to me today. I was playing chess with Vera,
everybody asleep, happy enough, when her hands came around the big
earpieces and covered my eyes. "Cut it out, Janine," I said. When I turned
around she was pouting.
"I just wanted to use Vera," she said.
"For what? Another hot love letter to one of your movie stars?"
"You treat me like a child," she said. For a wonder, she was fully
dressed; her face shone, her hair was damp and pulled down straight to the
back of her neck. She looked like your model serious-minded young
teen-ager. "What I wanted," she said, "was to go over thruster alignments
with Vera. Since you won't help me."
One of the reasons Janine was along with us was that she was smart-we
all were; had to be to be accepted for the mission. And one of the things
she was smart at was getting at me. "All right," I said, "you're right,
what can I say? Vera? Recess the game and give us the program for
providing propulsion for the Food Factory."
"Certainly," she said,"... Paul." And the board disappeared, and in its
place she built up a holo of the Food Factory. She had updated her specs
from the telescopic views we had obtained, and so it was shown complete
with its dust cloud and the glob of dirty snowball adhering to one side.
"Cancel the cloud, Vera," I ordered, and the blur disappeared and the Food
Factory showed up like an engineering drawing. "Okay, Janine. What's the
first step?"
"We dock," she said at once. "We hope the lander facsimile fits, and we
dock it. If we can't dock we link up with braces to some point on the
surface; either way, our ship becomes a rigid part of the structure, so we
can use our thrust for attitude control."
"Next?"
"We all dismount the number-one thruster and brace it to the aft
section of the factory-there." She pointed out the place on the holo. "We
slave it to the board here, and as soon as it is installed we activate."
"Guidance?"
"Vera will give us coordinates-oops, sorry, Paul." She had been
drifting out of orientation with me and Vera, and she caught my shoulder
with her hand to pull herself back. She kept her hand there. "Then we
repeat the process with the other five. By the time we have all six going
we have a delta-V of two meters per second per second, running off the
239pu generator. Then we start spreading the mirror foils..."
"No."
"Oh, sure, we inspect all the moorings to see that they're holding
under thrust first; well, I take that for granted. Then we start with
solar power, and when we've got it all spread we should be up to maybe two
and a quarter meters..."
"At first, Janine. The closer we get in, the more power we get. All
right. Now let's go through the hardware. You're bracing our ship to the
Heechee-metal hull; how do you go about it?"
And she told me, and kept on telling me; and by gosh she knew it all.
The only thing was her hand on my shoulder became a hand under my arm, and
it moved across my chest, and began to roam; and all the time she was
giving me the specs for coldwelding and how to get collimation for the
thrusters, her face serious and concerned, and her hand stroking my belly.
Fourteen years old. But she didn't look fourteen, or feel fourteen, or
smell fourteen-she'd been into Lurvy's quarter of an ounce of remaining
Chanel. What saved me was Vera; good thing, everything considered, because
I was losing interest in saving myself. The holo froze while Janine was
adding an extra strut to one of the thrusters, and Vera said, "Action
message coming in. Shall I read it out for you... Paul?"
"Go ahead." Janine withdrew her hand slightly as the holo winked away,
and the screen produced the message:
We've been requested to ask you for a favor. The next
outbreak of the 130-day syndrome is estimated to occur
within the next two months. HEW thinks that a full-coverage
visual of all of you describing the Food Factory and
emphasizing how well things are going and how important it
is will significantly reduce tensions and consequent damage.
Please follow the accompanying script. Request compliance
soonest possible so that we may tape and schedule broadcast
for maximum effect.
"Shall I give you the script?" Vera asked.
"Go ahead-hard copy," I added.
"Very well... Paul." The screen turned pale and empty, and she began to
squirt out typed sheets of paper. I picked them up to read while I sent
Janine off to wake up her sister and father. She didn't object. She loved
doing television for the folks back home, it always meant fan letters from
famous people for the brave young astronette.
The script was what you would expect. I programmed Vera to roll it for
us line by line, and we could have read it in ten minutes. That was not to
be. Janine insisted her sister had to do her hair, and even Lurvy decided
she had to make up and Payter wanted his beard trimmed. By me. So, all in
all, counting four rehearsals, we blew six hours, not counting a month's
power, on the TV broadcast. We all gathered before the camera, looking
domestic and dedicated, and explained what we were going to be doing to an
audience that wouldn't be seeing it for a month, by which time we would
already be there. But if it would do them any good, it was worth it. We
had been through eight or nine attacks of the 130-day fever since we took
off from Earth. Each time it had its own syndrome, satyriasis or
depression, lethargy or light-hearted joy. I had been outside when one of
them hit-that was how the big telescope got broken-and it had been about
an even bet whether I would ever make it back inside the ship. I simply
didn't care. I was hallucinating loneliness and anger, being chased by
apelike creatures and wishing I were dead. And back on Earth, with
billions of people, nearly all of them affected to one degree or another,
in one or another way, each time it hit it was pure bell. It had been
building up for ten years-eight since it was first identified as a
recurring scourge-and no one knew what caused it.
But everybody wanted it stopped.
Day 1288. Docking day! Payter was at the controls, wouldn't trust Vera
on a thing like that, while Lurvy was strapped in over his head to call
off course corrections. We came to relative rest just outside the thin
cloud of particles and gas, no more than a kilometer from the Food Factory
itself.
