If the Dead Man had had a face it would have shown the strain to trying to keep from laughing, but he said kindly, “’Kay, sonny. I know you keep hoping. Let’s see, did I tell you to watch their eyes?”
“Yes, Tiny Jim. You said if their pupils dilate it means they are sexually aroused.”
“Right. And I mentioned the existence of the sexually dimorphic structures in the brain?”
“I don’t think I know what that means, exactly.”
“Well, I don’t, either, but it’s anatomically so. They’re different, Wan, inside and out.”
“Please, Tiny Jim, keep telling me about the differences!” The Dead Man did, and Wan listened absorbedly. There was always time to go to the ship, and Tiny Jim was unusually coherent. All of the Dead Men had their own special subjects that they zeroed in to talk about, as though each had been frozen with one big thought in his mind. But even on the favored topics you could not always expect them to make sense. Wan pushed the mobile unit that they used to catch him—when it was working—out of the way and sprawled on the floor, chin in hands, while the Dead Man chattered and reminisced and explained courtship, and gifting, and making your move.
It was fascinating, even though he had heard it before. He listened until the Dead Man slowed down, hesitated, and stopped. Then the boy said, to confirm a theory:
“Teach me, Tiny Jim. I read a book in which a male and a female copulated. He hit her on the head and copulated her while she was unconscious. That appears to me an efficient way to ‘love,’ Tiny Jim, but in other stories it takes much longer. Why is this?”
“That was not love, sonny. That was what I was telling you about. Rape. Rape is a bad idea for people, even if it works for mallard ducks.”
Wan nodded and urged him on: “Why, Tiny Jim?”
Pause. “I will demonstrate it for you mathematically, Wan,” the Dead Man said at last. “Attractive sex objects may be defined as female, no more than five years younger than you are, no more than fifteen years older. These figures are normalized to your present age, and are also only approximate. Attractive sex objects may further be characterized by visual, olfactory, tactile, and aural qualities stimulating to you, in descending weighted order of significance plotted against probability of access. Do you understand me so far?”
“Not really.”
Pause. “Well, that’s all right for now. Now pay attention. On the basis of those four preliminary traits, some females will attract you. Up to the point of contact you will not know about other traits which may repel, harm or detumesce you. 5/28 of subjects will be menstruating. 3/87 will have gonorrhea, 2/95 syphilis. 1/17 will have excessive bodily hair, skin blemishes or other physical deformities concealed by clothing. Finally, 2/71 will conduct themselves offensively during intercourse, 1/16 will emit an unpleasant odor, 3/7 will resist rape so extensively as to diminish your enjoyment; these are subjective values quantified to match your known psychological profile. Cumulating these fractions, the odds are better than six to one that you will not receive maximum pleasure from rape.”
“Then I must not copulate a woman without wooing?”
“That’s right, boy. Not counting it’s against the law.”
Wan was thoughtfully silent for a moment, then remembered to ask, “Is all this true, Tiny Jim?”
Cackle of glee. “Got you that time, kid! Every word.”
Wan pouted like a frog-jaw. “That was not very exciting, Tiny Jim. In fact, you have detumesced me.”
“What do you expect, kid?” Tiny Jim said sullenly. “You told me not to make up any stories. Why are you being so unpleasant?”
“I am getting ready to leave. I do not have much time.”
“You don’t have anything else!” cackled Tiny Jim.
“And you have nothing to say that I want to hear,” said Wan cruelly. He disconnected them all, and angrily he went to the ship and squeezed the launch control. It did not occur to him that he was being rude to the only friends he had in the universe. It had never occurred to him that their feelings mattered.
2
On the Way to the Oort Cloud
On the twelve hundred and eighty-second day of our all-expense-paid joyride on the way to the Oort Cloud, the big excitement was the mail. Vera tinkled joyously and we all came to collect it. There were six letters for my horny little half-sister-in-law from famous movie stars—well, they’re not all movie stars. They’re just famous and good-looking jocks that she writes to, because she’s only fourteen years old and needs some kind of male to dream about, and that write back to her, I think, because their press agents tell them it’s going to be good publicity. A letter from the old country for Payter, my father-in-law. A long one, in German. They want him to come back to Dortmund and run for mayor or Bürgermeister or something. Assuming, of course, that he is still alive when he gets back, which is only an assumption for any of the four of us. But they don’t give up. Two private letters to my wife, Lurvy, I assume from ex-boyfriends. And a letter to all of us from poor Trish Bover’s widower, or maybe husband, depending on whether you considered Trish alive or dead:
Have you seen any trace of Trish’s ship?
