The difference between the ages of ten and fourteen is immense. After three and a half years in a photon-powered spaceship en route to the Oort cloud, Janine was no longer the child who had left. She had not stopped being a child. She had just reached that early maturation plateau wherein the individual recognizes that it still has a great deal of growing to do. Janine was not in a hurry to become an adult. She was simply working at getting the job done. Every day. All the time. With whatever tools came to hand.
When she left the others, on the day when she met Wan, she was not particularly searching for anything. She simply wanted to be alone. Not for any really private purpose. Not even because, or not only because, she was tired of her family. What she wanted was something of her own, an experience not shared, an evaluation not helped by always-present grownups; she wanted the look and touch and smell of the strangeness of the Food Factory, and she wanted it to be hers.
So she pushed herself at random along the passages, sucking from time to time at a squeeze bottle of coffee. Or what seemed to be “coffee” to her. It was a habit Janine had learned from her father, although, if you had asked her, she would have denied that she had learned any.
All of her senses thirsted for inputs. The Food Factory was the most fabulously exciting, delightfully scary thing that had ever happened to her. More than the launch from Earth when she was a mere child. More than the stained shorts that had announced she had become a woman. More than anything. Even the bare walls of the passages were exciting, because they were Heechee metal, a zillion years old, and still glowing with the gentle blue light their makers had built into them. (What sort of eyes had seen by that light when it was new?) She patted herself gently from chamber to chamber, only the balls of her feet ever touching the floor. In this room were walls of rubbery shelves (what had they held?), in that squatted a huge truncated sphere, top and bottom sliced off, mirror chrome in appearance, queerly powdery to the touch-what was it for? Some of the things she could guess at. The thing that looked like a table certainly was a table. (The lip around it was no doubt there to keep things from skittering off it in the Food Factory’s gentle gravity.) Some of the objects had been identified for them by Vera, accessing the information stores of Heechee artifacts cataloged by the big data sources back on Earth. The cubicles with cobwebby green tracings on the walls were thought to have been for sleeping accommodations; but who was to know if dumb Vera was right? No matter. The objects themselves were thrilling. So was the presence of space to move around in. Even to get lost in. For until they reached the Food Factory, Janine had never, ever, not once in her life, had the chance to get lost. The idea made her itch with scary pleasure. Especially as the quite adult part of her fourteen-year-old brain was always aware that, no matter how lost she got, the Food Factory simply was not large enough for her to stay lost.
So it was a safe thrill. Or seemed so.
Until she found herself trapped by the farside docks, as something-Heechee? Space monster? Crazed old castaway with a knife?-came shambling out of the hidden passages toward her.
And then it was none of those things, it was Wan.
Of course, she didn’t know his name. “Don’t you come any closer!” she whimpered, heart in mouth, radio in hand, forearms hugged across her new breasts. He didn’t. He stopped. He stared at her, eyes popping, mouth open, tongue almost hanging out. He was tall, skinny. His face was triangular, with a long, beaked nose. He was wearing what looked like a skirt and what looked like a tank-top, both dirty. He smelled male. He was shaking as he sniffed the air, and he was young. Surely he was not much older than Janine herself and the only person less than triple her age she had seen in years; and when he let himself drop gently to his knees and began to do what Janine had never seen any other person do she moaned while she giggled-amusement, relief, shock, hysteria. The shock was not at what he was doing. The shock came from meeting a boy. In her sleep Janine had dreamed wildly, but never of this.
For the next few days Janine could not bear to let Wan out of her sight. She felt herself to be his mother, his playmate, his teacher, his wife. “No, Wan! Sip it slowly, it’s hot!” “Wan, do you mean to say you’ve been all alone since you were three?” “You have really beautiful eyes, Wan.” She didn’t mind that he was not sophisticated enough to respond by telling her that she had beautiful eyes, too, because she could definitely tell that she fascinated him in all her parts.
The others could tell that, too, of course. Janine did not mind. Wan had plenty of senses-sharp, eyes-bright, obsessed adoration to share around. He slept even less than she. She appreciated that, at first, because it meant there was more of Wan to share, but then she could see that he was becoming exhausted. Even ill. When he began to sweat and tremble, in the room with the glittering silver-blue cocoon, she was the one who cried, “Lurvy! I think he’s going to be sick!” When he lurched toward the couch she flew to his side, fingers stretched to test his dry and burning forehead. The closing cover of the cocoon almost trapped her arm, gouging a long, deep slash from wrist to knuckles on her hand. “Paul,” she shouted, drawing back, “we’ve got to-“
And then the 130-day madness hit them all. Worst of any time. Different from any time. Between one heartbeat and the next Janine was sick.
Janine had never been sick. Now and then a bruise, a cramp, a sniffle. Nothing more. For most of her life she had been under Full Medical and sickness simply did not occur. She did not comprehend what was happening to her. Her body raged with fever and pain. She hallucinated monstrous strange figures, in some of whom she recognized her caricatured family; others were simply terrifying and strange. She even saw herself-hugely bosomed and grossly hipped, but herself-and in her belly rumbled a frenzy to thrust and thrust into all the seen and imagined cavities of that fantasy something that, even in fantasy, she did not have. None of this was clear. Nothing was clear. The agonies and the insanities came in waves. Between them, for a second or two now and then, she caught glimpses of reality. The steely blue glow from the walls. Lurvy, crouched and whimpering beside her. Her father, vomiting in the passage. The chrome and blue cocoon, with Wan writhing and babbling inside the mesh. It was not reason or will that made her claw at the lid and, on the hundredth, or thousandth, try to get it open; but she did it, at last, and dragged him whimpering and shaking out.
The hallucinations stopped at once.
Not quite as quickly, the pain, the nausea and the terror. But they stopped. They were all shuddering and reeling still, all but the boy, who was unconscious and breathing in a way that terrified Janine, great, hoarse, snoring gasps. “Help, Lurvy!” she screamed. “He’s dying!” Her sister was already beside her, thumb on the boy’s pulse, shaking her head to clear it as she peered dizzily at his eyes.
“Dehydrated. Fever. Come on,” she cried, struggling with Wan’s arms. “Help me get him back to the ship. He needs saline, antibiotics, a febrifuge, maybe some gamma globulin-“
It took them nearly twenty minutes to tow Wan to the ship, and Janine was in terror that he would die at every bounding, slow-motion step. Lurvy raced ahead the last hundred meters, and by the time Paul and Janine had struggled him through the airlock she had already unsealed the medic kit and was shouting orders. “Put him down. Make him swallow this. Take a blood sample and check virus and antibody titers. Send a priority to base, tell them we need medical instructions-if he lives long enough to get them!”
Paul helped them get Wan’s clothes off and the boy wrapped in one of the Payter’s blankets. Then he sent the message. But he knew, they all knew, that the problem of whether Wan lived or died would not be solved from Earth. Not with a round-trip time of seven weeks before they could get an answer. Payter was swearing over the bio-assay mobile unit. Lurvy and Janine were working on the boy. Paul, without saying a word to anyone, struggled into his EVA suit and exited into - space, where he spent an exhausting hour and a half redirecting the transmitter dishes-the main one to the bright double star that was the planet Neptune and its moon, the other to the point in space occupied by the Garfeld mission. Then, clinging to the hull, he radio-commanded Vera to repeat the SOS to each of them at max power. They might be monitoring. They might not When Vera signaled that the messages were sent he reoriented the big dish to Earth. It took them three hours, first to last, and whether either of them would receive his message was doubtful. It was no less doubtful that either would have much help to offer. The Garfeld ship was smaller and less well equipped than their own, and the people at the Triton base were short-timers. But if either did they could hope for a message of aid-or at least sympathy- a lot faster than from Earth.
In an hour Wan’s fever began to recede. In twelve the twitchings and babblings diminished and he slept normally. But he was still very sick.
Mother and playmate, teacher and at-least-fantasy wife, now Janine became Wan’s nurse as well. After the first round of medication, she would not even let Lurvy give him his shots. She went without sleep to sponge his brow. When he soiled himself in his coma she cleaned him fastidiously. She had no concentration left for anything else. The amused or concerned looks and words from her family left her untouched, until she brushed Wan’s unkempt hair off his face, and Paul made a patronizing comment. Janine heard the jealousy in the tone and flared, “Paul, you’re sickening! Wan needs me to take care of him!”
“And you do enjoy it, don’t you?” he snapped. He was really angry. Of course, that sparked more anger in Janine; but her father put in, gently enough, “Let the girl be a girl, Paul. Were you not yourself once young? Come, let us examine this Trdumeplatz again-“
Janine surprised herself by letting the peacemaker succeed; it had been a marvelous chance of a furious spat, but that was not where her interests lay. She took time for a tight, small grin about Paul’s jealousy, because that was a new service stripe to sew on her sleeve, and then back to Wan.
As he mended he became even more interesting. From time to time he woke, and spoke to her. When he was asleep she studied him. Face so dark, body olive; but from waist to thigh he bad the palest skin, the color of bread dough, taut over his sharp bones. Scant body hair. None on his face except a soft, almost invisible strand or two-more lip-lashes than mustache.
Janine knew that Lurvy and her father made a joke of her, and that Paul was actually jealous of the attentions he had avoided so long. It made a nice change. She had status. For the first time in her life, what she was doing was the most significant activity of the group. The others came to her to sue for permission to question Wan, and when she thought he was tiring they accepted her command to stop.
Besides, Wan fascinated her. She mapped him against all her previous experience of Men, to his advantage. Even against her pen-pals, Wan was better looking than the ice-skater, smarter than the actors, almost as tall as the basketball player. And against all of them, especially against the only two males she had been within tens of millions of kilometers of in years, Wan was so marvelously young. And Paul and her father, not. The backs of old Peter’s hands bore irregular blotches of caramel-colored pigment, which was gross. But at least the old man kept himself neat. Even dainty, in the continental way-even clipped the hairs that grew inside his ears with tiny silver scissors, because Janine had caught him at it. While Paul- In one of her skirmishes with Lurvy, Janine had snarled, “That’s what you go to bed With? An ape with hairy ears? I’d puke.”
So she fed Wan, and read to him, and drowsed over him while he slept. She shampooed his hair, and trimmed it to a soup-bowl mop, allowing Lurvy to help her get it even, and blow-dried it smooth. She washed his clothes and, spurning Lurvy for this, patched them and even cut down some of Paul’s to fit him. He accepted it all, every bit, and enjoyed it as much as she.
As he grew stronger, he no longer needed her as much, and she was less able to protect him from the questions of the others. But they were protective, too. Even old Peter. The computer, Vera, burrowed into its medical programs and prepared a long list of tests to be performed on the boy. “Assassin!” raged Peter. “Has it no understanding of a young man who has been so close to death that it wishes to finish it?” It was not entirely consideration. Peter had questions of his own, and he had been asking them when Janine would allow it, sulking and fidgeting when she would not. “That bed of yours, Wan, tell me again what you feel when you are in it? As though you are somehow a part of millions of people? And also they of you, isn’t that so?” But when Janine accused him of interfering with Wan’s recovery, the old man desisted. Though never for long.
Then Wan was well enough for Janine to allow herself a full night’s sleep in her own private, and when she woke her sister was at Vera’s console. Wan was holding to the back of her chair, grinning and frowning at the unfamiliar machine, and Lurvy was reading off to him his medical report. “Your vital signs are normal, your weight is picking up, your antibody levels are in the normal range-I think you’re going to be all right now, Wan.”
“So now,” cried her father, “at last we can talk? About this faster-than-light radio, the machines, the place he comes from, the dreaming room?” Janine hurled herself into the group.
“Leave him alone!” she snarled. But Wan shook his head.
“Let them ask what they like, Janine,” he said in his shrill, breathy voice.
“Now?”
“Yes, now!” stormed her father. “Now, this minute! Paul, come you here and tell this boy what we must know.”
They had planned this, Janine realized, the three of them; but Wan did not object, and she could not pretend he was unfit for questioning any longer. She marched over and sat beside him. If she could not prevent this interrogation, at least she would be there to protect him. She gave formal permission, coldly: “Go ahead, Paul. Say what you want to say, but don’t tire him out.”
Paul looked at her ironically, but spoke to Wan. “For more than a dozen years,” he said, “every hundred and thirty days or so, the whole Earth has gone crazy. It looks like it’s your fault,
The boy frowned, but said nothing. His public defender spoke for him. “Why are you picking on him?” she demanded.
“No one is ‘picking’, Janine. But what we experienced was the fever. It can’t be a coincidence. When Wan gets into that contraption he broadcasts to the world.” Paul shook his head. “Dear lad, do you have any idea of how much trouble you’ve caused? Ever since you began coming here, your dreams have been shared by millions of people. Billions! Sometimes you were peaceful, and your dreams were peaceful, and that wasn’t so bad. Sometimes you weren’t. I don’t want you to blame yourself,” he added kindly, forestalling Janine, “but thousands and thousands of people have died. And the property damage-Wan, you just can’t imagine.”
Wan shrilled defensively, “I have never harmed anyone!” he was unable to take in just what he was accused of, but there was no doubt in his mind that Paul was accusing. Lurvy put her hand on his arm.
“I wish it were so, Wan,” she said. “The important thing is, you mustn’t do that again.”
“No more dreaming in the couch?”
“No, Wan.” He looked to Janine for guidance, then shrugged. “But that is not all,” Paul put in. “You have to help us. Tell us everything you know. About the couch. About the Dead Men. About the faster-than-light radio, the food-“
“Why should I?” Wan demanded.
Patiently, Paul coaxed: “Because in that way you can make up for the fever. I don’t think you understand how important you are, Wan. The knowledge in your head might mean saving people from starvation. Millions of lives, Wan.”
Wan frowned over that concept for a moment, but “millions” was meaningless to him as applying to human beings-he had not yet adjusted to “five”. “You make me angry,” he scolded.
“I don’t mean to, Wan.”
“It is not what you mean to, it is what you do. You have just told me that,” the boy grumbled spitefully. “All right. What do you want?”
“We want you to tell us everything you know,” Paul said promptly. “Oh, not all at once. But as you remember. And we want you to go through this whole Food Factory with us and explain everything in it-as far as you can, I mean.”
“This place? There is nothing here but the dreaming room, and you won’t let me use that!”
“It is all new to us, Wan.”
“It is nothing! The water does not run, there is no library, the Dead Men are hard to talk to, nothing grows! At home I have everything, and much of it is working, so you can see for yourself.”
“You make it sound like heaven, Wan.”
“See for yourself! If I can’t dream, there is no reason to stay here!”
Paul looked at the others, perplexed. “Could we do that?”
“Of course! My ship will take us there-not all of you, no,” Wan corrected himself. “But some. We can leave the old man here. There is no woman for him, anyway, so there is no pairing to destroy. Or even,” he added cunningly, “only Janine and I can go. Then there will be more room in the ship. We can bring you back machines, books, treasures-“
“Forget that, Wan,” Janine said wisely. “They’ll never let us do that.”
“Not so fast, my girl,” her father said. “That is not for you to decide. What the boy is saying is interesting. If he can open the gates of heaven for us, who are we to stand outside in the cold?”
Janine studied her father, but his expression was bland. “You don’t mean you’d let Wan and me go there alone?”
“That,” he said, “is not the question. The question is, how can we most rapidly complete this God-bedamned mission and return to our reward. There is no other.”
“Well,” said Lurvy after a moment, “we don’t have to decide that right now. Heaven will wait for us, for all our lives.”
Her father said, “That is true, yes. But, expressed concretely, some of us have less lives to wait than others.”
Every day new messages came in from Earth. Infuriatingly, these related only to a remote past, before Wan, irrelevant to everything they were doing or planning now: Submit chemical analyses of this. X-ray that. Measure these other things. By now the slow packets of photons that transmitted the word of their reaching the Food Factory had arrived at Downlink-Vera on Earth, and perhaps replies were already on their way. But they would not arrive for weeks. The base at Triton had a smarter computer than Vera, and Paul and Lurvy argued for transmitting all their data there for interpretation and advice. Old Peter rejected the idea with fury. “Those wanderers, gypsies? Why should we give them what costs us so much to get!”
“But nobody’s questioning us, Pa,” Lurvy coaxed. “It’s all ours. The contracts spell it all out.”
“No!”