From where Janine and I were sitting in our life-support gear it was
hard to see what was going on outside. Past Payter's head and Lurvy's
gesticulating arms we could catch glimpses of the enormous old machine,
but only glimpses. no more than a glimmer of blue-lit metal and now and
then a docking pit or the shape of one of the old ships-
"Hellfire! I'm drifting away!"
"No, you aren't, Payter. The goddam thing's got a little acceleration!"
-and maybe a star. We didn't really need the life-support; Payter was
nudging us gently as he would a jellyfish in a tank. I wanted to ask where
the acceleration came from, or why; but the two pilots were busy, and
besides I did not suppose they knew the answer.
"That's got it. Now bring her in to that center docking pit, middle of
that row of three."
"Why that one?"
"Why not? Because I say so!"
And we edged in for a minute or two, and came to relative rest again.
And we matched and locked. The Heechee capsule at the forward end mated
neatly with the ancient pit.
Lurvy reached down and killed the board, and we all looked at each
other. We were there.
Or, to put it another way, we were halfway. Halfway home.
Day 1290. It was no surprise that the Heechee had breathed an
atmosphere we could survive in. The surprise was that any of it was left
in this place, after all the tens or hundreds of thousands of years since
anyone breathed any of it. And that was not the only surprise. The others
came later, and were scarier and worse.
It was not just the atmosphere that had survived. The whole ship had
survived-in working condition! We knew it as soon as we were inside and
the samplers had shown us we could take off our helmets. The blue-gleaming
metal walls were warm to the touch, and we could feel a faint, steady
vibration. The temperature was around twelve-cool, but no worse than some
Earthside homes I've been in. Do you want to guess what the first words
were spoken by human beings inside the Food Factory? They came from
Payter, and they were:
"Ten million dollars! Jesus, maybe even a hundred!"
And if he hadn't said it, one or another of us would. Our bonus was
going to be astronomical. Trish's report hadn't said whether the Food
Factory was operational or not-for all we knew, it could have been a
riddled hulk, empty of anything that made it worthwhile. But here we had a
complete and major Heechee artifact, in working condition! There was
simply nothing like it to judge against. The tunnels on Venus, the old
ships, even Gateway itself had been carefully emptied of nearly all their
contents half a million years before. This place was furnished! Warm,
livable, thrumming, soaked with weak microwave radiation, it was alive. It
did not seem old at all.
We had little chance to explore; the sooner we got the thing moving in
toward Earth, the sooner we would cash in on its promise. We allowed
ourselves an hour to roam around in the breathable air, poking into
chambers filled with great gray and blue metal shapes, slithering down
corridors, eating as we wandered, telling each other over the pocket
communicators (and relayed through Vera to Earth) what we found. Then
work. We suited up again and began the job of derigging the side-cargos.
And that was where we ran into the first trouble.
The Food Factory was not in free orbit. It was accelerating. Some sort
of thrust was driving it. It was not great, less than one percent of a G.
But the electric rocket assemblies weighed more than ten tons each.
Even at one percent of perceived weight, that meant over a hundred
kilograms of weight, not counting ten tons worth of inertia. As we began
to unship the first one it pulled itself free at one end and began to fall
away. Payter was there to catch it, but it was more than he could hold for
long; I pulled myself over and grabbed the side-cargo with one hand, the
brace it had been fastened to with the other, and we managed to keep it in
place until Janine could secure a cable over it.
Then we retired inside the ship to think things over.
We were already exhausted. After three-plus years in confined quarters,
we were not used to hard work. Vera's bio-assay unit reported we were
accumulating fatigue poisons. We bickered and worried at each other for a
while, then Payter and Lurvy went to sleep while Janine and I schemed out
a rigging that would let us secure each side-cargo before it was released
and swing it around the Food Factory on three long cables, belayed by
smaller guiding cables so that it would not smash into the hull at the far
end of its travel and pound itself into scrap. We had allowed ten hours to
move a rocket into position. It took three days for the first one. By the
time we had it secured we were stark, staring wrecks, our heartbeats
pounding, our muscles one solid ache. We took a full sleep shift and a few
hours of loafing around the interior of the Food Factory before we went
back to securing the rocket so that it could be started. Payter was the
most energetic of us; he went prowling as far as he could go down half a
dozen corridors. "All come to dead ends," he reported when he came back.
"Looks like the part we can reach is only about a tenth of the
object-'less we cut holes through the walls."
"Not now," I said.
"Not ever!" said Lurvy strongly. "All we do is get this thing back.
Anybody wants to start cutting it up, it will be after we've collected our
money!" She rubbed her biceps, arms folded across her chest, and added
regretfully, "And we might as well get started on securing the rocket."
It took us another two days to do that, but finally we had it in place.
The welding fluxes they had given us to secure steel to Heechee metal
actually worked. As far as we could tell from static inspection, it was
solid. We retired into the ship and commanded Vera to give it a ten
percent thrust.
At once we felt a tiny lurch. It was working. We all grinned at each
other, and I reached into my private hold-all for the bottle of champagne
I had been saving for this occasion-Another lurch.
Click, click, click, click-one after another our grins snapped off.
There should have been only one felt acceleration.
Lurvy jumped to the cyber board. "Vera! Report delta-V!" The screen
lighted up with a diagram of forces: the Food Factory imaged in the
middle, force arrows showing in two directions. One was our thruster,
doing its job of pushing against the hull. The other was not.
"Additional thrust now affecting course... Lurvy," Vera reported.
"Vector result now same in direction and magnitude as previous delta-V."
