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, Robin. 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-Klara Moynlin. And I sometimes was not sure she was wrong.
7
Heechee Heaven
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 by 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 w
ere 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 bioassay 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 hon
or 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.