So they fed all that Wan told them into Shipboard-Vera, and Vera’s small, slow intelligence painfully sorted the bits into patterns. Even into graphics. The external appearance of the place Wan had come from-it was probably not a very good likeness, because it was apparent that Wan had not had the curiosity to study it very closely. The corridors. The machines. The Heechee themselves; and each time Wan offered corrections:
“Ah, no. They both have beards, males and females. Even when they are quite young. And the breasts on the females are-“ He held his hands just below his rib cage, to show how low they swung. “And you do not give them the right smell.”
“Holos don’t smell at all, Wan,” said Paul.
“Yes, exactly! But they do, you see. In rut, they smell very much.”
And Vera mumbled and whined over the new data, and shakily drew in the new revisions. After hours of this, what had been a game for Wan turned into drudgery. When he began saying, “Yes, it is perfect, that is exactly how the Dead Men’s room looks,” they all understood that he was merely agreeing with anything that would stop the boredom for a while, and gave him a rest. Then Janine would take him for a wander through the corridors, sound and vision pickups strapped to her shoulder, in case he said something of value or pointed out a treasure, and they spoke of other things. His knowledge was as astonishing as his ignorance. Both were unpredictable.
It was not only Wan that needed study. Every hour Lurvy or old Peter would come up with a new idea for diverting the Food Factory from its programmed drive, so that they could try to accomplish their original purpose. None worked. Every day more messages came in from Earth. They were still not relevant. They were not even very interesting; Janine let a score of letters from her pen-pals stay in Vera’s memory without bothering to retrieve them, since the messages she was getting from Wan filled her needs. Sometimes the communications were odd. For Lurvy, the announcement that her college had named her its Woman of the Year. For old Peter, a formal petition from the city he had been born in. He read it and burst into laughter. “Dortmund still wishes me to run for Burgermeister! What nonsense!”
“Why, that’s really nice,” Lurvy said agreeably. “It’s quite a compliment.”
“It is quite nothing,” he corrected her severely. “Burgermeister! With what we have I could be elected president of the Federal Republic, or even-“ He fell silent, and then said gloomily, “If, to be sure, I ever see the Federal Republic again.” He paused, looking over their heads. His lips worked silently for a moment, and then he said: “Perhaps we should go back now.”
“Aw, Pop,” Janine began. And stopped, because the old man turned on her the look of an alpha wolf on a cub. There was a sudden tension among them, until Paul cleared his throat and said:
“Well, that’s certainly one of our options. Of course, there’s a legal question of contract-“
Peter shook his head. “I have thought of that. They owe us so much already! Simply for stopping the fever, if they pay us only one percent of the damage we save it is millions. Billions. And if they won’t pay-“ He hesitated, and then said, “No, there is no question that they won’t pay. We simply must speak to them. Report that we have stopped the fever, that we cannot move the Food Factory, that we are coming home. By the time a return message can arrive we will be weeks on our way.”
“And what about Wan?” Janine demanded.
“He will come with us, to he sure. He will be among his own kind again, and that is surely what is best for him.”
“Don’t you think we ought to let Wan decide that? And what happened to sending a bunch of us to investigate his heaven?”
“That was a dream,” her father said coldly. “Reality is that we cannot do everything. Let someone else explore his heaven, there is plenty for all; and we will be back in our homes, enjoying riches and fame. It is not just a matter of the contract,” he went on, almost pleadingly. “We are saviors! There will be lecture tours and endorsements for the advertising! We will be persons of great power!”
“No, Pop,” Janine said, “listen to me. You’ve all been talking about our duty to help the world-feed people, bring them new things to make their lives better. Well, aren’t we going to do our duty?”
He turned on her furiously. “Little minx, what do you know about duty? Without me you would be in some gutter in Chicago, waiting for the welfare check! We must think of ourselves as well!”
She would have replied, but Wan’s wide-eyed, frightened stare made her stop. “I hate this!” she announced. “Wan and I are going to go for a walk to get away from the lot of you!”
“He is not really a bad person,” she told Wan, once they were beyond the sound of the others. Quarreling voices had followed them and Wan, who had little experience of disagreements, was obviously upset.
Wan did not reply directly. He pointed to a bulge in the glowing blue wall. “This is a place for water,” he said, “but it is a dead one. There are dozens of them, but almost all dead.”
Out of duty, Janine inspected it, pointing her shoulder-held camera at it as she slid the rounded cover back and forth. There was a protuberance like a nose at the top of it, and what must be a drain at the bottom; it was almost large enough to get into, but bone dry. “You said one of them still works, but the water isn’t drinkable?”
“Yes, Janine. Would you like me to show it to you?”
“Well, I guess so.” She added, “Really, don’t let them get to you. They just get excited.”
“Yes, Janine.” But he was not in a talkative mood.
She said, “When I was little he used to tell me stories. Mostly they were scary, but sometimes not. He told me about Schwarze Peter, who, as far as I can figure out, was something like Santa Claus. He said if I was a good little girl Schwarze Peter would bring me a doll at Christmas, but if I wasn’t he’d bring me a lump of coal. Or worse. That’s what I used to call him, Schwarze Peter. But he never gave me a lump of coal.” He was listening intently as they moved down the glowing corridor, but he did not respond. “Then my mother died,” she said, “and Paul and Lurvy got married and I went to live with them for a while. But Pop wasn’t so bad, really. He came to see me as often as he could-I guess. Wan! Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“No,” he said. “What’s Santa Claus?”
“Oh, Wan!”
So she explained Santa Claus to him, and Christmas, and then had to explain winter and snow and gift-giving. His face smoothed, and he began to smile; and curiously, as Wan’s mood improved Janine’s grew worse. Trying to make Wan understand the world she lived in made her confront the world ahead. Almost, she thought, it would be better to do what Peter proposed, pack it all in, go back to their real lives. All the alternatives were frightening. Where they were was frightening, if she let herself feel it-in some kind of an artifact that was doggedly plowing its way through space to some unknown destination. What if it arrived? What would they confront? Or if they went back with Wan, what would be there? Heechee? Heechee! There was fear! Janine had lived all her young life with the Heechee just outside it-terrifying if real, less real than mythical. Like Schwarze Peter or Santa Claus. Like God. All myths and deities are tolerable enough to believe in; but what if they become real?
She knew that her family were as fearful as she, though she could not tell that from anything they said-they were setting an example of courage to her. She could only guess. She guessed that Paul and her sister were afraid but had made up their minds to gamble against that fear for the sake of what might come of it. Her own fear was of a very special kind-less fear of what might happen than of how badly she might behave while it was happening to her. What her father felt was obvious to everyone. He was angry and afraid, and what he was afraid of was dying before he cashed in on his courage.
And what did Wan feel? He seemed so uncomplicated as he showed her about his domain, like one child guiding another through his toy chest. Janine knew better. If she had learned anything in her fourteen years, it was that nobody was uncomplicated. Wan’s complications were merely not the same as her own, as she saw at once when he showed her the water fixture that worked. He had not been able to drink the water, but he had used it for a toilet. Janine, brought up in the great conspiracy of the Western world to pretend that excretion does not happen, would never have brought Wan to see this place of stains and smells, but he was wholly unembarrassed. She could not even make him embarrassed. “I had to go somewhere,” he said sullenly, when she reproached him for not using the ship’s sanitary like everybody else.
“Yes, but if you did it the right way Vera would have known you were sick, don’t you see? She’s always analyzing our, uh, the bathroom stuff.”
“There ought to be some other way.”
“Well, there is.” There was the mobile bioassay unit, which took tiny samples from each of them-which had, in fact, been put to work on Wan, once the necessity was perceived. But Vera was not a very smart computer, and had not thought to program her mobile unit to sample Wan until told to do so, a little late. “What’s the matter?”
He was acting uncomfortable. “When the Dead Men give me a medical check they stick things in me. I don’t like that.”
‘It’s for your own good, Wan,” she said severely. “Hey! That’s an idea. Let’s go talk to the Dead Men.”
And there was Janine’s own complicatedness. She didn’t really want to talk to the Dead Men. She just wanted to get away from the embarrassing place they were in; but by the time they had propelled themselves to the place where the Dead Men were, which was also the place where Wan’s dreaming couch was, Janine had decided to want something else. “Wan,” she said, “I want to try the couch.”
He tilted his head back and narrowed his eyes, appraising her over his long nose. “Lurvy told me not to do that any more,” he stated.
“I know she did. How do I get in?”
“First you tell me I must do what you all say,” he complained, “then you all tell me to do different things. It is very confusing.”
She had already stepped into the cocoon and stretched out. ‘Do I just pull the top down over me?”
“Oh,” he said, shrugging, “if you’ve made up your mind-yes. It snaps shut, there, where your hand is, but when you want to come out you just push.”
She reached for the webby top and pulled it toward her, looking up at his petulant, concerned face. “Does it-hurt?”
“Hurt? No! What an idea!”
“Well, what does it feel like?”
“Janine,” he said severely, “you are very childish. Why do you ask questions when you can see for yourself?” And he pushed down on the shimmery wire covering, and the catch midway down the side rustled and locked. “It is best if you go to sleep,” he called down to her, through the shining blue network of wire.
“But I’m not sleepy,” she objected reasonably. “I’m not anything. I don’t feel a thing. . . .”
And then she did.
It was not what she had expected out of her own experience of the fever; there was no obsessive interference with her own personality, no point source of feelings. There was only a warm and saturating glow. She was surrounded. She was an atom in a soup of sensation. The other atoms had no shape or individuality. They were not tangible or hard-edged. She could still see Wan, peering worriedly down at her through the wire when she opened her eyes, and these other-souls?-were not at all as real or as immediate. But she could feel them, as she had never felt another presence. Around her. Beside her. Within her. They were warm. They were comforting.
When Wan at last wrenched open the metal wire and pulled at her arm, she lay there staring at him. She did not have the strength to rise, or the desire. He had to help her up, and she leaned on his shoulder as they started back.
They were less than halfway back to the Herter-Hall ship when the other members of the family interrupted them, and they were furious. “Stupid little brat!” Paul raged. “You ever do anything like that again and I’ll paddle your pink little ass for you!”
“She won’t!” her father said grimly. “I will see to that, right now; and as to you, little miss, I will see to you later.”
They had all become so quarrelsome! No one paddled Janine’s bottom for trying out the dreaming couch. No one punished her at all. They all punished each other, instead, and did it all the time. The truce that had held for three and a half years, because each of them enforced it for himself, the alternative being mutual murder, dissolved. Paul and the old man did not speak for two days, because Peter had dismantled the couch without consultation. Lurvy and her father spat and shouted at each other because she had programmed too much salt in their meal, and then again, when it was his turn, because he had programmed too little. And as to Lurvy and Paul-they no longer slept together; they hardly spoke; they would surely not have stayed married, if there had been a divorce court within 5,000 A.U.
But if there had been a source of authority of any kind within 5,000 A.U., at least the disputes could have been resolved. Someone could have made their decisions. Should they return? Should they try to overpower the Food Factory’s guidance? Should they go with Wan to explore the other place-and if so, who should go and who should remain behind? They could not agree on grand plans. They could not even agree on the decisions of every hour, to take a machine apart and risk its destruction, or to leave it alone and give up the hope of some wonderful discovery that could change everything. They could not agree on who should talk to the Dead Men by radio, or what to ask them. Wan showed them, willingly enough, how to try to tempt the Dead Men into conversation, and they put Vera’s sound system in linkage with the “radio”. But Vera could not handle much give and take; and when the Dead Men did not understand her questions, or did not want to participate, or were simply too insane to be of any use, Vera was beaten.
All this was awful for Janine, but worst of all was Wan himself. The squabbling made him confused and indignant. He stopped following her around. And after one sleep, when she sat up and looked around for him, he was gone.
Fortunately for Janine’s pride, everyone else was gone, too- Paul and Lurvy outside the ship to reorient the antennae; her father asleep, so that she had time to deal with her jealousy. Let him be a pig! she thought. It was stupid of him not to realize that she had many friends, while he had only her; but he would find out! She was busy writing long letters to her neglected correspondents when she heard Paul and her sister returning; and when she told them that Wan had been gone for at least an hour she was unprepared for their reaction. “Pa!” Lurvy cried, rattling at the curtain of her father’s private. “Wake up! Wan’s gone!”
As the old man came blinking out, Janine said disagreeably, “Now, what’s the matter with all of you?”
“You don’t understand, do you?” Paul asked coldly. “What if he’s taken the ship?”
It was a possibility that had never occurred to Janine, and it was like a blow in the face. “He wouldn’t!”
“Would he not?” snarled her father. “And how do you know that, little minx? And if he does, what of us?” He finished zipping his coverall and stood up, glowering at them. “I have told you all,” he said-but looking at Lurvy and Paul, so that Janine understood she was not a part of their “all”-“I have told you that we must find a definite solution. If we are to go with him in his ship, we must do it. If not, we cannot take the risk that he will take it into his foolish little mind to go back without warning. That is assuredly certain.”
“And how do we do that?” Lurvy demanded. “You’re preposterous, Pa. We can’t guard the ship day and night.”
“And your sister cannot guard the boy, yes,” the old man nodded. “So we must either immobilize the ship, or immobilize the boy.”
Janine flew at him. “You monsters!” she choked. “You’ve been planning this all out when we weren’t around!” Her sister caught and held her.
“Calm down, Janine,” she ordered. “Yes, it’s true we’ve talked about it-we had to! But nothing’s settled, certainly not that we will hurt Wan.”
“Then settle it!” Janine flared. “I vote we go with Wan!”
“If he hasn’t gone already, by himself,” Paul put in.
“He hasn’t!”
Lurvy said practically, “If he has, it’s too late for us to do anything about it. Outside of that, I’m with Janine. We go! What do you say, Paul?”
He hesitated. “I-guess so,” he conceded. “Peter?”
The old man said with dignity, “If you are all agreed, then what does it matter how I vote? There is only the question remaining who is to go and who is to stay. I propose-“
Lurvy stopped him. “Pa,” she said, “I know what you are going to say, but it won’t work. We need to leave at least one person here, to keep in contact with Earth. Janine’s too young. It can’t be me, because I’m the best pilot and this is a chance to learn something about piloting a Heechee ship. I don’t want to go without Paul, and that leaves you.”
They took Vera apart, component by component, and redistributed her around the Food Factory. Fast memory, inputs, and displays went into the dreaming chamber, slow memory lining the passageway outside, transmission still in their old ship. Peter helped, silent and taciturn; the meaning of what they were doing was that further communications of interest would come from the exploring party, via the radio system of the Dead Men. Peter was helping to write himself off, and knew it. There was plenty of food in the ship, Wan told them; but Paul would not be satisfied with the automatic replenishment of God knew what product of the Food Factory, and he made them carry aboard rations of their own, as much as they could stow. Whereupon Wan insisted that they stock up with water, and so they depleted the recycling stocks in the ship to fill his plastic bags and loaded them, too. Wan’s ship had no beds, None were needed, Wan pointed out, because the acceleration cocoons were enough to protect them during maneuvers, and to keep them from floating around while they slept in the rest of the voyage-suggestion vetoed by both Lurvy and Paul, who dismantled the sleeping pouches from their private and reinstalled them in the ship. Personal possessions: Janine wanted her secret stash of perfume and books, Lurvy her personal locked bag, Paul his cards for solitaire. It was long and hard work, though they discovered they could ease it by sailing the plastic waterbags and the softer, solider other stores along the corridors in a game of slow-motion catch; but at last it was done. Peter sat sourly propped against a corridor wall, watching the others mill about, and tried to think of what had been forgotten. To Janine it seemed as though they were already treating him as though he were absent, if not dead, and she said, “Pop? Don’t take it so hard. We’ll all be back as soon as we can.”
He nodded. “Which comes to,” he said, “let me see, forty-nine days each way, plus as long as you decide to stay in this place.” But then he pushed himself up, and allowed Lurvy and Janine to kiss him. Almost cheerfully, he said, “Bon voyage. Are you sure you have forgotten nothing?”
Lurvy looked around, considering. “I think not-unless you think we should tell your friends we are coming, Wan?”
“The Dead Men?” he shrilled, grinning. “They will not know. They are not alive, you know, they have no sense of time.”
“Then why do you like them so much?” Janine demanded.
Wan caught the note of jealousy and scowled at her. “They are my friends,” he said. “They cannot be taken seriously all the time, and they often lie. But they do not ever make me feel afraid of them.”
Lurvy caught her breath. “Oh, Wan,” she said, touching him. “I know we haven’t been as nice as we might. We’ve all been under a great strain. We’re really better people than we must seem to you.”