Our rocket was pushing against the Food Factory. But it wasn't doing
much good. The factory was pushing back.
Day 1298. So we did what we obviously had to do. We turned everything
off and screamed for help.
We slept, and ate, and wandered around the factory for what seemed like
forever, wishing the 25-day delay did not exist. Vera wasn't much help.
"Transmit full telemetry," she said, and, "Stand by for further
directives." Well, we were doing that already.
After a day or two I pulled the champagne out anyway, and we all drank
up. At . 01G the carbonation had more muscle than gravity did, and
actually I had to hold my thumb over the bottle and my palm over each
glass to squirt and catch the spraying champagne. But after a fashion we
toasted. "Not so bad," said Payter when he had chug-a-lugged his wine. "At
least we've got a couple million each."
"If we ever live to collect it," snarled Janine.
"Don't be such a downer, Janine. We knew when we started out that the
mission might bum out." And so we had; the ship was designed so that we
could start back on our basic fuel, then rerig the photon-thrusters to get
us home-in another four years or so.
"And then what, Lurvy? I'll be an eighteen-year-old virgin! And a
failure."
"Oh, God. Janine, go explore for a while, won't you? I'm tired of the
sight of you."
And so were all of us, of each other. We were more tired of each other,
and less tolerant, than we had been all the way out in the cramped
quarters of the ship. Now that we had more space to lose each other in, as
much as a quarter-kilometer of it at farthest stretch, we were more
abrasive on each other than ever. Every twenty hours or so Vera's small,
dull brain would stumble through her contingency programs and come up with
some new experiment: test thrusts at one percent of power, at thirty
percent of power, even at full power. And we would get together long
enough to suit up and carry them out. But they were always the same no
matter how hard we pushed against the Food Factory, the artifact sensed
it, and pushed back at exactly the right magnitude and in exactly the
right direction to keep its steady acceleration to whatever goal it had in
mind. The only useful thing Vera came up with was a theory: the factory
had used up the comet it was working on and was moving on to a new one.
But that was only intellectually interesting. It did not do a practical
thing to help. So we wandered around, mostly alone, carrying the cameras
into every room and corridor we could reach. What we saw they saw, and
what they saw was transmitted on the time-sharing beam to Earth, and none
of it offered much help.
We found where Trish Bover had entered the factory easily enough-Payter
did that, and called us all to look, and we gathered silently to inspect
the remnants of a long-decayed lunch, the discarded pantyhose and the
graffiti she had scratched on the walls:
TRISH BOVER WAS HERE
And
GOD HELP ME!
"Maybe God will," said Lurvy after a while, "but 1 don't see how
anybody else can."
"She must have been here longer than I thought," Payter said. "There's
junk scattered all around in some of the rooms."
"What kind of junk?"
"Old spoiled food, mostly. Down toward the other landing face, you know
where the lights are?" I did, and Janine and I went to see. It was her
idea to keep me company, and not an idea I had been enthusiastic about at
first. But maybe the 12C temperature and the lack of anything like a bed
tempered her interest, or maybe she was too depressed and disappointed to
be very interested in her ambition to lose her virginity. We found the
discarded food easily enough. It didn't look like Gateway rations to me.
It seemed to come in packets; a couple of them were unopened, three
biggish ones, the size of a slice of bread, wrapped in bright red
something or other-it felt like silk. Two smaller ones, one green, one the
same red as the others but mottled with pink dots. We opened one
experimentally. It stank of rotten fish and was obviously no longer
edible. But had been.
I left Janine there to go back to find the others. They opened the
little green one. It did not smell spoiled, but was hard as rock. Payter
sniffed it, then licked It, then broke off a crumb against the wall and
chewed it thoughtfully. "No taste at all," he reported, then looked up at
us, looked startled, then grinned.
"You waiting for me to drop dead?" he inquired. "I don't think so. You
chew on it awhile, it gets soft. Like stale crackers, maybe."
Lurvy frowned. "If it really was food..." She stopped and thought. "If
it really was food, and Trish left it there, why didn't she just stay
here? Or why didn't she mention it?"
"She was scared silly," I suggested.
"Sure she was. But she did tape a report. She didn't say a word about
food. The Gateway techs were the ones who decided this was a Food Factory,
remember? And all they had to go on was the wrecked one they found around
Phyllis's World."
"Maybe she just forgot."
"I don't think she forgot," said Lurvy slowly, but she didn't say any
more than that. There wasn't anything more to be said. But for the next
day or two we did not do much solitary exploring.
Day 1311. Vera received the information about the food packages in
silence. After a while she displayed an instruction to submit the contents
of the packages to chemical-and bio-assay. We had already done that on our
own, and if she drew conclusions she did not say what they were.
For that matter, neither did we. On the occasions when we were all
awake together what we mostly talked about was what we would do if Base
could not figure out a way for us to move the Food Factory. Vera had
already suggested that we install the other five side-cargos, turn them
all on full-power at once and see if the factory could out-muscle six
thrusters. Vera's suggestions were not orders, and Lurvy spoke for all of
us when she said, "If we turn them on full and they don't work, the next
step is to turn them on to over rated capacity. They could get damaged.
And we could get stuck."
"What do we do if we hear from Earth and they make it an order?" I
asked.
Payter cut in ahead of her. "We bargain," he said, nodding sagely.
"They want us to take extra risks, they give us extra pay."
"Are you going to do the bargaining, Pa?"
