VIII
When Stan and Estrella could take no more, they staggered back to those queer Heechee beds. They didn’t talk; there was too frighteningly much that needed to be talked about, and no good place for them to begin.
Estrella dropped off at once, but not Stan. His head was too full of arithmetic, and all the sums were scary. The man had said forty thousand to one! Why, that meant that every minute that passed here in the Heechee’s Core was more than a month in the outside world! An hour was five years! A day would be over a century, a week would be—
But then fatigue would no longer be denied. He fell into an uneasy sleep, but it didn’t last. There was too much haunting his dreams. But when he woke enough to reach out for Estrella her bunk was empty, and she was gone.
Stan staggered to his feet and went in search of her. It was urgent that he find her. Even more urgently there was only one thing that he really wanted, and that was for the two of them to get right back in their Five, if it would still work after everything the Heechee had done to it, and head for home…before everyone they knew was irrevocably dead and gone.
Estrella wasn’t in the hallway, though there were voices coming from somewhere, lots of them. She wasn’t in the room they had entered in, either, though there were plenty of Heechee there who were looking very busy, at what Stan could not say. One of the Heechee took pity on him. He led Stan, chattering cheerfully, with plenty of those reassuring shoulder pats, to still another entrance chamber. It was the biggest yet, and the most crowded, with a constant stream of Heechee going in and out of the port to a docked ship. The guide led Stan to the door and gently nudged him inside.
The ship was the biggest he’d ever seen, and it was full of people, both human and Heechee. When one of the humans looked up he saw that it was Estrella, and she was talking—yes, apparently talking—to a couple of Heechee. She beckoned Stan over, holding up a flask of something brown. “It’s coffee, Stan,” she said with pleasure. “They’ve got a great kitchen on the immigrant ship. Want some?”
“Sure,” he said absently, staring at the Heechee. Incongruously, the creature was wearing a Texas sombrero, a sweatshirt that bore the legend Welcome to Houston and what looked like red and gold leather cowboy boots. He stuck out an affable hand to Stan.
“Great seeing you again, Mr. Avery,” he said—in English! “I’ve been introducing your good wife to our exploration pilot, Achiever. He’s about to go Outside on a very important mission, and we’ve been briefing him on conditions.” When Stan stared dumbly, the Heechee said apologetically, “Oh, sure, you don’t remember me, do you? My name is Gradient. I was the Doorwatcher in charge of the entry lock when you and Ms. Pancorbo arrived.” And added proudly, “I went with the first party of ours to go Outside, as soon as we saw what was happening.”
“Nice to see you again,” Stan said faintly. “You, ah, speak English very well.”
The Doorwatcher made a deprecating gesture with those skeletal hands. “I spent four years on your planet, so I had plenty of time to learn. Then when this ship was leaving to bring some of your people to the Core I came home.” Someone was chattering urgently to him in the Heechee language. He replied briefly, then sighed. “I’d better get back to work. Achiever’s about to leave and I’ve got to finish the briefing. And I’m anxious to see my significant persons, too. It’s been a long time for me…though they don’t even know I was gone!”
IX
Later on when Stan tried to remember that very long day, that forty-thousand-days-in-a-day day, its events and discoveries flew wildly around in his mind like infuriated bees when the hive is attacked. The surprises were too many and too great. The humans on that ship weren’t captives or invaders. They were immigrants. They had come to the Core to visit the Heechee for a few days or weeks (which was to say, centuries!). Then that same ship was going to go right back to Earth for more. The Door—the floating dock they had come to—was already aswarm with other humans from previous ships, waiting for still other ships which would take them to one of the Heechee planets, where they would go on display for the fascinated Heechee people. Some of these arrivals were dignitaries from Gateway Corp or from one of the nations of Earth, now in the Core to open embassies from the human race to the Heechee. Some of them were simply people who hadn’t liked the lives they had on Earth, and jumped at the chance to start new ones in the Core. “Like us, Stan,” Estrella told him as he blearily tried to take it all in. “Like everybody who came to Gateway, and the wonderful thing is that they’re going to get what they want here. The Heechee are wild to meet us, Stan. Every human being who gets here is going to live like a king.” And then she added worriedly, “Drink your coffee, hon. I think they put something in it to wake us up. You’ll need it.”
They had. It did. When Stan had swallowed his second flask of the stuff, fatigue was banished, and his mind was racing. “What do you mean, live like a king?” he demanded.
“What I said, Stan,” she said patiently—or not all that patiently; she was on overdrive, too, her eyes sparkling in a way Stan had never seen before. “They’re welcoming us, Stan. They want to hear everything about the human race. They’re fascinated by the idea that we have different nations and cultures and all. When I told the Doorwatcher about herding bison, he begged me to come to his own planet and talk about it—seems he’d missed that when he was on Earth. He says they’ll give us our own home, and a wonderful home, too, and…and I don’t think they know anything about Istanbul, either, or human history, and they’ll want to hear it all from you—”
But Stan was shaking his head. “We won’t have time,” he announced.
Estrella stopped short, peering at him from under her dragging eyelid. “Why won’t we?” she asked, suddenly shot down from her enthusiasm.