Old Peter had had enough. “Go you now,” he snarled. “Prove this to him, do not stand talking forever. And then come back and prove it to me!”
Less than two hours-the fever had never been so short before. Nor had it ever been as intense. The most susceptible one percent of the population had simply been out of it for four hours, and nearly everyone had been severely affected.
I was one of the lucky ones, because after the fever I was only stuck in my room, with nothing more than a bump on the head from falling over. I wasn’t trapped in a wrecked bus, crashed out of a jet-liner, struck by a runaway car, or bleeding to death on an operating table while surgeons and nurses writhed helplessly on the floor. All I had was one hour, fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds of delirious misery, and that diluted because it was shared with eleven billion other people.
Of course, everybody in all those eleven billion was trying to get in touch with everybody else, all at once, and so communications were jammed for fair. Harriet formed herself in the tank to tell me that at least twenty-five calls were coming in for me-my science program, my legal program, three or four accountancy programs from my holdings, and quite a few real, live people. None of them, she told me apologetically when I asked, was Essie; the circuits to Tucson were out entirely at the moment, and I couldn’t place a call from my end either. None of the machines had been affected by the madness. They never were. The only time something went wrong with them was when some live person had injected himself into the circuit, for maintenance or redesign. But, as statistically that was happening a million times a minute, somewhere in the world, with some machine or another, it was not surprising that some things took a little while to get going again.
First order of business was business; I had to pick up the pieces. I gave Harriet a hierarchy of priorities, and she began feeding me reports. Quick bulletin from the food mines: no significant damage. Real estate: some minor incidents of fire and flooding, nothing that mattered. Someone had left a barrier open in the fish factories and six hundred million fingerlings swam out to lose themselves in the open sea; but I was only a minority stockholder in them anyway. Taken all in all, I had come out of the fever smelling of roses, I thought, or anyway a lot better than a lot of others. The fever had struck the Indian subcontinent after midnight of a day that already had seen one of the worst hurricanes the Bay of Bengal had produced in fifty years. The death toll was immense. Rescue efforts had simply stopped for two hours. Tens, maybe even hundreds, of millions of people had been simply unable to drag themselves to high ground, and southern Bangladesh was a swamp of corpses. Add in a refinery explosion in California, a train wreck in Wales, and a few as yet uncatalogued disasters-the computers did not yet have an estimate of deaths, but the news reports were calling it the worst ever.
By the time I had taken all the urgent-urgent calls the elevators were running again. I wasn’t a captive any more. Looking out the window, I could see the Washington streets were normal enough. My trip to Tucson, on the other hand, was well bollixed. Since half the jets in the air had been on automatic pilot for two hours, seriously depleting their fuel, they had been landing where they could, and the lines had equipment in all sorts of wrong places. The schedules were scrambled. Harriet booked me the best she could, but the first space she could confirm was not until noon the next day. I couldn’t even call Essie, because the circuits were still jammed. That was only an annoyance, not a problem. If I really wanted to get through, there were priorities at my disposal-the rich have their perks. But the rich have their pleasures, too, and I decided it would be fun to surprise Essie by dropping in on her.
And meanwhile I had time to spare.
And all this time my science program had been bursting with things to tell me. That was the dessert after the spinach and liver. I had put it off until I had a chance for a good, long natter; and that time had arrived, “Harriet,” I said, “put him on.” And Albert Einstein took form in the tank, leaning forward and twitching with excitement. “What is it, Al,” I asked, “something good?”
“Sure thing, Robin! We’ve found out where the fever comes from-it’s the Food Factory!”
It was my own fault. If I had let Albert tell me what was on his mind at once, I wouldn’t have been just about the last person on Earth to find out that I owned the place all the trouble came from. That was the first thing that hit me, and I was thinking about possible liability and sniffing for advantages all the time he was explaining the evidence to me. First and conclusive, of course, was the on-the-spot pickup from the Food Factory itself. But we should have known all along. “If I had only timed the Onsets carefully,” Albert berated himself, “we could have located the source years ago. And there were plenty of other clues, consistent with their photonic nature.”
“Their what nature?”
“They are electromagnetic, Robin,” he explained. He tamped tobacco into his pipe and reached for a match. “You realize, of course, that this is established by transmission time-we received whatever signal caused the madness at the same time as the transmission showing it happening.”
“Wait a minute. If the Heechee have faster-than-light radio, why isn’t this the same?”
“Ah, Robin! If we only knew that!” he twinkled, lighting his pipe. “I can only conjecture-“ puff, puff, “that this particular effect is not compatible with their other mode of transmission, but the reasons for that I cannot even speculate on at this time. And, of course,” he went on, “there are certain questions raised at once to which we do not as yet have any answers.”
“Of course,” I said, but I didn’t ask him what they were. I was on the track of something else. “Albert? Display the ships and stations you drew information from in space.”
“Sure thing, Robin.” The flyaway hair and the seamed, cheerful face melted away, and at once the holographic tank filled with a representation of circumsolar space. Nine planets. A girdle of dust that was the asteroid belt, and a powdery shell far out that was the Oort cloud. And about forty points of colored light. The representation was in logarithmic scale, to get it all in, and the size of the planets and artifacts immensely enlarged. Albert’s voice explained, “The four green ships are ours, Robin. The eleven blue objects are Heechee installations; the round ones are only detected, the star-shaped ones have been visited and are mostly manned. All the others are ships that belong to other commercial interests, or to governments.”
I studied the plot. Not very many of the sparks were anywhere near the green ship and blue star that marked the Food Factory. “Albert? If somebody had to get another ship out to the Food Factory, which one could get there fastest?”
He appeared in the lower corner of the projection, frowning and sucking his pipe stem. A golden point near Saturn’s rings began to flash on and off. “There’s a Brazilian cruiser just departing Tethys that could make it in eighteen months,” he said. “I have displayed only the ships that were involved in my radiolocation. There are several others-“ new lights winked on in a scatter around the tank, “that could do better, provided they have adequate fuel and supplies. But none in less than a year.”
I sighed. “Turn it off, Albert,” I said. “The thing is, we’re into something I didn’t expect.”
“What’s that, Robin?” he asked, filling the tank again and folding his hands over his belly in a comfortable way.
“That cocoon. I don’t know how to handle it. I don’t even see the point of it. What’s it for, Albert? Have you got any conjectures?”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he said, nodding cheerfully. “My best conjectures are a pretty low order of probability, but that’s just because there are so many unknowns. Let’s put it this way. Suppose you were a Heechee-something like an anthropologist, say-interested in keeping an eye on a developing civilization. Evolution takes a long time, so you don’t want to just sit there and watch. What you’d like to do is get a quick estimate, maybe every thousand years or so, sort of a spot check. Well, given something like the cocoon, you could just send somebody over to the Food Factory every once in a while, maybe every thousand years or more; climb in the couch, get an instant feel for what was happening. It would take only minutes.” He paused consideringly for a moment, before going on. “Then-but this is a speculation on top of a conjecture; I wouldn’t even assign a probability rating to it at all-then, if you found anything interesting, you could explore further. You could even do something else. This is really far out, Robin. You might even suggest things. The cocoon transmits as well as receives, that’s what the fevers came from. Perhaps it can also transmit concepts. We know that in human history many of the great inventions sprang up all over the world, apparently independently, maybe simultaneously. Are they Heechee suggestions, via the couch?”
He sat there, puffing his pipe and smiling at me, while I thought about that.
All the thinking in the world didn’t make it good, clean fun. Thrilling, maybe. But nothing you could relax to. The world had changed in fundamental ways since the first astronauts discovered Heechee diggings on Venus, and the more we explored the bigger the changes got. A lost kid, playing with something he didn’t understand, had plunged the whole human race into recurring madness for more than a decade. If we kept on playing with things we didn’t understand, what were the Heechee going to give us for an encore?
To say nothing of the queasiness of Albert’s suggestion that these creatures had been spying on us for hundreds of thousands of years-maybe even throwing us a crumb, now and then, to see what we would make of it.
I told Albert to bring me up to date on everything else he knew about what was going on in the Food Factory, and while he was running through the physical facts I called up Harriet. She appeared in one corner of the tank, looking questioning, and took my order for dinner while Albert kept right on with his show and tell. He was continuously monitoring all the transmissions even as he was reporting on them, and be showed me selected scenes of the boy, the Herter-Hall party, the interiors of the artifact. The damn thing was still determined to go its own way. Best course estimates suggested that it was moving toward a new cluster of comets, several million miles away-at present rates, it would get there in a few months. “Then what?” I demanded.
Albert shrugged apologetically. “Presumably it will then stay there until it has mined them of all the CHON ingredients, Robin.”
“Then can we move it?”
“No evidence, Robin. But it’s possible. Speaking of which, I have a theory about the controls of the Heechee ships. When one of them reaches an operating artifact-the Food Factory, Gateway, whatever-its controls unlock and it can then be redirected. At any rate, I think that may be what happened to Ms. Patricia Bover-and that, too, has certain obvious implications,” he twinkled.
I don’t like to let a computer program think it’s smarter than I am. “You mean that there may be a lot of stranded Gateway astronauts all over the Galaxy, because their controls unlocked and they didn’t know how to get back?”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he said approvingly. “That may account for what Wan calls the ‘Dead Men’. We’ve received some conversations with them, by the way. Their responses are sometimes quite nonrational, and of course we’re handicapped by not being able to interact. But it does appear that they are, or were, human beings.”
“Are you telling me they were alive?”
“Sure thing, Robin, or at least in the sense that Enrico Caruso’s voice on a tape was once the voice of a living Neapolitan tenor. Whether they are ‘alive’ now is a matter of definition. You might ask the same question-“ puff, pull, “about me.”
“Huh.” I thought for a minute. “Why are they so crazy?”
“Imperfect transcription, I would say. But that is not the important thing.” I waited until he drew on his pipe to get ready to tell me the important thing. “It seems rather sure, Robin, that the transcription occurred by some sort of chemical readout of the actual brains of the prospectors.”
“You mean the Heechee killed them and poured their brains into a bottle?”
“Certainly not, Robin! First, I would hazard the opinion that the prospectors died naturally rather than being killed. That would degrade the chemistry of brain storage and contribute to the degradation of the information. And certainly not into a bottle! Into some sort of chemical analogs, perhaps. But the point is, how did this happen to be?”
I groaned. “Do you want me to abolish your program, Al? I could get all this quicker from straight visual synoptics.”
“Sure thing you could, Robin, but not,” he twinkled, “perhaps, as entertainingly. At any rate, the question is, how did the Heechee happen to have equipment to read out a human brain? Think about it, Robin. It seems very improbable that the chemistry of the Heechee would be the same as the chemistry of a human being. Close, yes. We know that from general considerations, e.g., what they breathed and ate. Fundamentally their chemistry was not unlike ours. But peptides are quite complex molecules. It seems most unlikely that a compound which represents, e.g., the ability to play a Stradivarius well, or even toilet-training, would be the same in their chemistry as in ours.” He started to relight his pipe, then caught my eye and added hurriedly, “So I conclude, Robin, that these machines were designed not for Heechee brains.”
He startled me. “For humans, then? But why? How? How did they know? When-“
“Please, Robin. At your instructions, your wife has programmed me to make large deductions from small data. Therefore I cannot defend all that I say. But,” he added, nodding sagely, “I have this opinion, yes.”
“Jesus,” I said. He did not seem to want to add anything to that, so I tucked it away and went on to the next worry. “What about the Old Ones? Are they human, do you think?”
He tapped his pipe out and reached for the tobacco pouch. “I would say not,” he said at last.
I didn’t ask him what the alternative was. I didn’t want to hear it.
When Albert had run himself dry for the moment, I told Harriet to put my legal program on. I couldn’t talk to him right away, though, because right then my dinner came up and the waiter was a human being. He wanted to ask me how I had got through the fever, so that he could tell me how he had, and that took time. But at last I sat down in front of the holo tank, sliced into my chicken steak and said, “Go ahead, Morton, what’s the bad news?”
He said apologetically, “You know that Bover suit?”
“What Bover suit?”
“Trish Bover’s husband. Or widower, depending on how you look at it. We filed the appearance, only unfortunately the judge had a bad attack of the fever and- Well. He is wrong in the law, Robin, but he denied our request for time to set a hearing date and entered summary judgment against.”
I stopped chewing. “Can he do that?” I roared through my mouthful of prime rare chicken.
“Well, yes, or at least he did it. But we’ll get him on appeal, only that makes it a little more complicated. Her lawyer got a chance to argue, and he pointed out that Trish did file a mission report. So there’s some question whether she actually completed the mission, do you see? Meanwhile-“
Sometimes I think Morton is too humanly programmed; he does know how to draw out a discussion so. “Meanwhile what, Morton?”
“Well, since the recent, ah, episode, there seems to be another complication. Gateway Corp wants to go slow until they figure out just where they are with this fever business, so they’ve accepted service of an injunction. Neither you nor Food Factory Inc. is supposed to proceed with exploitation of the factory.”
I blew up. “Shit, Mort! You mean we can’t use it after we bring it all the way in from orbit?”
“I’m afraid I mean more than that,” he apologized. “You’re enjoined to stop moving it. You’re enjoined to refrain from interfering with its normal activities in any way, pending a declarative judgment. That’s Bover’s action, on the grounds that if you prevent it from producing food by moving to a new comet cluster you’re endangering his interest. Now, we can get that vacated, I’m sure. But by then Gateway Corp will have some sort of action to stop doing everything until they get a handle on the fever.”
“Oh, God.” I put down my fork. I wasn’t hungry any more. “The only good thing,” I said, “is that’s an order they can’t enforce.”
“Because it will take so long to get a message to the Herter-Hall party, yes, Robin,” he nodded. “On the-“
He disappeared, zit. He slid diagonally away out of the tank, and Harriet appeared. She looked terrible. I have good programs for my computer help. But they don’t always bring good news. “Robin!” she cried. “There’s a message from Mesa General Hospital in Arizona-it’s your wife!”
“Essie? Essie? Is she sick?”
“Oh, worse than that, Robin. Total somatic cessation. She was killed in a car crash. They’ve got her on life support, but- There’s no prognosis, Robin. She isn’t responding.”
I didn’t use my priorities. I didn’t want to take the time. I went straight to the Washington office of the Gateway Corp. who went to the Secretary of Defense, who squeezed space for me out of a hospital plane leaving Boiling in twenty-five minutes, and I made it.
The flight was three hours, and I was in suspended animation all the way. There were no comm facilities for passengers in the plane. I didn’t even want them. I just wanted to get there. When my mother died and left me it hurt, but I was poor and confused and used to hurting. When the love of my life, or at any rate the woman who seemed to come to be the love of my life after she was safely gone, also left me-without quite dying, because she was stuck in some awful astrophysical anomaly and far out of reach forever-that also hurt. But I was hurting all over anyway then. I wasn’t used to happiness, hadn’t formed the habit of it. There is a Carnot law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes but the difference between source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable for too long to equip me for this. I was in shock.
Mesa General was a low-rise, dug into the desert outside Tucson. All you could see as we came up to it were the solar installations on the “roof,” but under them were six subterranean floors of hospital rooms, labs, and operating theaters. They were all full. Tucson is a commuting city, and the madness had struck at drive time.
When I finally got a floor nurse to stop and answer a question, what I heard was that Essie was still on the heart-lung, but might be taken off at any moment. It was a question of triage. The machines might better be used for other patients, whose chances were better than hers.
I am shamed to say how fast conceptions of fairness went out the window when it was my own wife who was on the machines. I hunted out a doctor’s office-he wouldn’t be using it for some time-kicked out the insurance adjustor who had borrowed his desk and got on the wires. I had two senators on the line at once before Harriet broke in with a report from our medical program.
Essie’s pulse had begun to respond. They now thought her chances were good enough to justify giving her the additional chance of staying on the machines for a while.
Of course, Full Medical helped. But the waiting room outside had all its benches full of people waiting for treatment, and I could see from the neck-bands that some of them were Full Medical too; the hospital was simply swamped.