"You bet I am. And listen. Suppose it don't work. Suppose we have to go
back. You know what we do then?" He nodded to us again. "We load up the
ship with everything we can carry. We find little machines that we can
take out, you know? Maybe we see if they work. We stuff that ship with
everything it can hold, throw away everything we can spare. Leave most of
the side-. cargos here and load on big machines outside, you see? We could
come back with, God, I don't know, another twenty, thirty million dollars'
worth of artifacts."
"Like prayer fans!" Janine cried, clapping her hands. There were piles
of them in the room where Payter had found the food. There were other
things there, too, a sort of metal-mesh couch, tulip-shaped things that
looked like candleholders on the walls. But hundreds of prayer fans. By my
quick guess, at a thousand dollars each, there was half a million dollars'
worth of prayer fans in that room alone, delivered to the curio markets in
Chicago and Rome... if we lived to deliver them. Not counting all the
other things I could think of, that I was inventorying in my mind. I
wasn't the only one.
"Prayer fans are the least of it," Lurvy said thoughtfully. "But that's
not in our contract, Pa."
"Contract! So what are they going to do with us, shoot us? Cheat us?
After we give up eight years of our lives? No. They'll give us the
bonuses."
The more we thought about it, the better that sounded. I went to sleep
thinking about which of the gadgets and what-you-call 'ems I'd seen could
be carried back, and what among them seemed the most valuable, and had my
first pleasant dreams since we had tested the thruster-
And woke up with Janine's urgent whisper in my ear. "Pop? Paul? Lurvy?
Can you hear me?"
I swam up to a sitting position and looked around. She wasn't speaking
in my ear; it was my radio. Lurvy was awake beside me, and Payter came
hurrying around a corner to join us, their radios going too. I said, "We
hear you, Janine. What..."
"Shut up!" the whisper came, hissing out with white sound as though her
lips were pressed against the microphone. "Don't answer me, just listen.
There's someone here."
We stared at each other. Lurvy whispered, "Where are you?"
"I said shut up! I'm out at the far docking area, you know? Where we
found that food. I was looking for something we could bring back with us,
like Pop said, only-"Well, I saw something on the floor. Like an apple,
only it wasn't-kind of reddish brown on the outside and green on the
inside, and it smelled like...I don't know what it smelled like.
Strawberries. And it wasn't any hundred thousand years old, either. It was
fresh. And I heard-wait a minute."
We did not dare answer, just listened to her breathing for a moment.
When she spoke again her whisper sounded scared. "It's coming this way.
It's between me and you, and I'm stuck. I-keep thinking it's a Heechee,
and it's going to be..."
Her voice stopped. We heard her gasp; then, out loud, "Don't you come
any closer!"
I had heard enough. "Let's go," I said, jumping toward the corridor.
Payter and Lurvy were right behind me as we hurried in long, swimming
leaps down the blue-walled tunnel. When we got near the docks we stopped,
looking around irresolutely.
Before we could make a decision on which way to search, Janine's voice
came again. It was neither whisper nor terrified cry. "He-he stopped when
I told him," she said unbelievingly. "And I don't think he's a Heechee. He
looks like just an ordinary person to me-well, kind of scruffy. He's just
standing there staring at me, kind of sniffing the air."
"Janine!" I shouted into the radio. "We're at the docks-which way from
here?"
Pause. Then, strangely, a kind of shocked giggle. "Just keep coming
straight," she said shakily. "Come on quick. You-you wouldn't believe what
he's doing now!"
3 Wan in Love
The trip to the outpost seemed longer than usual to Wan, because he was
troubled in his mind. He missed the companionship of the Dead Men. He
missed even more what he had never had. A female. The notion of Wan in
love was a fantasy for him, but it was a fantasy he wanted to make real.
So many of the books helped it along, Romeo and Juliet and Anna Karenina
and the old romantic Chinese classics.
What drove the fantasies out of his mind at last was the sight of the
outpost as he drew near. The board lighted up to signal the beginning of
docking maneuvers, the flow lines on the screen melted away, and the shape
of the outpost snapped into vision. But it was not the same shape as
always. There was a new ship in one of the docking hatches, and a strange
jagged structure strapped to one side of the hull.
What could such things mean? When the docking was complete Wan poked
his head through the hatch and stared around, sniffing and listening.
After a time he concluded that no one was near. He did not remove his
books or other possessions from the ship. He resolved to stay ready to
flee at a moment's notice, but he decided to explore. Once before, long
ago, some other person had been at the outpost, and he believed it had
been a female. Tiny Jim had helped him identify the garment then. Perhaps
he should ask Tiny Jim for advice now? Munching on a berryfruit, he handed
himself easily along the rails toward the dreaming room, where the
pleasure couch lay surrounded by the book machines.
And stopped.
Had that been a sound? A laugh or a cry, from far away?
He threw the berryfruit away and stood for a moment, all his senses
tensely extended. The sound was not repeated. But there was something-a
smell, very faint, quite pleasant, quite strange. It was not unlike the
smell in the garment he had found, and carried around for many days until
the last vestige of scent was gone from it and he put it back where it was
found.
Had that person come back?
Wan began to shake. A person! It had been a dozen years since be had
smelled or touched a person! And then only his parents. But it might not
be a person, it could be something else. He launched himself toward the
dock where that other person had been, craftily avoiding the main
passages, hurling himself down narrower, less direct ways where he did not
think any stranger was likely to go. Wan knew every inch of the outpost,
at least as far within it as it was possible to travel without coming to
the dead-end locked walls that he did not know how to open. It took him
only a few minutes to reach the place where he had carefully rearranged
the debris left by the outpost's one visitor.