“Because we’ve got to be on that ship when it goes back, Estrella. We have to get there while we’re still news, the first people to come back from the Core. Can you imagine what that will be worth? Not just the bonus—I bet that’ll be huge—but we’ll be famous! And rich, Full Medical and all!” He ran out of steam then, peering at Estrella’s face, trying to read her expression. “Don’t you see what we’re missing, Estrella?”
She said contemplatively, “Full Medical. Long, rich lives. On Earth.”
He nodded with vigor. “Exactly! And time is passing us by. We have to go back!”
Estrella took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. She asked simply, “Why?”
He blinked at her. “What do you mean, why?”
“Well, Stan,” she said reasonably, “there’s no real hurry, is there? What have we got to go back to that we won’t have right here?”
“Our friends—” he began, but she shook her head. She kissed his hand before she released it and spoke.
“Have you looked at the time, dear? Our friends are getting old. They might even have died by now. You wanted to live a long, long time. Now we’re doing it.” She took pity on the look on his face and hugged him tightly. “Besides,” she said persuasively, “we’ve come all this way. As long as we’re here, we might as well see what the place looks like.”
Stan found words at last. “How long?”
“Not long, if that’s what you want. A week or two—”
“Estrella! That’ll be—what? A thousand years or more on Earth!”
She nodded. “And by then maybe it’ll be worth going back to.”
3
* * *
Hunting the Hunters
I
Before Estrella and Stan ever got to the Core—indeed, when you factor that enormous 40,000-to-1 time difference into your calculations, long before they had even been born—a Heechee space pilot named Achiever was there already. That was because he lived there. He had lived in the Core all his life and had no desire ever to leave it. Achiever knew that there were a lot of highly interesting things Outside. However, he also knew how dangerous those interesting things might be, and so he had no more desire to see them for himself
than did any other Heechee. (Not that Achiever thought of himself as a “Heechee.” That was a human word. Achiever at that point had never heard it, and was not going to like it when he did.)
The flight for which Achiever was preparing certainly was not intended to take him Outside—though, curiously, his ship happened to be one of the few in the Heechee fleet that could actually have made the journey. It was also one of the larger Heechee ships, and so it would have flabbergasted any of those early Gateway prospectors if they had ever seen it. Any one of the Ones and Threes and Fives those early adventurers flew could have fit easily into one of its cargo holds.
Cargo was what Achiever’s mission was all about. He was preparing to ferry essential supplies from the factories of the planet he was orbiting to the free-floating space station called Door. It was a run that he had made more than thirty times already, without a single accident of any kind and with no serious delays. For this reason Achiever had just been promoted. His new title might be translated as “Pilot Who Is Sufficiently Capable and Cautious to Be Both Permitted and Required to Instruct Others,” and the physical evidence of his new status was standing there before him. Her name was Breeze. She was the very first student pilot he had had assigned to him for training.
Although Achiever had never had a trainee before, he knew what was expected of him. “Tell me, Breeze,” he addressed her, his voice kindly but in the tone of one who had the right to ask, “what would you do if you were approaching an object such as Door and your lookplate flipped from nearspace to a panoramic view?”
She didn’t hesitate. “First I would check the bias on the lookplate and correct it if needed. If that didn’t work I would activate the standby plate. If that too was inoperative, I would abort the docking, enter a holding orbit and disassemble the lookplate for repair. Do you want me to tell you how I would go about troubleshooting the system?”
He flapped his wrists, the equivalent of a shake of a human head. “Not just yet. First I want to know why you didn’t simply allow the automatic systems to land you.”
“That is of course what I would do for a planet landing, provided we had already passed the planet’s radiation shield, Achiever, but you specified a destination like Door. Even a small excess of velocity at docking might breach Door’s hull integrity, with loss of interior pressure. I would not take that risk. Now would you like me to describe the troubleshooting?”
Indeed he would. He listened attentively to her reply, and to her answers to the other technical problems he posed for her. They were all satisfactory. He could have complimented her. He didn’t. He simply said, “Let’s finish getting the cargo on board, shall we?”
By that time the human female Estrella had been born on her parents’ New Mexican ranch, a very long distance away. As Breeze activated the handlers and the cargo began to move out of the landers into the ship itself, the male human, Stan, also was born in the American embassy hospital in Ankara, and a youth named Robinette Broadhead was dismally wondering if there was any possible way for him to escape a lifetime of drudgery in the Wyoming food mines.
These particular persons were all human beings. Of course Achiever had never heard of any of them, yet.
By the time loading was complete, Achiever had decided that he liked Breeze—liked her not in any sexual way but simply because she was smart and diligent and willing.
This might have been thought curious by any young human male in the presence of a good-looking young female. To Achiever there was nothing curious about it. He was hardly even aware that Breeze was pleasingly broad in the shoulders and slim in the waist, with her soft, gray neck fuzz decorously brushed flat. All those things were true enough, but what was also true was that Breeze’s female genital organs were not in their mating configuration. That being so, her attractive features hardly mattered.