I could not get in to see her. Intensive Care was No Visitors, and no visitors meant not even me; there was a Tucson city policeman at the door, forcing himself to stay awake after a very long, hard day and feeling mean. I fiddled with the absent doctor’s desk set until I found a closed-circuit line that looked into Intensive Care, and I just left it on. I couldn’t see how well Essie was doing. I couldn’t even tell for sure which mummy she was. But I kept looking at it. Harriet called in from time to time to pass on little news items. She didn’t bother with messages of sympathy and concern; there were plenty of those, but Essie had written me a Robinette Broadhead program to deal with social time-wasters, and Harriet gave callers an image and a worried smile and a thank you without bothering to cut me in to the circuit. Essie had been very good at that kind of programming- Past tense. When I realized I was thinking of a past-tense Essie is when I felt really bad.
After an hour a Gray Lady found me and gave me bouillon and crackers, and a little later I spent forty-five minutes in line for the public men’s room; and that was about all the diversion I had on the third floor of Mesa General until, at last, a candystriper poked her head in the door and said, “Senor Broad’ead? Por favor.” The cop was still at the door of Intensive Care, fanning himself with his sweaty Stetson to stay awake, but with the candy-striper leading me firmly by the hand he did not interfere.
Essie was under a positive-pressure bubble. There was a transparent patch just at her face, so that I could see a tube coming out of her nostril and a wad of bandaging over the left side of her face. Her eyes were closed. They had bundled her dirty-gold hair into a net. She was not conscious.
Two minutes was all they allowed, and that wasn’t enough time for anything. Not enough even to figure out what all the lumpy, bulky objects under the translucent part of her bubble were all about. Not enough at all for Essie to sit up and talk to me or to change expression. Or even to have one.
In the hall outside, her doctor gave me sixty seconds. He was a short, pot-bellied old black man wearing blue-eyed contact lenses, and he looked at a piece of paper to see who it was he was talking to. “Oh, yes, Mr. Blackhead,” he said. “Your wife is receiving the best of care, she is responding to treatment, there is some chance she will be conscious for a short time toward evening.”
I didn’t bother to correct him about the name and picked the three top questions on the list: “Will she be in pain? What happened to her? Is there anything she needs?-I mean anything.”
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. Evidently the contacts had been in too long. “Pain we can take care of, and she’s already on Full Medical. I understand you are an important man, Mr. Brackett. But there is nothing for you to do. Tomorrow or the next day, maybe there’ll be something she’ll need. Today, no. Her whole left side was crushed when the bus folded in on her. She was bent almost double and stayed that way for six or seven hours, until somebody got to her.”
I didn’t know I had made a sound, but the doctor heard something. A little sympathy came through the contact lenses as he peered up at me. “That was actually to her advantage, you know. It probably saved her life. Being squeezed was as good as compression pads, otherwise she would have bled to death.” He blinked down at the scrap of paper in his hand. “Um. She’s going to need, let me see, a new hip joint. Splints to replace two ribs. Eight, ten, fourteen-maybe twenty square inches of new skin, and there’s considerable tissue loss to the left kidney. I think we’ll want a transplant.”
“If there’s anything at all-“
“Nothing at all, Mr. Blackeu,” he said, folding up the paper. “Nothing now. Go away, please. Come back after six if you want to, and you may be able to talk to her for a minute. But right now we need the space you’re taking up.”
Harriet had already arranged for the hotel to move Essie’s things out of her room and into a penthouse suite, and she had even ordered and had delivered toilet stuff and a couple of changes of clothing. I holed up there. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t enjoy seeing the cheerful tipplers in the lobby bar, or the streets full of people who had got safely through the fever and wanted to tell each other what a close thing it had been for them.
I made myself eat. Then I made myself sleep. I succeeded in that much, but not in staying asleep very long. I took a long, hot whirly bath and played some music for background; it was actually quite a nice hotel. But when they went from Stravinsky to Carl Orff that lusty, horny Catullus poetry made me think about the last time I had played it with my lusty, horny, and, at the moment, seriously broken-up wife.
“Turn it off,” I snapped and ever-vigilant Harriet stopped it in midshriek.
“Do you want to receive messages, Robin?” she inquired froth the same audio speaker.
I dried myself carefully, and then said: “In a minute. I might as well.” Dried, brushed, in clean clothes, I sat down in front of the hotel’s comm system. They weren’t quite nice enough to give their guests full holo, but Harriet looked familiar enough as she peered at me out of a flat-plate display. She reassured me about Essie. She was continuously monitoring, and everything was going well enough-not far enough, of course. But not badly. Essie’s own real flesh-and-blood doctor was in the picture, and Harriet gave me a taped message from her. It translated to don’t worry, Robin. Or, more accurately, don’t worry quite as much as you think you ought to.
Harriet had a batch of action messages for me to deal with. I authorized another half-million dollars for fire-fighting in the food mines, instructed Morton to get a hearing time with the Gateway Corp for our man in Brasilia, told my broker what to sell to give me a little more liquidity as a hedge against unreported fever losses. Then I let the most interesting programs report in, finishing with Albert’s latest synoptic from the Food Factory. I did all this, you understand, with great clarity and efficiency. I had accepted the fact that Essie’s chances of survival were measurably improving all the time, so I didn’t need to spare any energy for grief. And I had not, entirely, allowed myself to understand how many gobbets of flesh and bone had been gouged out of my love’s lovely body, and that saved me all sorts of expenditures, for emotions I did not want to explore.
There was a time when I went through several long years of shrinkery, in the course of which I found out a lot of places inside my head that I didn’t much like having there. That’s okay. Once you take them out and look at them-well, they’re pretty bad, but at least they’re outside, now, not still inside and poisoning your system. My old psychiatric program, Sigfrid von Shrink, said it was like moving your bowels.
He was right, far as he went-one of the things I found unlikeable about Sigfrid was that he was infuriatingly reliably right, all too much of the time. What he didn’t say was that you never got finished moving your bowels. I kept coming up with new excreta, and, you know, no matter how much of it you encounter, you never get to liking it.
I turned Harriet off, except for standby in case of something urgent, and watched some piezovision comedies for a while. I made myself a drink out of the suite’s adequate wet bar, and then I made another. I wasn’t watching the PV, and I wasn’t enjoying the drink. What I was doing was encountering another great glob of fecal matter coming out of my head. My dearest beloved wife was lying all beaten and broken in Intensive Care, and I was thinking about somebody else.
I turned off the tap-dancers and called for Albert Einstein. He popped onto the plate, his white hair flying and his old pipe in his hand. “What can I do for you, Robin?” he beamed.
“I want you to talk to me about black holes,” I said.
“Sure thing, Robin. But we’ve been over this a goad many times, you know-“
“Fuck off, Albert! Just do it. And I don’t mean in mathematics, I just want you to explain them as simply as you can.” One of these days I would have to get Essie to rewrite Albert’s program a little less idiosyncratically.
“Sure thing, Robin,” he said, cheerfully ignoring my temper. He wrinkled his furry eyebrows. “Ah-ha,” he said. “Uh-huh. Well, let’s see.”
“Is that a hard question for you?” I asked, more surprised than sarcastic.
“Of course not, Robin. I was just thinking how far back I should start. Well, let’s start with light. You know that light is made up of particles called photons. It has mass, and it exerts pressure-“
“Not that far back, Albert, please.”
“All right. But the way a black hole begins starts with a failure of light pressure. Take a big star-a blue Class-O, say. Ten times as massive as the sun. Burns up its nuclear fuel so fast that it only lives about a billion years. What keeps it from collapsing is the radiation pressure-call it the ‘light pressure’-from the nuclear reaction of hydrogen fusing into helium inside it. But then it runs out of hydrogen. Pressure stops. It collapses. It does so very, very fast, Robin, maybe in only a matter of hours. And a star that used to be millions of kilometers in diameter is all of a sudden only thirty kilometers. Have you got that part, Robin?”
“I think so. Get on with it.”
“Well,” he said, lighting his pipe and taking a couple of puffs-I can’t help wondering if he enjoys it!-“that’s one of the ways black holes get started. The classical way, you might call it. Keep that in mind, and now go on to the next part: escape velocity.”
“I know what escape velocity is.”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he nodded, “an old Gateway prospector like you. Well. When you were on Gateway, suppose you threw a rock straight up from the surface. It would probably come back, because even an asteroid has some gravity. But if you could throw it fast enough-maybe forty or fifty kilometers an hour-it wouldn’t come back. It would reach escape velocity and just fly away forever. On the Moon, you’d have to throw it a lot faster still, say two or three kilometers a second. On the Earth, faster than that-better than eleven kilometers a second.
“Now,” he said, reaching forward to tap coals out of his pipe and light it again, “if you-“ tap, tap, “if you were on the surface of some object that has a very, very high surface gravity, the condition would be worse. Suppose the gravity were such that the escape velocity were up real high, say around three hundred and ten thousand kilometers a second. You couldn’t throw a rock that fast. Even light doesn’t quite go that fast! So even light-“ puff, puff, “can’t escape, because its velocity is ten thousand kilometers a second too slow. And, as we know, if light can’t escape, then nothing can escape; that’s Einstein. If I may be excused the vanity.” He actually winked at me over his pipe. “So that’s a black hole. It’s black because it can’t radiate at all.”
I said, “What about a Heechee spaceship? They go faster than light.”
Albert grinned ruefully. “Got me there, Robin, but we don’t know how they go faster than light. Maybe a Heechee can get out of a black hole, who knows? But we don’t have any evidence of one of them ever doing it.”
I thought that over for a moment. “Yet,” I said.
“Well, yes, Robin,” he agreed. “The problem, of going faster than light, and the problem of escaping from a black hole, are essentially the same problem.” He paused. A long pause. Then, apologetically, “I guess that’s about all we can profitably say on that subject, right now.”
I got up and refreshed my drink, leaving him sitting there, patiently puffing his pipe. Sometimes it was hard to remember that there was really nothing there, nothing but a few interference patterns of collimated light, backed up by some tons of metal and plastic. “Albert,” I said, “tell me something. You computers are supposed to be lightning-fast. Why is it that you take so long to answer sometimes? Just dramatic effect?”
“Well, Bob, sometimes it is,” he said after a moment, “like that time. But I am not sure you understand how difficult it is for me to ‘chat.’ If you want information about, say, black holes, I have no trouble producing it for you. Six million bits a second, if you like. But to put it in terms you can understand, above all to put it in the form of conversation, involves more than accessing the storage. I have to do word-searches through literature and taped conversations. I have to map analogies and metaphors against your own mind-sets. I have to meet such strictures as are imposed by your defined normatives for my behavior, and by relevance to the tone of the particular chat. ‘Tain’t easy, Robin.”
“You’re smarter than you look, Albert,” I said.
He tapped his pipe out and looked up at me under his shaggy white mop. “Would you mind, Bob, if I said so are you?”
I let him go, saying, “You’re a good old machine, Albert.” I stretched out on the jelly-bed couch, half asleep with my drink in my hand. At least he had taken my mind off Essie for a while, but there was a nagging question in my mind. Somewhere, sometime, I had said the same thing to some other program, and I couldn’t remember when.
Harriet woke me up to say that there was an in-person call from our doctor-not the program, but the real live Wilma Liederman, M.D., who came to see us to make sure the machines were doing things right, every once in a while. “Robin,” she said, “I think Essie’s out of danger.”
“That’s-marvelous!” I said, wishing I had saved words like “marvelous” for when I really meant them, because they didn’t do justice to the way I felt. Our program had already accessed the Mesa General circuits, of course. Wilma knew as much about her condition as the little black man I had talked to-and, of course, had pumped all of Essie’s medical history back into the Mesa General store. Wilma offered to fly out herself if we wanted her to. I told her she was the doctor, not me, and she told me that she would get a Columbia classmate of hers in Tucson to look in on Essie instead.
“But don’t go to see her tonight, Robin,” she said. “Talk to her on the phone if you want to-I prescribe it-but don’t tire her out. By tomorrow-well, I think she’ll be stronger.”
So I called Essie, and talked to her for three minutes-she was groggy, but she knew what was happening. And then I let myself go back to sleep, and just as I was dropping off I remembered that Albert had called me “Bob”.
There was another program that I had been on friendly terms with, a long time ago, that sometimes called me “Robin” and sometimes “Bob” and even “Bobby”. I hadn’t talked to that particular program in quite a while, because I hadn’t felt the need of it; but maybe I was beginning to.
Full Medical is-well, it’s full medical. It’s everything. If there’s a way to keep you healthy, and especially to keep you alive, you’ve got it. And there are lots of ways. Full Medical runs to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Not too many people can afford it-something under one tenth of one percent even in the developed countries. But it buys a lot. Right after lunch the next day, it bought me Essie.
Wilma said it was all right, and so did everybody else. The city of Tucson had recovered enough for that sort of thing. The city had got over the emergency aspects of the fever. Its structures were back to business as usual, meaning that they once again had time to deliver what people paid for. So at noon a private ambulance trucked in bed, heart-lung machine, dialysis pack, and peripherals. At twelve-thirty a team of nurses moved into the suite across the hail, and at a quarter after two I rode up in the freight elevator with six cubic meters of hardware, in the heart of which was the heart of me, namely my wife.
Among the other things Full Medical bought were a trickle of pain-killers and mood-mediators, corticosteroids to speed healing and moderators to keep the corticosteroids from spoiling her cells, four hundred kilograms of plumbing under the framework of the bed to monitor all of what Essie did, and to intervene to help her do it when she couldn’t. Just transferring her from the travel machine to the one in the master bedroom took an hour and a half, with Wilma’s classmate supervising a team of interns and orderlies. They threw me out while that was going on, and I drank a couple of cups of coffee down in the hotel lobby, watching the teardrop-shaped elevators climb up and down the interior walls. When I figured I was allowed back I met the doctor from the hospital in the hail. He had managed to get a little sleep and he was wearing granny glasses instead of the contacts. “Don’t tire her out,” he said.
“I’m getting tired of hearing that.”
He grinned and invited himself to share a third cup of coffee with me. He turned out to be quite a nice guy, as well as the best short basketball center Tempe had ever had, when he was an Arizona State undergraduate. There is something I like about a man of a hundred and sixty centimeters who goes out for the basketball team, and we parted friends. That was the most reassuring thing of all. He wouldn’t have let that happen if he hadn’t been pretty sure Essie was going to make it.
I did not then appreciate how much “making it” she was going to have to do.
She was still under the positive-pressure bubble, and that spared me from seeing quite how used up she looked. The dayduty nurse retreated to the sitting room, after telling me not to get Essie too tired, and we talked for a while. We didn’t say anything, really. S. Ya. is not your talkative type person. She asked me what the news was from the Food Factory, and when I had given her a thirty-second synoptic on that she asked what the news was about the fever. By the time I had given her four or five thousand-word answers to her one-sentence questions it began to dawn on me that talking was really quite a strain and that I shouldn’t tire her out.
But she was talking, and even talking coherently, and did not seem worried; and so I went back to my console and to work.
There was the usual raft of reports to get through and decisions to make. When that was done I listened to Albert’s latest reports from the Food Factory for a while and then realized it was time for me to go to sleep.
I lay in bed for quite a while. I wasn’t restless. I wasn’t exhausted. I was just letting the tensions drain out of me. In the sitting room I could hear the night nurse moving around. On the other side, from Essie’s room, came the constant faint sigh and hum and gurgle of the machines that were keeping my wife alive. The world had got well ahead of me. I was not taking it all in. I had not yet quite understood that forty-eight hours before, Essie had been dead. Kaput. Xed. No longer alive. If it hadn’t been for Full Medical, and a lot of luck, I would along about now have been selecting the clothes to wear to her funeral.
And inside my head there was a small minority of cells of the brain that understood that fact and was thinking, well, you know, maybe, it just might have been tidier all around if she hadn’t been brought back to life.
This had nothing to do with the fact that I loved Essie, loved her a lot, wished her nothing but well, had gone into shock when I heard she was hurt. The minority party in my brain spoke only for itself. Every time the question came up a thundering majority voted for loving Essie, whenever polled, however asked.
I have never been entirely sure what the word “love” means. Especially when applied to myself. Just before I fell asleep I thought for a moment of dialing Albert up and asking him to explain it. But I didn’t. Albert was the wrong program to ask, and I didn’t want to start up with the right one.
The synoptics kept coming in, and I watched the unfolding story of the Food Factory, and I felt like an anachronism. A couple of centuries ago the world-girdlers of England and Spain operated at a remove of a month or two from the action fronts. No cable, no satellites. Their orders went out on sailing ships, and replies came back when they could. I wished I could share their skills. The fifty days of round-trip time between us and the Herter-Halls seemed like forever. Here was I at Ghent, and there were they, Andy Jackson pounding the pee out of the British at New Orleans weeks after the war was over. Of course, I had sent out instant orders on how they were to conduct themselves. What questions they were to ask of the boy, Wan. What attempts they were to make to divert the Food Factory from its course. And five thousand astronomical units away, they were doing what occurred to them to do, and by the time my orders arrived all the questions would be moot.