Everything was there. But not, he saw, as he had left it. Some things
bad been picked up and dropped again.
Wan knew he had not done that. Apart from the discipline he had always
imposed upon himself, of leaving the outpost exactly as he had found it,
so that no one could ever know he was there, this time he had been
especially careful to arrange the litter precisely as it had been left.
Someone else was on the outpost.
and he was many minutes away from his ship.
Cautiously but quickly he returned to the docks on the other side,
pausing at every intersection to look and smell and listen. He reached his
ship and hovered at the hatch, indecisively. Run or explore?
But the smell was stronger now, and irresistible.
Step by step he ventured down one of the long, dead-end corridors,
ready to retreat instantly.
A voice! Whispering, almost inaudible. But it was there. He peered
around a doorway, and his heart pounded. A person! Huddled against a wall,
with a metal object at its lips, staring at him in terror. The person
cried out at him: "Don't you come any closer!" But he could not have if he
had wanted to; he was frozen. It was not merely a person. It was a female
person! The diagnostic signs were clear, as Tiny Jim had explained them to
him: two swellings at the chest, a swelling around the hips and a
narrowing at the waist, a smooth brow with no bulges over the eye
sockets-yes, female! And young. And dressed in something that revealed
bare legs and, oh, bare arms; smooth hair tied behind the head in a long
tail, great eyes staring at him.
Wan responded as he had learned to respond. He fell gently to his
knees, opened his garment and touched his sex. It had been several days
since he had masturbated, and with no such stimulus as this; he was erect
at once and shuddering with excitement.
He hardly noticed the noises behind him as three other persons came
racing up. It was not until he was finished that he stood up, adjusted his
clothing and smiled politely to them where they were ranged around the
young female, talking excitedly and almost hysterically among themselves.
"Hello," he said. "I am Wan." When they did not respond, he repeated the
greeting in Spanish and Cantonese, and would have gone on to his other
languages except that the second female person stepped forward and said:
"Hello, Wan. I'm Dorema Herter-Hall-they call me 'Lurvy'. We're very
glad to see you."
In all of Wan's fifteen years there had never been twelve hours as
exciting, as frightening and as heart-stoppingly thrilling, as these. So
many questions! So much to say and to hear. So shuddery-pleasant to touch
these other persons, and to smell their smells and feel their presence.
They knew so incredibly little, and so astonishingly much-did not know how
to get food from the lockers, had not used the dreaming couch, had never
seen an Old One or talked with a Dead Man. And yet they knew of spaceships
and cities, of walking under an open sky ("sky"? it took a long time for
Wan to grasp what they were talking about) and of Making Love. He could
see that the younger female was willing to show him more of that, but the
older one did not wish her to; how strange. The older male did not seem to
make love with anyone; even stranger. But it was all strange, and he was
expiring of the delights and terrors of so much strangeness. After they
had talked for a long time, and he had shown them some of the tricks of
the outpost, and they had shown him some of the wonders of their ship (a
thing like a Dead Man, but which had never been alive; pictures of people
on Earth; a flush toilet) after all these wonders, the Lurvy person had
commanded that they all rest. He had at once started toward the dreaming
couch, but she had invited him to stay near them and he could not say no,
though all through the sleep he woke from time to time, trembling and
sniffing and staring around in the dim blue light.
So much excitement was bad for him. When they were all awake again he
found himself still shaking, his body aching as though he had not slept at
all. no matter. The questions and the chatter began again at once:
"And who are the Dead Men?"
"I don't know. Let us ask them? Perhaps-sometimes they call themselves
'prospectors'. From a place called 'Gateway'."
"And this place they are in, is it a Heechee artifact?"
"Heechee?" He thought; he had heard the word, long ago, but he did not
know what it meant. "Do you mean the Old Ones?"
"What do the Old Ones look like?" And he could not say in words, so
they gave him a sketch pad again and he tried to draw the big waggling
jaws, the frowsty beards, and as each sketch was finished they snatched it
up and held it before the machine they called "Vera".
"This machine is like a Dead Man," he offered, and they flew in with
questions again:
"Do you mean the Dead Men are computers?"
"What is a 'computer'?"
And then the questions would go the other way for a while, as they
explained to him the meaning of "computer", and presidential elections,
and the 130-day fever. And all the while they were roaming the ship, as he
explained to them what he knew of it. Wan was becoming very tired. He had
had little experience of fatigue, because in his timeless life when he was
sleepy he slept and did not get up until he was rested. He did not enjoy
the feeling, or the scratchiness in his throat, or the headache. But he
was too excited to stop, especially when they told him about the female
person named Trish Bover. "She was here? Here in the outpost? And she did
not stay?"
"No, Wan. She didn't know you would come. She thought if she stayed she
would die." What a terrible pity! Although, Wan calculated, he had only
been ten years old when she came, he could have been a companion for her.
And she for him. He would have fed her and cared for her and taken her
with him to see the Old Ones and the Dead Men, and been very happy.
"Then where did she go?" he asked.
For some reason, that question troubled them. They looked at each
other. Lurvy said after a moment, "She got in her ship, Wan."
"She went back to Earth?"
"No. Not yet. It is a very long trip for the kind of ship she had.
Longer than she would live."