It is a known fact that the Heechee were reasonably like humans in that, now and then, some of them liked sorts of sexual practices that others might conceivably describe as “kinky.” Not that kinky, though. Very few Heechee males were perverted enough to desire intercourse with a female who wasn’t in estrus.
Achiever waved Breeze to the seat beside his own. “You may perch here,” he informed her in the language of Do, but then, less formally, he added in the language of Feel, “At this point I think I should begin the voyage, but probably at some later time I will allow you to run the controls.”
“Thank you, Achiever,” she said gratefully, stowing her pod in the space between the leaves of the perch and watching attentively—although, in truth, she had experienced the setting of a course many times in her previous training. As he perfectly well knew.
Achiever put his splayed fingers on the knurled control wheel. That produced an immediate display of colored light that would have baffled any human—that had indeed baffled thousands of humans in the ancient Gateway days when every new prospector had to confront the fact that those incomprehensible settings could make the difference between life and death for him.
With quick competency Achiever set the course, paused and asked, “What about temperature, humidity, trace gases, all those parameters? I usually let the settings go to default, but if you have any special preferences?”
“Default is acceptable,” she assured him. “I generally do that, too. I wonder sometimes why we bother with those settings.”
Achiever made a woofling sort of sound, partly of sympathy, partly of good-humored reproach. “Yes. One might wonder so. But if someday you have a passenger with a medical problem, or a cargo that can be damaged if the settings are wrong, then you will know why.”
Abashed, Breeze watched in silence as he squeezed the start control. All the subsidiary wheels crawled to their default settings, and they were off.
Unlike the largest vessels in the Heechee fleet, Achiever’s craft did not require a hand on the controls after launch. He sat back and regarded his charge. “I could not help but notice,” he said mildly, “that you have shown interest in this craft’s special feature.” He gestured toward the twisted crystal rod that rose in the center of the control chamber.
“I paid close attention to your teaching, Achiever!”
“Of course you did,” he said, “but you could hardly fail to notice it, could you? You may have thought it was a penetrator, to let us through planetary radiation screens?”
“It does not look like one, Achiever.”
“No,” he agreed. “It does not. You’ve probably never seen one before. It is an order disrupter.”
He expected a reaction to that. It took a moment, but then it came. “Oh,” she said, and then, “Oh!”
“Yes,” he said, with the shoulder shrug that was the Heechee equivalent of a human nod of sympathy. “It is the instrument that the generation of our parents used to transit into aligned systems.” (Which is to say, in human terms, black holes. The Heechee didn’t see them as holes, though. To be fair, even a human would have had to admit that, with all the radiation from infalling material, they were hardly ever black, either.) “You need not be alarmed,” he added. “Naturally we are not going to be using it for that purpose. It is an interesting fact, however, that it is fully functional.”
She was looking at it now with full attention. “There was nothing like that on any of the spacecraft I learned on,” she said, sounding almost apprehensive.
“Of course there wasn’t. There is no need for such things here, because there are no aligned systems here in the Core—other, of course, than the Core itself. None were brought in from the external galaxy at the time of the Withdrawal. For that reason, none of our newer spacecraft have anything of this sort, except for the very few scoutcraft that patrol the outside galaxy from time to time. This particular spacecraft is quite old, you know. It is in excellent condition, certainly, or else it would not have been given the important task of supplying Door, but it happens to have been built before our ancestors migrated here. There is much history in this spacecraft, Breeze. It is likely that when it
was new this order disrupter you see before you penetrated many a Schwarzschild”—he didn’t use the word “Schwarzschild,” of course, but what he was talking about was the light-trapping shell around a black hole that humans called by that term—“penetrated many a Schwarzschild barrier in the days before the Withdrawal. The system was left intact, as you see it there, simply because there was no reason to remove it. In any case,” he went on, “I’m glad our ship still has it installed. Every student pilot should learn how this model of the order disrupter works—in case, you know, a time when it might be of value should ever come.”
He watched her expression approvingly. There was no further sign of nervousness, though the mere thought of breaking through the perimeters of the enormous black hole they lived in was still scary for any Heechee. Then, practically, “Now let us recheck the stowage of our cargo.”
She shrugged assent and touched the viewer controls. The first icons that appeared represented tanks of liquid atmospheric gases—replenishments for Door’s air supply; the station was nearly gas-tight but there was always some leakage. Other icons represented personal effects for Door’s permanent party, still others water and fuel. Breeze reported: “They are all secure, Achiever. Do you want anything else checked?”
Achiever touched his fingertips to his thin lips—it was the equivalent of a yawn. “I think not, not right now. However, since there are two of us, I suggest that one of us should remain in the control chamber at all times.”
Breeze looked perplexed. “Is that necessary, Achiever?”
“Necessary? Perhaps not, but it is what I wish.” He was pleased to see that that settled the matter for her; she would be a credit to him as his first student. He went on, “I will take the first shift, Breeze. You may wish to sleep, or to make yourself a meal—our food manufactury is quite good. Or perhaps you would like to avail yourself of the ship’s library. I have chosen the library’s fans personally, and I think you will find enjoyable reading there. Which would you prefer?”