As Essie mended, so did my spirits. Her heart pumped by itself. Her lungs kept her in air. They took the positive-pressure bubble off her and I could touch her and kiss her cheek, and she was taking an interest in what went on. Had been all along; when I said it was too bad she’d missed her conference she grinned up at me. “AU on tape, dear Robin; have been playing it back when you were busy.”
“But you couldn’t give your own paper-“
“You think? Why not? I wrote ‘Robinette Broadhead’ program for you, did you not know I also wrote one for me? Conference moved in full holographics and S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead projection gave complete text. To considerable approval. Even handled questions,” she boasted, “by borrowing your Albert program in drag.”
Well, she’s an astonishing person, as I have always known. The trouble is that I expect her to be astonishing, and when I talked to her doctor he brought me down. He was on the hop, between the suite and Mesa General, and I asked him if I could bring her home. He hesitated, peering up at me through the blue contacts. “Yes, probably,” he said. “But I’m not sure you understand how serious her injuries are, Mr. Broadhead. All that’s happening now is that she’s building up some reserves of strength. She’s going to need them.”
“Well, I know that, Doe. There’ll have to be another operation-“
“No. Not one, Mr. Broadhead. I think your wife will spend most of the next couple of months in surgery and convalescence. And I don’t want you assuming that the results are a foregone conclusion,” he lectured. “There’s a risk to every procedure, and she’s up against some hairy ones. Cherish her, Mr. Broadhead. We reanimated her after one cardiac arrest. I don’t guarantee it’ll happen every time.”
So I went in to see Essie in somewhat chastened mood to get on with the cherishing.
The nurse was standing by her bed, and both of them were watching Essie’s tapes of the computer conference on her flatplate viewer. Since Essie’s plate was slaved to the big fullholographic interactive one I had had moved into my room, there was a little yellow attention light in the come; meant for me. Harriet had something she wanted to tell me about. It could wait; when the light began to pulse and brighten and turn to red was when it got important, and at the moment Essie was at the top of my priorities. “You can leave us for a while, Alma,” Essie said. The nurse looked at me and shrugged why-not, so I took the chair next to the bed and reached for Essie’s hand.
“It’s nice to be able to touch you again,” I said.
Essie has a coarse, deep chuckle. I was glad to hear it. “Touch more in a couple weeks,” she said. “Meanwhile, no rule against kissing.”
So, of course, I kissed her-hard enough so that something must have registered on her telltales, because the day nurse popped her head in the door to see what was going on. She didn’t stop us, though. We stopped ourselves. Essie reached up with her right hand-the left was still in its cast, covering God knew what-and pushed her streaky dark-blonde hair away from her eyes. “Very nice,” she judged. “Do you want to see what Harriet has to say?”
“Not particularly.”
“Untrue,” she said. “You have been talking to Dr. Ben, I see, and he has told you to be sweet to me. But you always are, Robin, only not everybody would notice.” She grinned at me and turned her head to the plate. “Harriet!” she called. “Robin is here.”
I had not until that moment known that my secretary program would respond to my wife’s commands as well as my own. But I hadn’t known she could borrow my science program, either. Especially without my knowing about it. When Harriet’s cheerful and concerned face filled the screen I told her, “If it’s business I’ll take it later-unless it can’t wait?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Harriet said. “But Albert’s desperate to talk to you. He’s got some good stuff from the Food Factory.”
“I’ll take it in the other room,” I started, but Essie put her free hand on mine.
“No. Here, Robin. I’m interested, too.”
So I told Harriet to go ahead, and Albert’s voice came on. But not Albert’s face. “Take a look at this,” Albert said, and the screen filled with a sort of American Gothic family portrait A man and a woman-not really-a male and a female, standing side by side. They had faces and arms and legs, and the female had breasts. Both had skungy beards and long hair pulled into braids, and they were wearing wrap-around garments like saris, with dots of color brightening the drab cloth.
I caught my breath. The pictures had taken me by surprise.
Albert appeared in the lower corner of the plate. “These are not ‘real,’ Robin,” he said. “They are simply compositions generated by the shipboard computer from Wan’s, description. The boy says they are pretty accurate, though.”
I swallowed and glanced at Essie. I had to control my breathing before I could ask, “Are these-are these what the Heechee look like?”
He frowned and chewed on his pipe stem. The figures on the screen rotated solemnly, as though they were doing a slow folkdance, so that we could see all sides. “There are some anomalies, Robin. For example, there is the famous question of the Heechee ass. We have some Heechee furniture, e.g., the seats before the control panels in their ships. From these it was deduced that the Heechee bottom was not as the human bottom, because there seems to be room for a large pendulant structure, perhaps a divided body like a wasp’s, hanging below the pelvis and between the legs. There is nothing of this sort in the computer-generated image. But-Occam’s Razor, Robin.”
“If I just give you time, you’ll explain that,” I commented.
“Sure thing, Robin, but it’s a law of logic that I think you know. In the absence of evidence, it is best to take the simplest theory. We know of only two intelligent races in the history of the universe. These people do not seem to belong to ours-the shape of the skull, and particularly the jaw, is different; there is a triangular arcade, more like an ape’s than a human being’s, and the teeth are quite anomalous. Therefore it is probable that they belong to the other.”
“Is somewhat scary,” Essie offered softly. And it was. Especially to me, since you might say that it was my responsibility. I was the one who had ordered the Herter-Hall bunch to go out and look around, and if they found the Heechee in the process. .
I was not ready to think of what that might mean.
“What about the Dead Men? Do you have anything on them?”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he said, nodding his dustmop head. “Look at this.”
The pictures winked away, and text rolled up the screen:
MISSION REPORT
Vessel 5-2, Voyage 081D31. Crew A. Meacham, D. Filgren, H. Meacham.
Mission was science experiment, crew limited to allow instrumentation and computational equipment. Maximum lifesupport time estimated 800 days. Vessel still unreported day 1200, presumed lost.
“It was only a fifty thousand dollar bonus-not much, but it was one of the earliest from Gateway,” Albert said over the text. “The one called ‘H. Meacham’ appears to be the ‘Dead Man’ Wan calls Henrietta. She was a sort of A.B.D. astrophysicist-you know, Robin, ‘All But Dissertation’. She blew that. When she tried to defend it they said it was more psychology than physics, so she went to Gateway. The pilot’s first name was Doris, which checks, and the other person was Henrietta’s husband, Arnold.”
“So you’ve identified one of them? They were really real?”
“Sure thing, Robin-point nine nine sure, anyway. These Dead Men are sometimes nonrational,” he complained, reappearing on the plate. “And of course we have had no opportunity for direct interrogation. The shipboard computer is not really up to this kind of task. But, apart from the confirmation of names, the mission seems appropriate. It was an astrophysical investigation, and Henrietta’s conversation includes repeated references to astrophysical subjects. Once you subtract the sexual ones, I mean,” he twinkled, scratching his cheek with his pipestem. “For example. ‘Sagittarius A West’-a radio source at the center of the Galaxy. ‘NGC nag’. A giant elliptical galaxy, part of a large cluster. ‘Average radial velocity of globular clusters’-in our own galaxy, that comes to about 50 kilometers per second. ‘High-redshift OSOs’-“
“You don’t have to list them all,” I said hastily. “Do you know what they all mean? I mean, if you were talking about all those things, what would you be talking about?”
Pause-but a short one; he was not accessing all the literature on the subject, he had already done that “Cosmology,” he said. “Specifically, I think I would be talking about the classic HoyleOpik-Gamow controversy; that is, whether the universe is closed, or open ended, or cyclical. Whether it is in a steady state, or began with a big bang.”
He paused again, but this time it was to let me think. I did, but not to much effect “There doesn’t seem to be much nourishment in that,” I said.
“Perhaps not, Rabin. It does sort of tie in with your questions about black holes, though.”
Well, damn your calculating heart, I thought, but did not say. He looked innocent as a lamb, puffing away on his old pipe, calm and serious. “That’ll be all for now,” I ordered, and kept my eyes on the blank screen long after he had disappeared, in case Essie was going to ask me about why I had been inquiring about black holes.
Well, she didn’t. She just lay back, looking at the mirrors on the ceiling. After a while she said, “Dear Robin, know what I wish?”
I was ready for it. “What, Essie?”
“Wish I could scratch.”
All I could manage to say was, “Oh.” I felt deflated-no; plugged up. I was all ready to defend myself-with all gentle care, of course, because of Essie’s condition. And I didn’t have to. I picked up her hand. “I was worried about you,” I offered.
“Yes, so was I,” she said practically. “Tell me, Robin. Is true that the fevers are from some sort of Heechee mind-ray?”
“Something like that, I suppose. Albert says it’s electromagnetic, but that’s all I know.” I stroked the veins on the back of her hand, and she moved restlessly. But only from the neck up.
“I am apprehensive about Heechee, Robin,” she said.
“That’s very sensible. Even temperate. Me, I’m scared shitless.” And, as a matter of fact I was; in fact, I was trembling. The little yellow light winked on at the corner of the screen.
“Somebody wants to talk to you, Robin.”
“They can wait. I’m talking to the woman I love right now.”
“Thank you. Robin? If you are scared of Heechee as I am, how is it that you go right ahead?”
“Well, honey, what choice do I have? There’s fifty days of dead time. What we just heard is ancient history, twenty-five days old. If I told them to break off and go home right now, it would be twenty-five days before they heard it.”
“Surely, yes. But if you could stop, would you?” I didn’t answer. I was feeling very strange-a little frightened, a lot unlike myself. “What if Heechee don’t like us, Robin?” she asked.
And what a good question that was! I had been asking it of myself ever since the first day I considered getting into a Gateway prospecting ship and setting out to explore for myself. What if we meet the Heechee and they don’t like us? What if they squash us like flies, torture us, enslave us, experiment on us- what if they simply ignore us? With my eyes on the yellow dot, which was beginning to pulse slowly, I said, mothering her, “Well, there’s not much chance that they will actually do us any harm-“
“I do not need soothing, Robin!” She was distinctly edgy, and so was I. Something must have been showing up on her monitors, because the day nurse looked in again, hovered indecisively in the doorway, and went away.
I said, “Essie, the stakes are too big. Remember last year in Calcutta?” We had gone to one of her seminars, and had cut it short because we couldn’t bear the sight of the abject city of two hundred million paupers.
Her eyes were on me, and she was frowning. “Yes, I know, starvation. There has always been starvation, Robin.”
“Not like this! Not like what it will be before very long, if something doesn’t happen to prevent it! The world is bursting at the seams. Albert says-“ I hesitated. I didn’t actually want to tell her what Albert said. Siberia was already out of food production, its fragile land looking like the Gobi because of overpressure. The topsoil in the American Midwest was down to scant inches, and even the food mines were straining to keep up with demand. What Albert said was that we had maybe ten years.
The signal light had gone to red and was winking rapidly, but I didn’t want to interrupt myself. “Essie,” I said, “if we can make the Food Factory work, we can bring CHON-food to all the starving people, and that means no more starvation ever. That’s only the beginning. If we can figure out how to build Heechee ships for ourselves, and make them go where we like- then we can colonize new planets. Lots of them. More than that. With Heechee technology we can take all the asteroids in the solar system and turn them into Gateways. Build space habitats. Terraform planets. We can make a paradise for a million times the population of the Earth, for the next million years!”
I stopped, because I realized I was babbling. I felt sad and delirious, worried and-lustful; and from the expression on Essie’s face she was feeling something strange too. “Those are very good reasons, Robin,” she began, and that was as far as she got The signal light was bright ruby red and vibrating like a pulsar; and then it winked away and Albert Einstein’s worried face appeared on the screen. I had never known him to appear without being invited before.
“Robin,” he cried, “there is another emanation of the fever!”
I stood up shaking. “But it isn’t time,” I objected stupidly.
“It has happened, Robin, and it is rather strange. It peaked, let me see, just under one hundred seconds ago. I believe- Yes,” he nodded, seeming to listen to an inaudible voice, “it is dying away.”
And, as a matter of fact, I was already feeling less strange. No attack had ever been so short, and no other had quite felt like that Apparently somebody else was experimenting with the couch.
“Albert,” I said, “send a priority message to the Food Factory. Desist immediately, repeat immediately, from any further use of the couch for any purpose. Dismantle it if possible without irreversible damage. You will forfeit all pay and bonuses if there is any further breach of this directive. Got it?”
“It’s already on its way, Robin,” he said, and disappeared.
Essie and I looked at each other for a moment. “But you did not tell them to abandon the expedition and come back,” she said at last.
I shrugged. “It doesn’t change anything,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. “And you have given me some really very good reasons, Robin. But are they your reasons?”
I didn’t answer.
I knew what Essie thought were my reasons for pushing on into the exploration of Heechee space, regardless of fevers or costs or risks. She thought my reasons had a name, and the name was Gelle-Kiara Moynlin. And I sometimes was not sure she was wrong.
Wherever Lurvy moved in the ship, she was always conscious of the mottled gray pattern in the viewplate. It showed nothing she could recognize, but it was a nothing she had seen before, for months on end.
While they were traveling faster than light on the way to Heechee Heaven they were alone. The universe was empty around them, except for that pebbly, shifting gray. They were the universe. Even on the long climb to the Food Factory it had not been this solitary. At least there were stars. Even planets. In tau space, or whatever crazy kind of space Heechee ships drove through or tunneled under or sidestepped around, there was nothing. Last times Lurvy had been in that much emptiness had been in her Gateway missions, and they were not sweet memories at all.
This ship was far the biggest she had ever seen. Gateway’s largest held five people. This could have housed twenty or more. It contained eight separate compartments. Three were cargo, filled automatically (Wan explained) with the output of the Food Factory while the ship was docked there. Two seemed to be staterooms, but not for human beings. If the “bunks” that rolled out from the walls were bunks indeed, they were too tiny for human adults. One of the rooms Wan identified as his own, which he invited Janine to share. When Lurvy vetoed the notion he gave in sulkily, and so they roomed in segregated style, boys in one chamber, girls in the other. The largest room, located in the mathematical center of the ship, was shaped like a cylinder with tapered ends. It had neither floor nor ceiling, except that three seats were fixed to the surface facing the controls. As the surface was curved, the seats leaned toward each other. They were simple enough, of the design Lurvy had lived with for months at a time: Two flat metal slabs, joined together in a Vee. “On Gateway ships we stretched webbing across them,” Lurvy offered.
“What is ‘webbing’?” asked Wan; and, when it was explained, said, “What a good idea. I will do that next trip. I can steal some material from the Old Ones.”
As in all Heechee ships, the controls themselves were nearly automatic. There were a dozen knurled wheels in a row, with colored lights for each wheel. As the wheels were turned (not that anyone would ever turn them while in flight; that was well established suicide), the lights changed color and intensity, and developed bands of light and dark like spectrum lines. They represented course settings. Not even Wan could read them, much less Lurvy or the others. But since Lurvy’s time on Gateway, at great expense in prospectors’ lives, the big brains had accumulated a considerable store of data. Some colors meant a good chance of something worthwhile. Some referred to the length of the trip the course director was set for. Some-many- were filed away as no-nos, because every ship that had entered faster-than-light space with those settings had stayed there. Or somewhere. Had, at least, never returned to Gateway. Out of habit and orders, Lurvy photographed every fluctuation of control lights and viewscreen, even when the screen showed nothing she could recognize as worth photographing. An hour after the group left the Food Factory, the star patterns began to shrink together to a winking point of brightness. They had reached the speed of light. And then even the point was gone. The screen took on the appearance of gray mud that raindrops had spattered, and stayed that way.
To Wan, of course, the ship was only his familiar schoolbus, used for commuting back and forth since he was old enough to squeeze the launch teat. Paul had never been in a real Heechee ship before, and was subdued for days. Neither had Janine, but one more marvel was nothing unusual in her fourteen-year-old life. For Lurvy, something else. It was a bigger version of the ships in which she had earned her Out bangles-and precious little else-and therefore frightening.