The younger man, Paul, the one who coupled with Lurvy, took over. "She
is still traveling, Wan. We don't know where exactly. We are not even sure
she is alive. She froze herself."
"Then she is dead?"
"Well-she is probably not alive. But if she is found, maybe she can be
revived. She's in the freezing compartment of her ship, at minus-forty
degrees. Her body will not decay for some time, I think. She thought. At
any rate, she thought it was the best chance she had."
"I could have given her a better one," Wan said dejectedly. Then he
brightened. There was the other female, Janine, who was not frozen.
Wishing to impress her, he said, "That is a gosh number."
"What is? What kind of a number?"
"A gosh number, Janine. Tiny Jim talks about them. When you say
'minus-forty' you don't have to say whether it is in Celsius or
Fahrenheit, because they are the same." He tittered at the joke.
They were looking at each other again. Wan could see that something was
wrong, but he was feeling stranger, dizzier, more fatigued at every
second. He thought perhaps they had not understood the joke, so he said,
"Let us ask Tiny Jim. He can be reached just down this passage, where the
dreaming couch is."
"Reached? How?" demanded the old man, Payter.
Wan did not answer; he was not feeling well enough to trust what he
said, and, besides, it was easier to show them. He turned abruptly away
and hauled himself toward the dreaming chamber. By the time they followed
he had already keyed the book in and called for number one hundred twelve.
"Tiny Jim?" he tried; then, over his shoulder, "Sometimes he doesn't want
to talk. Please be patient." But he was lucky this time, and the Dead
Man's voice responded quite quickly.
"Wan? Is that you?"
"Of course it is me, Tiny Jim. I want to hear about gosh numbers."
"Very well, Wan. Gosh numbers are numbers which represent more than one
quantity, so that when you perceive the coincidence you say, 'Gosh.' Some
gosh numbers are trivial. Some are perhaps of transcendental importance.
Some religious persons count gosh numbers as a proof of the existence of
God. As to whether or not God exists, I can give you only a broad outline
of..."
"No, Tiny Jim. Please stick to gosh numbers now."
"Yes, Wan. I will now give you a list of a few of the simplest gosh
numbers. Point-five degrees. Minus-forty degrees. One thirty-seven. Two
thousand and twenty-five. Ten to the 39th. Please write one paragraph on
each of these, identifying the characteristics which make them gosh
numbers and..."
"Cancel, cancel," Wan squeaked, his voice rising higher because it
smarted so. "This is not a class."
"Oh, well," said the Dead Man gloomily, "all right. Point-five degrees
is the angular diameter of both the sun and the Moon as seen from Earth.
Gosh! How strange that they should be the same, but also how useful,
because it is partly because of this coincidence that Earth has eclipses.
Minus-forty degrees is the temperature which is the same in both
Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. Gosh. Two thousand twenty-five is the sum
of the cubes of the integers, one cubed plus two cubed plus three cubed
and so on up to nine cubed, all added together. It is also the square of
their sum. Gosh. Ten to the thirty-ninth is a measure of the weakness of
the gravitational force as compared with the electromagnetic. It is also
the age of the universe expressed as a dimensionless number. It is also
the square root of the number of particles in the observable universe,
that is, that part of the universe relative to Earth in which Hubble's
constant is less than point-five. Also-well, never mind, but gosh! Gosh,
gosh, gosh. On these goshes P. A. M. Dirac constructed his Large Numbers
Hypothesis, from which he deduced that the force of gravity must be
weakening as the age of the universe increased. Now, there is a gosh for
you!"
"You left out one thirty-seven," the boy accused.
The Dead Man cackled. "Good for you, Wan! I wanted to see if you were
listening. One thirty-seven is Eddington's fine structure constant, of
course, and turns up over and over in nuclear physics. But it is more than
that. Suppose you take the inverse, that is one over one thirty-seven, and
express it as a decimal. The first three digits are Double Ought Seven,
James Bond's identification as a killer. There is the lethality of the
universe for you! The first eight digits are Clarke's Palindrome, point oh
seven two nine nine two seven oh. There is its symmetry. Deadly, and
two-faced, that is the fine structure constant! Or," he mused, "perhaps I
should say, there is its inverse. Which would imply that the universe
itself is the inverse of that? Namely kind and uneven? Help me, Wan. I am
not sure how to interpret this symbol."
"Oh, cancel, cancel," said Wan angrily. "Cancel and out." He was
feeling irritable and shaky, as well as more ill than he had ever been,
even when the Dead Men had given him shots. "He goes on like that," he
apologized to the others. "That's why I don't usually speak to him from
here."
"He doesn't look well," said Lurvy worriedly to her husband, and then
to Wan, "Do you feel all right?" He shook his head, because he did not
know how to answer.
Paul said, "You ought to rest. But-what did you mean, 'from here.'
Where is, uh, Tiny Jim?"
"Oh, he is in the main station," said Wan weakly, sneezing.
"You mean..." Paul swallowed hard. "But you said it was forty-five days
away by ship. That must be a very long way."
The old man, Payter, cried: "Radio? Are you talking to him by radio?
Faster-than-light radio?"
Wan shrugged. Paul had been right; he needed to rest, and there was the
couch, which had always been the exact proper place to make him feel good
and rested.
"Tell me, boy!" shouted the old man. "If you have a working FU
radio...The bonus..."
"I am very tired," said Wan hoarsely. "I must sleep." He felt himself
falling. He evaded their clutching arms, dove between them and plunged
into the couch, its comforting webbing closing around him.
4 Robin Broadhead, Inc.
Essie and I were water-skiing on the Tappan Sea when my neck radio
buzzed to tell me that a stranger had turned up on the Food Factory. I
ordered the boat to turn immediately and take us back to the long stretch
of waterfront property owned by Robin Broadhead, Inc. before I told Essie
what it was. "A boy, Robin?" she shouted over the noise of the hydrogen
motor and the wind. "Where in hell a boy comes to Food Factory?"
"That's what we have to find out," I yelled back. The boat skillfully
snaked us in to shallow water and waited while we jumped out and ran up
the grass. When it recognized that we were gone, it purred down the
shoreline to put itself away.
Wet as we were, we ran directly to the brain room. We had begun to get
opticals already, and the holo tank showed a skinny, scraggly youth
wearing a sort of divided kilt and a dirty tunic. He did not seem
threatening in any way, but he sure as hell had no right to be there.
"Voice," I ordered, and the moving lips began to speak-queer, shrill,
high-pitched, but good enough English to understand:
"From the main station, yes. It is about seven seven-days...weeks, I
mean. I come here often."
"For God's sake, how?" I could not see the speaker, but it was male and
had no accent: Paul Hall.
"In a ship, to be sure. Do you not have a ship? The Dead Men speak only
of traveling in ships, I do not know any other way."
"Incredible," said Essie over my shoulder. She backed away, not taking
her eyes off the tank, and came back with a terrycloth robe to throw over
my shoulders and one for herself. "What do you suppose is 'main station'?"
"I wish to God I knew. Harriet?"
The voices from the tank grew fainter, and my secretary's voice said,
"Yes, Mr. Broadhead?"
"When did he get there?"
"About seventeen point four minutes ago, Mr. Broadhead. Plus transit
time from the Food Factory, of course. He was discovered by Janine Herter.
She did not appear to have had a camera with her, so we received only
voice until one of the other members of the party arrived." As soon as she
stopped speaking the voice from the figure in the tank came up again;
Harriet is a very good program, one of Essie's best.
"...sorry if I behaved improperly," the boy was saying. Pause. Then,
old Peter Herter:
"Never mind that, by God. Are there other people on this main station?"
The boy pursed his lips. "That," he said philosophically, "would
depend, would it not, on how one defines 'person'? In the sense of a
living organism of our species, no. The closest is the Dead Men."
A woman's voice-Dorema Herter-Hall. "Are you hungry? Do you need
anything?"
"No, why should I?"
"Harriet? What's that about behaving improperly?" I asked. Harriet's
voice came hesitantly. "He, uh, he brought himself to orgasm, Mr.
Broadhead. Right in front of Janine Herter."
I couldn't help it, I broke out laughing. "Essie," I said to my wife,
"I think you made her a little too ladylike." But that wasn't what I was
laughing at. It was the plain incongruity of the thing. I had
guessed-anything. Anything but this: a Heechee, a space pirate,
Martians-God knows what, but not a horny teen-aged boy.
There was a scrabble of steel claws from behind and something jumped on
my shoulder. "Down, Squiffy," I snapped.
Essie said, "Just let him nuzzle neck for a minute. He'll go away."
"He isn't dainty in his personal habits," I snarled. "Can't we get rid
of him?"
"Na, na, galubka," she said soothingly, patting the top of my head as
she got up. "Want Full Medical, don't you? Squiffy comes along." She
kissed me and wandered out of the room, leaving me to think about the
thing that, to my somewhat surprise, was making all sorts of tiny but
discomforting stirrings inside me. To see a Heechee! Well, we hadn't-but
what if we did?
When the first Venus explorers discovered the traces the Heechee had
left, glowing blue-lined empty tunnels, spindle-shaped caves, it was a
shock. A few artifacts, another shock-what were they? There were the
scrolls of metal somebody named "prayer fans" (but did the Heechee pray,
and if so to whom?) There were the glowing little beads called "fire
pearls", but they weren't pearls, and they weren't burning. Then someone
found the Gateway asteroid, and the biggest shock of all, because on it
were a couple of hundred working spaceships. Only you couldn't direct
them. You could get in and go, and that was it... and what you found when
you got there was shock, shock, shock, shock.
I knew. I had had the shocks, on my three silly missions-No. Two silly
missions. And then one terribly unsilly one. It had made me rich and
deprived me of somebody I loved, and what is silly about either of those
things?
And ever since then the Heechee, dead half a million years, not even a
written word left to tell what they were up to, had permeated every part
of our world. It was all questions, and not very many answers. We didn't
even know what they called themselves, certainly not "Heechee", because
that was just a name the explorers made up for them. We had no idea what
these remote and godlike creatures called themselves. But we didn't know
what God called Himself, either. Jehovah, Jupiter, Baal, Allah-those were
names people made up. Who knew by what name He was known to His buddies?
I was trying to let myself feel what I might have felt if the stranger
in the Food Factory had actually been Heechee when the toilet flushed,
Essie came out and Squiffy made a dash for the bowl. There are indignities
to having Full Medical coverage, and a mobile bio-assay unit is one of
them.
"You are wasting my program time!" Essie scolded, and I realized that
Harriet had been sitting patiently in the tank, waiting to be told to get
on with her information about the other claims on my attention. The report
from the Food Factory was all being taped and stored in any case, so Essie
went to her own office to deal with her own priorities, I told Harriet to
start the cook on lunch, and then I let her do her secretarial duties.