She could not help it. She could not convince herself that this trip, at least, was a regular shuttle run. She had learned too much fear blundering into the unknown as a Gateway pilot. She pushed herself around its vast-comparatively vast-space (nearly a hundred and fifty cubic meters!), and worried. It was not only the muddy viewscreen that kept her attention. There was the shiny golden lozenge, bigger than a man, that was thought to contain the FTL drive machinery and was known to explode totally if opened. There was the crystal, glassy spiral that got hot (no one had ever known why) from time to time, and lit up with tiny hot flecks of radiance at the beginning and end of each trip, and at one other very important time.
It was that time that Lurvy was watching for. And when, exactly twenty-four days, five hours and fifty-six minutes after they left the Food Factory, the golden coil flickered and began to light, she could not help a great sigh of relief.
“What’s the matter?” Wan shrilled suspiciously.
“Just that we’re halfway now,” she said, noting the time in her log. “That’s the turnaround point. That’s what you look for in a Gateway ship. If you reach the halfway point with only a quarter of your life-support gone you know you won’t run out and starve on the way home.”
Wan pouted. “Don’t you trust me, Lurvy? We will not starve.”
“It feels good to know for sure,” she grinned, and then lost the grin, because she was thinking about what was at the end of the trip.
So they rubbed along together, the best way they could, getting on each other’s nerves a thousand times apiece a day. Paul taught Wan to play chess, to keep his mind off Janine. Wan patiently-more often impatiently-rehearsed again and again everything he could tell them about Heechee Heaven and its occupants.
They slept as much as they could. In the restraining net next to Paul, Wan’s teen-aged juices bubbled and flowed. He tossed and turned in the random, tiny accelerations of the ship, wishing he were alone so that he could do those things that appeared to be prohibited when one was not alone-or wishing he were not alone, but with Janine, so that he could do those even better things Tiny Jim and Henrietta had described to him. He had asked Henrietta any number of times what the female role was in this conjugation. To this she always responded, even when she would not talk about anything else; but almost never in a way that was helpful to Wan. However her sentences began, they almost always ended by returning tearfully to the subject of her terrible betrayals by her husband and that floozy, Doris.
He did not know, even, in just what physical ways the female departed from the male. Pictures and words did not do it. Toward the end of the trip curiosity overpowered acculturation, and he begged Janine or Lurvy, either one, to let him see for himself. Even without touching. “Why, you filthy beast,” said Janine diagnostically. She was not angry. She was smiling. “Bide your time, boy, you’ll get your chances.”
But Lurvy was not amused, and when Wan had gone disconsolately away she and her sister had, for them, a long talk. As long as Janine would tolerate. “Lurvy, dear,” she said at last, “I know. I know I’m only fifteen-well, almost-and Wan’s not much older. I know that I don’t want to get pregnant four years away from a doctor, and with all kinds of things coming up that we don’t know how we’ll deal with-I know all that. You think I’m just your snotty kid sister. Well, I am. But I’m your smart snotty kid sister. When you say something worth listening to I listen. So piss off, dear Lurvy.” Smiling comfortably, she pushed herself away after Wan, and then stopped and returned to kiss Lurvy. “You and Pop,” she said. “You both drive me straight up the wall. But I love you both a lot-and Paul, too.”
It was not altogether Wan’s fault, Lurvy knew. They were all smelling extremely high. Among all their sweats and secretions were pheromones enough to make a monk horny, much less an impressionable virgin kid. And that was not at all Wan’s fault, in fact exactly the reverse. If he had not insisted, they would not have lugged so much water aboard; if they had not, they would be even filthier and sweatier than their rationed sponge baths left them. They had, when you came right down to it, left the Food Factory far too impulsively. Payter had been right.
Astonishingly, Lurvy realized that she actually missed the old man. In the ship they were wholly cut off from communication of any kind. What was he doing? Was he still well? They had had to take the mobile bio-assay unit-they had only one, and four people needed it more than one. But that was not really true, either, because away from the shipboard computer it was balled into a shiny, motionless mass, and would stay that way until they established radio contact with Vera from Heechee Heaven-and meanwhile, what was happening to her father?
The curious thing was that Lurvy loved the old man, and thought that he loved her back. He had given every sign of it but verbal ones. It was his money and ambition that had put them all on the flight to the Food Factory in the first place, buying them participants’ shares by scraping the bottom of the money, if not of the ambition. It had been his money that had paid for her going to Gateway in the first place, and when the gamble went sour he had not reproached her. Or not directly, and not much.
After six weeks in Wan’s ship, Lurvy began to feel adjusted to it. She even felt fairly comfortable, not counting the smells and irritations and worries; at least, as long as she didn’t think too much about the trips that had earned her her five Out bangles from Gateway. There was very little good to remember in any of them.
Lurvy’s first trip had been a washout. Fourteen months of round-trip travel to come out circling a planet that had been flamed clean in a nova eruption. Maybe something had been there once. Nothing was there when Lurvy arrived, stark solitary and already talking to herself in her one-person ship. That had cured her of single flights, and the next was in a Three. No better. None of them any better. She became famous in Gateway, an object of curiosity-strong contender for the record of most flights taken and fewest profits returned. It was not an honor she liked, but it was never as bad until the last flight of all.
That was disaster.
Before they even reached their destination she had awakened out of an edgy, restless sleep to horror. The woman she had made her special friend was floating bloodily next to her, the other woman also dead not far away, and the two men who made up the rest of the Five’s crew engaged in screaming, mutilating hand-to-hand battle.
The rules of the Gateway Corporation provided that any payments resulting from a voyage were to be divided equally among the survivors. Her shipmate Stratos Kristianides had made up his mind to be the only survivor.
In actuality, he didn’t survive. He lost the battle to her other shipmate, and lover, Hector Possanbee. The winner, with Lurvy, went on to find-again-nothing. Smoldering red gas giant. Pitiful little binary Class-M companion star. And no way of reaching the only detectable planet, a huge methane-covered Jupiter of a thing, without dying in the attempt.
Lurvy had come back to Earth after that with her tail between her legs, and no second chance in sight. Payter had given her that opportunity, and she did not think there would be another. The hundred and some thousand dollars it had cost him to pay her way to Gateway had put a very big dent in the money he had accumulated over his sixty or seventy years-she didn’t really know how many years-of life. She had failed him. Not just him. And she accepted, out of his kindness and forbearance to hate her, the fact that he really did love his daughter-and kind, pointless Paul and silly young Janine, too. In some way, Payter loved them all.
And was getting very little out of it, Lurvy judged.
She rubbed her Out bangles moodily. They had been very expensive to obtain.
She was not easy in her mind about her father, or about what lay ahead.
Making love to Paul helped pass the time-when they could convince themselves that they didn’t have to supervise the younger ones for a quarter of an hour or so. It was not the same for Lurvy as making love to Hector, the man who had survived the last Gateway flight with her, the man who had asked her to marry him. The man who asked her to ship out with him again and to build a life together. Short, broad, always active, always alert, a dynamo in bed, kind and patient when she was sick or irritable or scared-there were a hundred reasons why she should have married Hector. And only one, really, why she did not. When she was wrenched out of that terrible sleep she had found Hector and Stratos battling. While she watched, Stratos died.
Hector had explained to her that Stratos had gone out of control to try to slay them all; but she had been asleep when the slaughter started. One of the men had obviously tried to murder his shipmates.
But she had never known for sure which one.
He proposed to her when things were bleakest and grimiest, a day before they reached Gateway on the sorry return trip. “We are really most delightfully good together, Dorema,” he said, arms about her, consolingly. “Just us and no one else. I think I could not have borne this with the others around. Next time we will be more fortunate! So let’s get married, please?”
She burrowed her chin into his hard, warm, cocoa-colored shoulder. “I’ll have to think, dear,” she said, feeling the hand that had killed Stratos kneading the back of her neck.
So Lurvy was not unhappy when the trip was over and Janine called her out of her private room, all thrilled and excited; the great glassy spiral was filling with hot specks of darting golden light, the ship was lurching tentatively in one direction and another; the mottled gray mud was gone from the viewscreen and there were stars. More than stars. There was an object that glowed blue in patches amid featureless gray. It was lemonshaped and spun slowly, and Lurvy could form no idea of its size until she perceived that the surface of the object was not featureless. There were tiny projections jutting out here and there, and she recognized the tiniest of them as Gateway-type ships, Ones and Threes, and there a Five; the lemon had to be more than a kilometer long! Wan, grinning with pride, settled himself in the central pilot seat (they had stuffed it with extra clothing, a device that had never occurred to Wan), and grasped the lander control levers. It was all Lurvy could do to keep her hands off. But Wan had been performing this particular maneuver all his life. With coarse competence he banged and slammed the ship into a downward spiral that matched the slow spin of the blueeyed gray lemon, intersected one of the waiting pits, docked, locked, and looked up for applause. They were on Heechee Heaven.
The Food Factory had been the size of a skyscraper, but this was a world. Perhaps, like Gateway, it had once been an asteroid; but, if so, it had been so tooled and sculpted that there was no trace of original structure. It was cubic kilometers of mass. It was a rotating mountain. So much to explore! So much to learn!
And so much to fear. They skulked, or strutted, through the old halls, and Lurvy realized she was clinging to her husband’s hand. And Paul was clinging back. She forced herself to observe and comment. The sides of the walls were veined with luminous tracing of scarlet; the overhead was the familiar blue Heecheemetal glow. On the floor-and it was really a floor; they had weight here, though not more than a tenth of Earth-normal- diamond-shaped mounds contained what looked like soil and grew plants. “Berryfruit,” said Wan proudly over his shoulder, shrugging toward a waist-high bush with fuzzed objects hanging among its emerald leaves. “We can stop and eat some if you like.”
“Not right now,” said Lurvy. A dozen paces farther along the corridor was another planted lozenge, this one with slate-green tendrils and soft, squashed cauliflower-shaped buds. “What’s that?”
He paused and looked at her. It was clear he thought it was a silly question. “They are not good to eat,” he shrilled scornfully. “Try the berryfruit. They are quite tasty.”
So the party paused, where two of the red-lined corridors came together and one of them changed to blue. They peeled brown-green furry skins from the berryfruit and nibbled at the juicy insides-first tentatively, then with pleasure-while Wan explained the geography of Heechee Heaven. These were the red sections, and they were the best to be in. There was food here, and good places to sleep; and the ship was here, and here the Old Ones never came. But didn’t they sometimes wander out of their usual places to pick the berryfruit? Yes, of course they did! But never (his voice rising half an octave) here. It had never happened. Over there the blue. His voice sank, in volume as well as pitch. The Old Ones came there quite often, or to some parts of the blue. But it was all dead. If it were not that the Dead Men’s room was in the blue he would never go there. And Lurvy, peering down the corridor he pointed to, felt a chill of incredible age. It had the look of a Stonehenge or Gizeh or Angkor Wat. Even the ceilings were dimmer, and the plantings there were sparse and puny. The green, he went on, was all very well, but it was not working properly. The water jets did not function. The plantings died. And the gold-
His pleasure faded when he talked about the gold. That was where the Old Ones lived. If it were not for needing books, and sometimes clothes, he would never go to the gold, though the Dead Men were always urging him to. He did not want to see the Old Ones.
Paul cleared his throat to say: “But I think we have to do that, Wan.”
“Why?” the boy shrilled. “They are not interesting!”
Lurvy put her hand on his arm. “What’s the matter, Wan?” she asked kindly, observing his expression. What Wan felt always showed on his face. He had never had the need to develop the skills of dissembling.
“He looks scared,” Paul commented.
“He is not scared!” Wan retorted. “You do not understand this place! it is not interesting to go to the gold!”
“Wan, dear,” Lurvy said, “the thing is, it’s worth taking chances to find out more about the Heechee. I don’t know if I can explain what it means to us, but the least part of it is that we would get money for it. A lot of money.”
“He doesn’t know what money is,” Paul interrupted impatiently. “Wan. Pay attention. We are going to do this. Tell us how the four of us can safely explore the gold corridors.”
“The four of us can not! One person can. I can,” he boasted. He was angry now, and showed it. Paul! Wan’s feelings about him were mixed, but most of the mixture were unfavorable. Speaking to Wan, Paul shaped his words so carefully-so contemptuously. As though he did not think Wan were smart enough to understand. When Wan and Janine were together, Paul was always near. If Paul was a sample of human males, Wan was not proud to be one. “I have gone to the gold many times,” he boasted, “for books, or for berryfruit, or just to watch the silly things they do. They are so funny! But they are not entirely stupid, you know. I can go there safely. One person can. Perhaps two people can, but if we all go they will surely see us.”
“And then?” Lurvy asked.
Wan shrugged defensively. He didn’t really know the answer to that, only that it had frightened his father. “They are not interesting,” he repeated, contradicting himself.
Janine licked her fingers and tossed the empty berryfruit skins to the base of the bush. “You people,” she sighed, “are unreal. Wan? Where do these Old Ones come?”
“To the edge of the gold, always. Sometimes into the blue or the green.”
“Well, if they like these berryfruits, and if you know a place where they come to pick them, why don’t we just leave a camera there? We can see them. They can’t see us.”
Wan shrilled triumphantly, “Of course! You see, Lurvy, it is not necessary to go there! Janine is right, only-“ he hesitated- “Janine? What is a camera?”
As they went, Lurvy had to nerve herself to pass every intersection, could not help staring down each corridor. But they heard nothing, and saw nothing that moved. It was as quiet as the Food Factory when they first set foot in it, and just as queer. Queerer. The traceries of light on every wall, the patches of growing things-above all, the terrifying thought that there were Heechee alive somewhere near. When they had dropped off a camera by a berryfruit bush in a space where green, blue, and gold came together, Wan bustled them away, directly to the room where the Dead Men lived. That was first priority: to get to the radio that would once again put them in touch with the rest of the world. Even if the rest of the world was only old Payter, fidgeting resentfully around the Food Factory. If they could not do that much, Lurvy reasoned, they had no business being here at all, and they should return to the ship and head for home; it was no good exploring if they could not report what they found!
So Wan, courage returning in direct proportion to his increasing distance from the Old Ones, marched them through a stretch of green, up several levels in blue, to a wide blue door. “Let us see if it is working right,” he said importantly, and stepped on a ridge of metal before the door. The door hesitated, sighed and then creakily opened for them, and, satisfied, Wan led them inside.
This place at least seemed human. If strange. It even smelled human, no doubt because Wan had spent so much time there over his short life. Lurvy took one of the minicameras from Paul and settled it on her shoulder. The little machine hissed tape past its lens, recording an octagonal chamber with three of the forked Heechee seats, two of them broken, and a stained wall bearing the Heechee version of instrumentation-ridges of colored lights. There was a tiny sound of clicks and hums, barely perceptible, behind the wall. Wan waved at it “In there,” he said, “is where the Dead Men live. If ‘live’ is the right word for what they do.” He tittered.
Lurvy pointed the camera at the seats and the knurled knobs before them, then at a domed, clawed object under the smeared wall. It stood chest high, and it was mounted on soft, squashed cylinders to roll on. “What’s that, Wan?”
“It is what the Dead Men catch me with sometimes,” he muttered. “They don’t use it very often. it is very old. When it breaks, it takes forever to mend itself.”
Paul eyed the machine warily, and moved away from it. “Turn on your friends, Wan,” he ordered.
“Of course. It is not very difficult,” Wan boasted. “Watch me carefully, and you will see how to do it.” He sat himself with careless ease on the one unbroken seat, and frowned at the controls. “I will bring you Tiny Jim,” he decided, and thumbed the controls before him. The lights on the stained wall flickered and flowed, and Wan said, “Wake up, Tiny Jim. There is someone here for you to meet.”
Silence.
Wan scowled, glanced over his shoulder at the others and then ordered: “Tiny Jim! Speak to me at once!” He pursed his lips and spat a gobbet at the wall. Lurvy recognized the source of the stains, but said nothing.
A weary voice over their heads said, “Hello, Wan.”
“That is better,” Wan shrilled, grinning at the others. “Now, Tiny Jim! Tell my friends something interesting, or I will spit on you again.”
“I wish you would be more respectful,” sighed the voice, “but very well. Let me see. On the ninth planet of the star Saiph there is an old civilization. Their rulers are a class of shit-handlers, who exercise power by removing the excrement only from the homes of those citizens who are honest, industrious, clever, and unfailing in the payment of their taxes. On their principal holiday, which they call the Feast of St. Gautama, the youngest maiden in each family bathes herself in sunflower oil, takes a hazelnut between her teeth, and ritually-“
“Tiny Jim,” Wan interrupted, “is this a true story?”