"You have an appointment to testify before the Senate Ways and Means
Committee tomorrow morning, Mr. Broadhead."
"I know. I'll be there."
"You're due for your next checkup this weekend. Shall I confirm the
appointment?"
That's one of the penalties of Full Medical, and besides Essie
insists-she's twenty years younger than I, and reminds me of it. "All
right, let's get it over with."
"You are being sued by one Hanson Bover, and Morton wants to talk to
you about it. Your consolidated statement for the quarter came in and is
on your desk file-except for the food mine holdings, which will not be
complete until tomorrow. And there are a number of minor messages-most of
which I have already dealt with-for your review at your convenience."
"Thank you. That's all for now." The tank went transparent and I leaned
back in my chair to think.
I didn't need to see the consolidated statement-I already pretty well
knew what it would say. The real estate investments were performing
nicely; the little bit I had left in sea farming was moving toward a
record profit year. Everything was solid, except for the food mines. The
last 130-day fever had cost us. I couldn't blame the guys in Cody, they
weren't any more responsible than I was when the fever bit. But they had
somehow let the thermal drilling get out of control, and five thousand
acres of our shale were burning away underground. It had taken three
months to get the mine back in operation at all, and we still didn't know
what it was going to cost. no wonder their quarterly statement was late.
But that was only an annoyance, not a disaster. I was too well
diversified to be killed by any one sector going bad. I wouldn't have been
in the food mines except for Morton's advice; the extraction allowance
made it a really good thing, tax-wise. (But I'd sold most of my
sea-farming holdings to buy in.) Then Morton figured out that I still
needed a tax shelter, so we started The Broadhead Institute for
Extra-Solar Research. The Institute owns all my stock, but I vote it, and
I vote it for what I want to do. I got us into the coownership with the
Gateway Corporation that financed probes to four detected but unvisited
Heechee-metal sources in or near the solar system, and one of them had
been the Food Factory. As soon as they made contact we spun off a separate
exploitation company to deal with it-and now it was looking really
interesting.
"Harriet? Let me have the direct from the Food Factory again," I said.
The holo sprang up, the boy still talking excitedly in his shrill, squeaky
voice. I tried to catch the thread of what he was saying-something about a
Dead Man (only it wasn't a man, because its name was Henrietta) speaking
to him (so it wasn't dead?) about a Gateway mission she had been on (when?
why hadn't I heard of her?). It was all perplexing, so I had a better
idea. "Albert Einstein, please," I said, and the holo swirled to show the
sweet old lined face peering at me.
"Yes, Robin?" said my science program, reaching for his pipe and
tobacco as he almost always does when we talk.
"I'd like some best-guess estimates from you on the Food Factory and
the boy that turned up there."
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, tamping the tobacco with his thumb. "The
boy's name is Wan. He appears to be between fourteen and nineteen years of
age, probably toward the young end of the spread, and I would guess that
he is fully genetically human."
"Where does he come from?"
"Ah, that is conjectural, Robin. He speaks of a 'main station',
presumably another Heechee artifact in some ways resembling Gateway,
Gateway Two and the Food Factory itself, but without any self-evident
function. There do not appear to be any other living humans there. He
speaks of 'Dead Men', who appear to be some sort of computer program like
myself, although it is not clear whether they may not in fact be quite
different in origin. He also mentions living creatures he calls 'the Old
Ones' or 'the frog-jaws'. He has little contact with them, in fact avoids
it, and it is not clear where they come from."
I took a deep breath. "Heechee?"
"I don't know, Robin. I cannot even guess. By Occam's Razor one would
conjecture that living non-humans occupying a Heechee artifact might well
be Heechee-but there is no direct evidence. We have no idea what Heechee
look like, you know."
I did know. It was a sobering thought that we might soon find out.
"Anything else? Can you tell me what's happening with the tests to
bring the factory back?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, striking a match to the pipe. "But I'm
afraid there's no good news. The object appears to be course-programmed
and under full control. Whatever we do to it it counteracts."
It had been a close decision whether to leave the Food Factory out in
the Oort cloud and somehow try to ship food back to Earth, or bring the
thing itself in. Now it looked as though we had no choice. "Is there-do
you think it's under Heechee control?"
"There is no way to be sure as yet. Narrowly, I would conjecture not.
It appears to be an automatic response. However," he said, puffing on his
pipe, "there is something encouraging. May I show you some visuals from
the factory?"
"Please do," I said, but actually he hadn't waited; Albert is a
courteous program, but also a smart one. He disappeared and I was looking
at a scene of the boy, Wan, showing Peter Herter how to open what seemed
to be a hatch in the wall of a passage. Out of it he was pulling floppy
soft packages of something in bright red wrappings.
"Our assumption as to the nature of the artifact seems to be validated,
Robin. Those are edible and, according to Wan, they are continually
replenished. He has been living on them for most of his life and, as you
see, appears to be in excellent health, basically-I am afraid he is
catching a cold just now."
I looked at the clock over his shoulder-he always keeps it at the right
time for my sake. "That's all for now, then. Keep me posted if anything
that affects your conclusions turns up."
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, disappearing.
I started to get up. Talking of food reminded me that lunch should be
about ready, and I was not only hungry, I had plans for an afterlunch
break. I tied the robe around me-and then remembered the message about the
lawsuit. Lawsuits are nothing special in any rich man's life, but if
Morton wanted to talk to me I probably ought to listen.
He responded at once, sitting at his desk, leaning forward earnestly.
"We