Pause. “Metaphorically it is,” Tiny Jim said sullenly.
“You are very foolish,” Wan reproved the Dead Man, “and I am shamed before my friends. Pay attention. Here are Dorema Herter-Hall, who you will call Lurvy, and her sister Janine Herter. And Paul. Say hello to them.”
Long pause. “Are there other living human beings here?” the voice asked doubtfully.
“I have just told you there are!”
Another long pause. Then, “Good-bye, Wan,” the voice said sadly, and would not speak again, no matter how loudly Wan commanded or how furiously he spat at the wall.
“Christ,” grumbled Paul. “Is he always like that?”
“No, not always,” Wan shrilled. “But sometimes he is worse. Shall I try one of the others for you?”
“Are they any better?”
“Well, no,” Wan admitted. “Tiny Jim is the best.”
Paul closed his eyes in despair, and opened them again to glare at Lurvy. “How simply bloody wonderful,” he said. “Do you know what I’m beginning to think? I’m beginning to think your father was right. We should have stayed on the Food Factory.”
Lurvy took a deep breath. “Well, we didn’t,” she pointed out. “We’re here. Let’s give it forty-eight hours, and then- And then we’ll make up our minds.”
Long before the forty-eight hours were up they had made up their minds to stay. At least for a while. There was simply too much in Heechee Heaven to abandon it.
The big factor in the decision was reaching Payter on the FTL radio. No one had thought to ask Wan if his ability to call Heechee Heaven from the Food Factory implied that he could call in the other direction. It turned out he could not. He had never had a reason to try, because there had never been anyone there to answer the phone. Lurvy drafted Janine to help her carry food and a few essentials out of the ship, fighting depression and worry all the way, and returned to find Paul proud and Wan jubilant. They had made contact. “How is he?” Lurvy demanded at once.
“Oh, you mean your father? He’s all right,” Paul said. “He sounded grouchy, come to think of it-cabin fever, I suppose. There were about a million messages. He patched them through as a burst transmission and I’ve got them on tape-but it’ll take us a week to play them all.” He rummaged through the stuff Janine and Lurvy had brought until he found the tools he had demanded. He was patching together a digitalized picture transmitter, to make use of the voice-only FTL circuits. “We can only transmit single frames,” he said, eyes on the picture-tape machine. “But if we’re going to be here for very long, maybe I can work out a burst-transmission system from here. Meanwhile, we’ve got voice and-oh, yeah. The old man said to kiss you for him.”
“Then I guess we’re going to stay for a while,” said Janine.
“Then I guess we’d better bring more stuff out of the ship,” her sister agreed. “Wan? Where should we sleep?”
So while Paul worked on the communications, Wan and the two women hustled the necessities of life to a cluster of chambers in the red-walled corridors. Wan was proud to show them off. There were wall bunks larger than the ones the ship had offered-large enough, actually, for even Paul to sleep in, if he didn’t mind bending his knees. There was a place for toilet facilities, not quite of human design. Or not of very recent human design. The facilities were simply lustrous metal slits in the floor, like the squat-toilets of Eastern Europe. There was even a place to bathe. It was something between a wading pool and a tub, with something between a shower head and a small waterfall coming out of the wall behind it. When you got inside tepid water poured out. After that they all began to smell much better. Wan, in particular, bathed ostentatiously often, sometimes beginning to undress to bathe again before the last drops of unsopped water had dried on the back of his neck from the bath before. Tiny Jim had told him that bathing was a custom among polite people. Besides, he had perceived that Janine did it regularly. Lurvy watched them both, remembered how much trouble it had been to get Janine to bathe on the long flight up from Earth, and did not comment.
As pilot, therefore captain, Lurvy constituted herself head of the expedition. She assigned Paul to establish and maintain communication with her father on the Food Factory, with Wan’s help in dealing with the Dead Men. She assigned Janine, with her own help and Wan’s, to housekeeping tasks like washing their clothes in the tepid tub. She assigned Wan, with anyone who could be spared, to roam the safe parts of Heechee Heaven, photographing and recording for transmission to Payter and Earth. Usually Wan’s compaanion was Janine. When someone else could be spared, the two young people were chaperoned, but that was seldom.
Janine did not seem to mind either way. She had not finished with the preliminary thrill of Wan’s companionship and was in no hurry to move to a further stage-except when they touched. Or when she caught him staring at her. Or when she saw the knotted bulge in his ragged kilt. Even then, her fantasies and reveries were almost as good as that next stage, at least for now. She played with the Dead Men, and munched on berryfruit, brown-skinned and green-fleshed, and did her chores, and waited to grow up a little more.
There were not many objections to Lurvy’s rule, since she had taken care to assign tasks that the draftees were willing to do anyhow, which left for herself such drudgery as going through the backed-up cormuands and persuasions from Payter, and faroff Earth.
The communication was a long way from satisfactory. Lurvy had not appreciated Shipboard-Vera until she had to get along without her. She could not command priority messages first, or have the computer sort them out by theme. There was no computer she could use, except the overtaxed one in her own head. The messages came in higgledy-piggledy, and when she replied, or transmitted reports for downlink relay to Earth, she had no confidence at all that they were getting where they were supposed to go.
The Dead Men seemed to be basically read-only memories, interactive but limited. And their circuits had been further scrambled in the makeshift attempt to use them for communication to the Food Factory, a task for which they had never been designed. (But what had they really been designed for? And by whom?) Wan blustered and bluffed, in his pose as expert, and then miserably confessed that they were not doing what they were supposed to do any more. Sometimes he would dial Tiny Jim and get Henrietta, and sometimes a former-English Lit professor named Willard; and once he got a voice he had never heard before, shaking and whispering on the near side of inaudibility, muttering on the far side of madness. “Go to the gold,” whimpered Henrietta, fretful as ever, and without pause Tiny Jim’s thick tenor would override: “They’ll kill you! They don’t like castaways!”
That was frightening. Especially as Wan assured them that Tiny Jim had always been the most sensible of the Dead Men. It puzzled Lurvy that she was not more terrified than she was, but there had been so many alarms and terrors that she had become used to them. Her circuits were scrambled, too.
And the messages! In one five-minute burst of clear transmission Paul had recorded fourteen hours of them. Commands from downlink: “Report all control settings shuttle ship. Attempt secure tissue samples Heechee/Old Ones. Freeze and store berryfruit leaves, fruits, stems. Exercise extreme caution.” Half a dozen separate communications from her father; he was lonesome; he didn’t feel well; he was not receiving proper medical attention because they had taken the mobile bio-assay unit away; he was being barraged by peremptory orders from Earth. Information messages from Earth: their first reports had been received, analyzed and interpreted for them, and now there were suggestions for follow-up programs beyond counting. They should interrogate Henrietta about her references to cosmological phenomena-Shipboard-Vera was making a hash of it, and Downlink-Vera could not communicate in real time, and old Payter did not know enough astrophysics to ask the right questions, so it was up to them. They should interrogate all the Dead Men on their memories of Gateway and their missions-assuming they remembered anything. They should attempt to find out how living prospectors became stored computer programs. They should- They should do everything. All at once. And almost none of it was possible; tissue samples of the Heechee, forsooth! When an occasional message was clear and personal and undemanding, Lurvy treasured it.
And some of those were surprises. Besides the fan letters from Janine’s pen-pals and the continuing plea for any information they might come across from Trish Bover’s relict, there was one for Lurvy personally, from Robinette Broadhead:
“Dorema, I know you’re being swamped. Your whole mission was important and hazardous to begin with, and now it turns out about a million times more so. All I expect from you is that you do the best you can. I don’t have the authority to override Gateway Corp orders. I can’t change your assigned objectives. But I want you to know I’m on your side. Find out all you can. Try not to get into a spot you can’t retreat from. And I’ll do everything I can to see that you get rewarded as fully and lavishly as you can hope for. I mean it, Lurvy. I give you my word.”
It was a strange message, and oddly touching. It was also a surprise to Lurvy that Broadhead even knew her nickname. They had not exactly been intimates. When she and her family were interviewing for the Food Factory assignment they had met Broadhead several times. But the relationship had been of suppliant and monarch, and there was not much close interpersonal friendship involved. Nor had she particularly liked him. He was candid and amiable enough-high-rolling multimillionaire with an easy-going manner, but sharply on top of every dollar he spent and every development in every project he was involved in. She did not like being a client to a capricious Titan of finance.
And, to be fair, she had come to their meetings with a faint prejudice. She had heard about Robinette Broadhead long before he played any part in her own life. In Lurvy’s own time on the Gateway asteroid and in its ships, she had once gone out in a three-person ship with an elderly woman who had once been shipmate with Gelle-Kiara Moynlim. From the woman Lurvy had heard the story of Broadhead’s last mission, the one that made him a multimillionaire. There was something questionable about it. Nine people had died on that mission. Broadhead was the only survivor. And one of the casualties had been Kiara Moynlin, with whom (the old woman said) Broadhead had been in love. Maybe it was Lurvy’s own experience with a mission in which most of the crew had died that colored her feelings. But they were there.
The curious thing about the Broadhead mission was that maybe “died” was not the right word for the casualties. This Kiara and the rest had been trapped in a black hole, and perhaps they were still there, and perhaps still alive-prisoners of slowed-down time, maybe no more than a few hours older after all the years.
So what was the hidden agenda in Broadhead’s message to Lurvy? Was he urging them on to try to find a way to penetrate Gelle-Kiara Moynlin’s prison? Did he know himself? Lurvy could not tell, but for the first time she thought of their employer as a human being. The thought was touching. It did not make Lurvy feel less afraid, but perhaps a little less alone. When she brought her latest batch of tapes to Paul, in the Dead Men’s room, to record at high speed and transmit when he could, she tarried to put her arms around him and cling, which surprised him very much.
When Janine returned to the Dead Men’s room from an exploration with Wan, something told her to move quietly. She looked in without being heard, and saw her sister and brother-in-law sitting comfortably against a wall, half listening to the maniac chatter of the Dead Men, half chatting desultorily with each other. She turned, put her finger to her lips and led Wan away. “I think they want to be alone,” she explained. “Anyway, I’m tired. Let’s take a break.”
Wan shrugged. They found a convenient spot at an intersection of corridors a few dozen meters away and he settled himself pensively beside the girl. “Are they conjugating?” he asked.
“Cripes, Wan. You’ve only got the one thing on your mind all the time.” But she was not annoyed, and let him move close to her, until one hand approached her breast. “Knock it off,” she said mildly.
He withdrew his hand. “You are being very disturbed, Janine,” he said, pouting.
“Oh, get off my back.” But when he moved millimeters away, she let herself move a little closer again. She was quite content to have him want her and quite serene in believing that when anything happened, as “anything” sooner or later surely would, it would be when she wanted it to happen. Nearly two months with Wan had made her like him, and even trust him, and the rest could wait. She enjoyed his presence.
Even when he was grouchy. “You are not competing properly,” he complained.
“Competing at what, for the Lord’s sake?”
“You should talk to Tiny Jim,” he said severely. “He will teach you better strategies in the reproduction race. He has fully explained the male role to me, so that I am sure I can compete successfully. Of course, yours is different. Basically, your best choice would be to allow me to copulate with you.”
“Yes, you’ve said that. You know what, Wan? You talk too much.”
He was silent for a moment, perplexed. He could not defend himself against that charge. He did not even know why it was a charge. In most of his life the only mode of interaction he had had was talk. He rehearsed all of Tiny Jim’s teachings in his mind, and then his expression cleared. “I see. You want to kiss first,” he said.
“No! I don’t want to kiss ‘first’, and get your knee off my bladder.”
He released her unwillingly. “Janine,” he explained, “close contact is essential to ‘love’. This is true of the lower orders as well as of us. Dogs sniff. Primates groom. Reptiles coil around each other. Even rose shoots nestle close to the mature plant, Tiny Jim says, although he does not believe that is a sexual manifestation. But you will lose the reproductive race if you are not careful, Janine.”
She giggled. “To what? Old dead Henrietta?” But he was scowling and she took pity on him. She sat up and announced, kindly enough, “You’ve got some really wrong ideas, do you know that? The last thing I want, even if we ever do get around to your goddam conjugation, is to get caught in a place like this.”
“‘Caught’?”
“Pregnant,” she explained. “Winning the goddam reproductive race. Knocked up. Oh, Wan,” she said, nuzzling the top of his head, “you just don’t know where it’s all at. I bet you and I are going to conjugate the hell out of each other, some time or other, and maybe we’ll even get married, or something, and we’ll just win that old reproductive race a whole bunch. But right now you’re just a snotty-nosed kid, and so am I. You don’t want to reproduce. You just want to make love.”
“Well, that is true, yes, but Tiny Jim-“
“Will you shut up about Tiny Jim?” She stood up and regarded him for a moment, and said affectionately, “Tell you what. I’m going back to the Dead Men’s room. Why don’t you go read a book for a while to cool off?”
“You are silly!” he scolded. “I have no book here, or reader.”
“Oh, for the Lord’s sake! Then go somewhere and whack off until you feel better.”
Wan looked up at her, then down at his freshly laundered kilt. No bulge was visible, but there was a pale, spreading spot of damp. He grinned. “I guess I don’t need to any more,” he said.
By the time they got back, Paul and Lurvy were no longer cozily nestling each other, but Janine could detect that they were more at peace than usual. What Lurvy could detect about Wan and Janine was less tangible. She looked at them thoughtfully, considered asking what they had been up to, decided against it. Paul was, in any event, more interested in what they had just discovered. He said, “Hey, kids, listen to this.” He dialed Henrietta’s number, waited until her weepy voice said a tentative hello and then asked: “Who are you?”
The voice strengthened. “I am a computer analog,” it said firmly. “When I was alive I was Mrs. Arnold Meacham of mission Orbit Seventy-four, Day Nineteen. I have a bachelor of science and master’s from Tulane and the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and my special discipline is astrophysics. After twenty-two days we docked at an artifact and were subsequently captured by its occupants. At the time of my death I was thirty-eight years old, two years younger than-“ the voice hesitated, “than Doris Filgren, our pilot, who-“ it hesitated again, “who-who my husband seemed to-who had an affair with- who-“ The voice was sobbing now, and Paul turned it off.
“Well, it doesn’t last,” he said, “but there it is. Poor dumb old Vera has sorted out some kind of a connection with reality for her. And not just for her. Do you want to know your mother’s name, Wan?”
The boy was staring at him, pop-eyed. “My mother’s name?” he shrilled.
“Or anybody else’s. Tiny Jim, for instance. He was actually an airbody pilot from Venus who got to Gateway, and then here. His name is James Cornwell. Willard was an English teacher. He embezzled money from the students’ fund to pay his way to Gateway-didn’t get much out of it, of course. His first flight brought him here. The downlink computers wrote an interrogation program for Vera, and she’s been working at it all along, and-what’s the matter, Wan?”
The boy licked his lips. “My mother’s name?” he repeated.
“Oh. Sorry,” Paul apologized, reminded to be kind. It had not occurred to him that Wan’s emotions would be involved. “Her name was Elfega Zamorra. But she doesn’t seem to be one of the Dead Men, Wan. I don’t know why. And your father-well, that’s a funny thing. Your real father was dead before she came here. The man you talk about must have been somebody else, but I don’t know who. Any idea why that is?” Wan shrugged. “I mean, why your mother or, I guess you’d call him, your step-father doesn’t seem to be stored?” Wan spread his hands.
Lurvy moved closer to him. The poor kid! Responding to his distress, she put her arm around him and said, “I guess this is a shock to you, Wan. I’m sure we’ll find out a lot more.” She gestured at the mare’s nest of recorders, encoders and processors that littered the once bare room. “Everything we find out gets transmitted back to Earth,” she said. He looked up at her politely, but not entirely comprehendingly, as she tired to explain the vast complex of information-handling machinery on Earth, and how it systematically analyzed, compared, collated, and interpreted every scrap from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory-not to mention every other bit of data, wherever derived. Until Janine intervened.
“Oh, leave him alone. He understands enough,” she said wisely. “Just let him live with it for a while.” She rummaged through the case of rations for one of the slate-green packages, and then said casually, “By the way. Why is that thing beeping at us?”
Paul listened, then sprang to his clutter of gadgets. The monitor slaved to their portable cameras was emitting a faint Queep. Queep. Queep. He spun it around so they could all see, swearing to himself.
It was the camera they had left by the berryfruit bush, set patiently to record the unchanging scene and to sound an alarm whenever it detected movement.
It had. There was a face scowling out at them.
Lurvy felt a thrill of terror. “Heechee,” she breathed.
But if so, the face showed no evidence of concealing a mind that could colonize a galaxy. It seemed to be down on all fours, peering worriedly at the camera, and behind it were four or five others like it. The face had no chin. The brow slanted down from a fuzzy scalp; there was more hair on the face than on the head. If the skull had had an occipital ridge, it would have looked like a gorilla. Taken all in all, it was not far from the shipboard computer’s reconstruction of Wan’s description, but on a cruder, more animal design. Yet they were not animals. As the face moved to one side Lurvy saw that the others, clustered around the berryfruit bush, wore what no animal had ever spontaneously worn. They were clothed. There were even evidences of fashion in what they wore, patches of color sewn to their tunics, what looked like tattoos on exposed skin, even a string of sharp-edged beads around the neck of one of the males. “I suppose,” Lurvy said shakily, “that even the Heechee might degenerate in time. And they’ve had lots of time.”
The view in the camera spun dizzily. “Damn him,” Paul snapped. “He’s not so degenerate he doesn’t notice the camera. He’s picked the damn thing up. Wan! Do you suppose they know we’re here?”
The boy shrugged disinterestedly. “Of course they do. They always have, you know. They simply do not care.”
Lurvy’s heart caught. “What do you mean, Wan? How do you know they won’t come after us?”
The view in the camera steadied; the Old One who had picked it up was handing it to another. Wan glanced at it and said, “I have told you, they almost never come into this part of the blue. Or ever, into the red; and there is no reason to go into the green. Nothing works there, not even the food chutes or the readers. Almost always, they stay in the gold. Unless they have eaten all the berryfruit there, and want more.”
There was a mewling cry from the sound system of the monitor, and the view whirled again. It stopped momentarily on one of the female Old Ones, sucking a finger; then she reached out balefully for the camera. It spun and then went blank. “Paul! What did they do?” Lurvy demanded.
“Broke it, I suppose,” he said, failing to get the picture back after manipulating the controls. “Question is, what do we do? Haven’t we got enough here? Shouldn’t we think about going back?”
And think about it Lurvy did. They all did. But however carefully they questioned Wan, the boy stubbornly insisted there was nothing to fear. The Old Ones had never troubled him in the corridors walled with red skeins of light. He had never seen them in the green-though, to be sure, he seldom went there himself. Rarely in the blue. And, yes, of course they knew there were people here-the Dead Men assured him the Old Ones had machines that listened, and sometimes watched, everywhere- when they were not broken, of course. They simply did not care very much. “If we don’t go into the gold they will not trouble us,” he said positively. “Except, of course, if they come out.”
“Wan,” Paul snarled, “I can’t tell you how confident you make me feel.”
But it developed that that was only the boy’s way of saying that the odds were very good. “I go to the gold for excitement often,” he boasted. “Also for books. I have never been caught, you know.”
“And what if the Heechee come here for excitement, or books?” Paul demanded.
“Books! What would they do with books? For berryfruit, maybe. Sometimes they go with the machines-Tiny Jim says they are for repairing things that break. But not always. And the machines do not work very well, or very often. Besides, you can hear them far away!”
They all sat silent for a moment, looking at each other. Then Lurvy said, “Here’s what I think. Let’s give ourselves one week here. I don’t think that’s stretching our luck too much. We have, what is it, Paul?-five cameras left. We’ll plant them around, slave them to the monitor here and leave them. If we take care, maybe we can conceal them so the Heechee won’t find them. We’ll explore all the red corridors, because they’re safe, and as many of the blue and green as we can. Collect samples. Take pictures-I want to get a look at those repair machines. And when we’ve done as much of that as we can, we’ll-we’ll see how much time we have. And then we’ll make a decision about going into the gold.”
“But no more than one week. From now,” Paul repeated. He was not insisting. He was only making sure he understood.
“No more,” Lurvy agreed, and Janine and Wan nodded.
But forty-eight hours later they were in the gold, all the same. They had decided to replace the broken camera, and so, all four of them together, they retraced their steps to the three-way intersection where the berryfruit bush rose, bare of ripe fruit. Wan was first, hand in hand with Janine, and she detached herself to swoop down on the wreck of the camera. “They really bashed it,” she marveled. “You didn’t tell us they were so strong, Wan. Look, is that blood?”
Paul snatched it from her hand, turning it over, frowning at the crust of black along one edge. “It looks like they were trying to get it open,” he said. “I don’t think I could do that with my bare hands. He must have slipped and cut himself.”
“Oh, yes,” shrilled Wan absently, “they are quite strong.” His attention was not on the camera. He was peering down the long gold corridor, sniffing the air, listening more for distant sounds than to the others.
“You’re making me nervous,” Lurvy said. “Do you hear anything?”
He shrugged irritably. “You smell them before you hear them but, no, I do not smell anything. They are not very near. And I am not afraid! I come here often, to get books or to watch the funny things they do.”
“I bet,” said Janine, taking the old camera from Paul while he hunted a place to conceal the new one. There were not many places. Heechee decor was stark.
Wan bristled. “I have gone down that corridor as far as you can see!” he boasted. “Even the place where the books is is far down-do you see? Some of them are in the corridor.”
Lurvy looked, but was not sure what Wan meant. A few dozen meters away was a heap of glittering trash, but no books. Paul, peeling tape from a sticky bracket to mount it as high as he could on the wall, said, “The way you carry on about those books of yours. I’ve seen them, you know, Moby Dick and The Adventures of Don Quixote. What would the Heechee be doing with them?”
Wan shrilled with dignity, “You are stupid, Paul. Those are only what the Dead Men gave me, they are not the real books. Those are the real books.”
Janine looked at him curiously, then moved a few step down the corridor. “They’re not books,” she called over her shoulder.
“Of course they are! I have told you they are!”
“No, they aren’t. Come and look.” Lurvy opened her mouth to call her back, hesitated, then followed. The corridor was empty, and Wan did not seem more than usually agitated. When she was halfway to the glittering scatter she recognized what she was looking at, and quickly joined Janine to pick one up.
“Wan,” she said, “I’ve seen these before. They’re Heechee prayer fans. There are hundreds of them on Earth.”
“No, no!” He was getting angry. “Why do you say that I lie?”
“I’m not saying you lie, Wan.” She unrolled the thing in her hands. It was like a tapering scroll of plastic; it opened easily in her hand, but as soon as she released it it closed again. It was the commonest artifact of Heechee culture, found by the scores in the abandoned tunnels on Venus, brought back by Gateway prospectors from every successful mission. No one had ever found what the Heechee did with them, and whether the name that they had been given was appropriate only the Heechee knew. “They’re called ‘prayer fans’, Wan.”
“No, no,” he shrilled crossly, taking it away from her and marching into the chamber. “You do not pray with them. You read them. Like this.” He started to put the scroll into one of the tulip-shaped fixtures on the wall, glanced at it, threw it down. “That is not a good one,” he said, rummaging in the heaps of fans on the floor. “Wait. Yes. This is not good, either, but it is at least something one can recognize.” He slipped it into the tulip. There was a quick tiny flutter of electronic whispers, and then the tulip and scroll disappeared. A lemon-shaped cloud of color enveloped them, and shaped itself to display a sewn book, opened at a page of vertical lines of ideographs. A tinny voice-a human voice!-began to declaim something in a staccato, highly tonal language.
Lurvy could not understand the words, but two years on Gateway had made her cosmopolitan. She gasped, “I-I think that’s Japanese! And those look like haiku! Wan, what are the Heechee doing with books in Japanese?”
He said in a superior tone, “These are not really the Old Ones, Lurvy, they are only copies of other books. The good ones are all like that. Tiny Jim says that all the tapes and books of the Dead Men, all the Dead Men, even the ones that are no longer here, are stored in these. I read them all the time.”
“My God,” said Lurvy. “And how many times have I had one of those in my hands and not known what it was for?”
Paul shook his head wonderingly. He reached into the glowing image and pulled the fan out of its tulip. It came away easily; the picture vanished and voice stopped in mid-syllable, and he turned the scroll over in his hands. “That beats me,” he said. “Every scientist in the world has had a go at these things. How come nobody ever figured out what they were?”
Wan shrugged. He was no longer angry; he was enjoying the triumph of showing these people how much more than they he knew. “Perhaps they are stupid too,” he shrilled. Then, charitably, “Or perhaps they merely have only the ones that no one can understand-except perhaps the Old Ones, If they ever bothered to read them.”
“Have you got one of those handy, Wan?” Lurvy asked.
He shrugged petulantly. “I never bother with those,” he explained. “Still, if you do not believe me-“ He rummaged around in the heaps, his expression making it clear that they were wasting time with things he had already explored and found without interest. “Yes. I think this is one of the worthless ones.”
When he slipped it into the tulip, the hologram that sprang up was bright-and baffling. It was as hard to read as the play of colors on the controls of a Heechee spacecraft. Harder. Strange, oscillating lines that twined around each other, leaped apart in a spray of color, and then drew together again. If it was written language, it was as remote from any Western alphabet as cuneiform. More so. All Earthly languages had characteristics in common, if only that they were almost all represented by symbols on a plane surface. This seemed meant to be perceived in three dimensions. And with it came a sort of interrupted mosquito-whine of sound, like telemetry which, by mistake, was being received on a pocket radio. All in all, it was unnerving.
“I did not think you would enjoy it,” Wan observed spitefully. “Turn it off, Wan,” Lurvy said; and then, energetically, “We want to take as many of these things as we can. Paul, take off your shirt. Load up as many as you can and take them back to the Dead Men’s room. And take that old camera, too; give it to the bio-assay unit, and see if it can make anything out of the Heechee blood.”
“And what are you going to do?” Paul asked. But he had already slipped off his blouse and was filling it with the glittery “books”.
“We’ll be right along. Go ahead, Paul. Wan? Can you tell which are which-I mean, which are the ones you don’t bother with?”
“Of course I can, Lurvy. They are very much older, sometimes a little chipped-you can see.”
“All right. You two, take off your top clothes too-as much as you need to make a carrying-bag out of. Go ahead. We’ll be modest some other time,” she said, slipping out of her coverall. She stood in bra and panties, tying knots in the arms and legs of the garment. She could fit at least fifty or sixty of the fans in that, she calculated-with Wan’s tunic and Janine’s dress they could carry at least half of the objects away. And that would be enough. She would not be greedy. There were plenty more on the Food Factory, anyway-although probably they were the ones Wan had brought there, and thus only the ones he had found he could understand. “Are there readers on the Food Factory, Wan?”
“Of course,” he said. “Why else would I bring books there?” He was sorting irritably through the fans, muttering to himself as he tossed the oldest, “useless” ones to Janine and Lurvy. “I am cold,” he complained.
“We all are. I wish you’d worn a bra, Janine,” she said, frowning at her sister.
Janine said indignantly, “I wasn’t planning to take my clothes off. Wan’s right. I’m cold, too.”
“It’s only for a little while. Hurry it up, Wan. You too, Janine, let’s see how fast we can pick out the Heechee ones.” They had her coverall nearly full, and Wan, scowling and dignified in his kilt, was beginning to stuff the fans into his. It would be possible, Lurvy calculated, to wrap a few dozen more in the kilt. After all, he had a breechcloth under it. But they were really doing very well. Paul had already taken at least thirty or forty. Her coverall seemed able to hold nearly seventy-five. And, in any event, they could always come back another time for the rest, if they chose,
Lurvy did not think she would choose to do that. Enough was enough. Whatever else they might do in Heechee Heaven, they had already acquired one priceless fact. The prayer fans were books! Knowing that that was so was half the battle; with that certainty before them, scientists would surely be able to unlock the secret of reading them. If they could not do it from scratch, there were the readers on the Food Factory; if worst came to worst they could read every fan before one of Vera’s remotes, encode sound and image, and transmit the whole thing to Earth. Perhaps they could wrench a reading machine loose and bring it back with them. . . . And back they would go, Lurvy was suddenly sure. If they could not find a way to move the Food Factory, they would abandon it. No one could fault them. They had done enough. If there was a need for more, other parties could follow them, but meanwhile- Meanwhile they would have brought back richer gifts than any other human beings since the discovery of the Gateway asteroid itself! They would be rewarded accordingly, there was no question of that-she even had Robinette Broadhead’s word. For the first time since they had left the Moon on the searing chemical flame of their takeoff rockets, Lurvy let herself think of herself not as someone who was striving for a prize, but as someone who had won. And how happy her father would be. . .
“That’s enough,” she said, helping Janine grip the spilling sack of prayer fans. “Let’s take them right to the ship.”
Janine hugged the clumsy bundle to her small breasts and picked up a few more with a free hand. “You sound as if we’re going home,” she said.
“Maybe so,” Lurvy grinned. “Of course, we’ll have to have a conference and decide- Wan? What’s the matter?”
He was at the door, his shirtful of fans under an arm. And he looked stricken. “We waited too long,” he whispered, peering down the corridor. “There are Old Ones by the berryfruit.”
“Oh, no.” But it was true. Lurvy peered cautiously out into the corridor and there they were, staring up at the camera Paul had fixed to the wall. One reached up and effortlessly pulled it loose while she watched. “Wan? Is there another way home?”
“Yes, through the gold, but-“ His nose was working. “I think there are some there, too. I can smell them and, yes, I can hear them!” And that was true, too; Lurvy could hear a faint sound of mellow, chirrupy grunts, from where the corridor bent.
“We don’t have a choice,” she said. “There are only two of them back the way we came. We’ll take them by surprise and just push our way through. Come on!” Still carrying the tapes, she hustled the others ahead of her. The Heechee might be strong, but Wan had said they were slow. With any luck at all- They had no luck at all. As they reached the opening she saw that there were more than two, half a dozen more, standing around and looking toward them in the entrances to the other corridors. “Paul!” she shouted at the camera. “We’re caught! Get in the ship, and if we don’t get away-“ And she could say no more, because they were upon her; and, yes, they were strong!
They were hustled up through half a dozen levels, their captors one to each arm, stolidly chirping at each other, ignoring their struggles and their words. Wan did not speak. He let them pull him as they would, all the way up to a great open spindleshaped volume, where another dozen Old Ones waited and a huge blue-lit machine sat silent behind them. Did the Heechee believe in sacrifice? Or perform experiments on captives? Would they wind up as Dead Men themselves, rambling and obsessed, ready for the next batch of visitors? Lurvy looked upon all of these as interesting questions, and had no answers for any of them. She was not yet afraid. Her feelings had not caught up with the facts; it was too recently that she had allowed herself to feel triumph. The realization of defeat would have to wait.
The Old Ones chirruped to each other, gesticulating toward the prisoners, the corridors, the great silent machine, like a battle tank without guns. Like a nightmare. Lurvy could not understand any of it, even though the situation was clear enough. After minutes of jabber they were pushed into a cubicle, and found in it-astonishingly!---quite familiar objects. Behind the closed door Lurvy shuffled through them-clothing; a chess set; long desiccated rations. In the toe of one shoe was a thick roll of Brazilian currency, more than a quarter of a million dollars of it, she guessed. They had not been the first captives here! But in none of the rubble was anything like a weapon. She turned to Wan, who was pale and shaking. ‘What will happen?” she demanded.
He waggled his head like an Old One. It was the only answer he could give. “My father-“ he began, and had to swallow before he could go on. “They captured my father once and, yes, truly, they let him go again. But I do not think that is a rule, since my father told me I must never let myself be caught.”
Janine said, “At least Paul got away. Maybe-maybe he can bring help. . . .” But she stopped there, and did not expect an answer. Any hopeful answer would have been fantasy, defined by the four years it would take another vessel like theirs to reach the Food Factory. If help came, it would not be soon. She began to sort through the old clothing. “At least we can get something on,” she said. “Come on, Wan. Get yourself dressed.”
Lurvy followed her example, and then stopped at a strange sound from her sister. It was almost a laugh! “What’s so funny?” she snapped.
Janine pulled a sweater over her head before she answered. It was too big, but it was warm. “I was just thinking about the orders we got,” she said. “To get Heechee tissue samples, you know? Well, the way it worked out-they got ours instead. All of them.”