Hanson Bover
Short and sweet, because that’s all he could afford, I guess. I told Vera to send him the same reply as always—“Sorry, no.” I had plenty of time to take care of that correspondence, because there was nothing for Paul C. Hall, who is me.
There is usually not much for me, which is one of the reasons I play chess a lot. Payter tells me I’m lucky to be on the mission at all, and I suppose I wouldn’t be if he hadn’t put his own money into it, financing his whole family. Also his skills, but we’ve all done that. Payter is a food chemist. I’m a structural engineer. My wife, Dorema—it’s better not to call her that, and we mostly call her “Lurvy”—is a pilot. Damn good one, too. Lurvy is younger than I am, but she was on Gateway for six years. Never scored, came back next to broke, but she learned a lot. Not just about piloting. Sometimes I look at Lurvy’s arms with the five Out bangles, one for each of her Gateway missions; and her hands, hard and sure on the ship controls, warm and warming when we touch…I don’t know much about what happened to her on Gateway. Perhaps I shouldn’t.
And the other one is her little jailbait half-sister, Janine. Ah, Janine! Sometimes she was fourteen years old, and sometimes forty. When she was fourteen she wrote her gushy letters to her movie stars and played with her toys—a ragged, stuffed armadillo, a Heechee prayer fan (real) and a fire-pearl (fake) which her father had bought her to tempt her onto the trip. When she was forty what she mostly wanted to play with was me. And there we are. In each other’s pockets for three and a half years. Trying not to need to commit murder.
We were not the only ones in space. Once in a great while we would get a message from our nearest neighbors, the Triton base or the exploring ship that had got itself lost. But Triton, with Neptune, was well ahead of us in its orbit—round-trip message time, three weeks. And the explorer had no power to waste on us, though they were now only fifty light-hours away. It was not like a friendly natter over the garden hedge.
So what I did, I played a lot of chess with our shipboard computer.
There’s not an awful lot to do on the way to the Oort except play games, and besides it was a good way to stay noncombatant in The War Between Two Women that continually raged in our little ship. I can stand my father-in-law, if I have to. Mostly he keeps to himself, as much as he can in four hundred cubic meters. I can’t always stand his two crazy daughters, even though I love them both.
All this would have been easier to take if we had had more room—I told myself that—but there is no way to go for a cooling-down walk around the block when you are in a spaceship. Once in a while a quick EVA to check the side-cargos, yes, and then I could look around—the sun still the brightest star in its constellation, but only just; Sirius ahead of us was brighter, and so was Alpha Centauri, off below the ecliptic and to the side. But that was only an hour at
a time, and then back inside the ship. Not a luxury ship. A human-made antique of a spaceship that was never planned for more than a six-month mission and that we had to stay cooped up in for three and a half years. My God! We must have been crazy to sign up. What good is a couple million dollars when getting it drives you out of your head?
Our shipboard brain was a lot easier to get along with. When I played chess with her, hunched over the console with the big headset over my ears, I could shut out Lurvy and Janine. The brain’s name was Vera, which was just my own conceit and had nothing to do with her, I mean its, gender. Or with her truthfulness, either, because I had instructed her she could joke with me sometimes. When Vera was downlinked with the big computers that were in orbit or back on Earth, she was very, very smart. But she couldn’t carry on a conversation that way, because of the 25-day round-trip communications time, and so when she wasn’t in link she was very, very dumb—
“Pawn to king’s rook four, Vera.”
“Thank you…” Long pause, while she checked my parameters to make sure who she was talking to and what she was supposed to be doing, “Paul. Bishop takes knight.”
I could beat the ass off Vera when we played chess, unless she cheated. How did she cheat? Well, after I had won maybe two hundred games from her she won one. And then I won about fifty, and then she won one, and another, and for the next twenty games we were about even and then she began to clobber me every time. Until I figured out what she was doing. She was transmitting position and plans to the big computers on Earth and then, when we recessed games, as we sometimes did, because Payter or one of the women would drag me away from the set, she would have time to get Downlink-Vera’s criticism of her plans and suggestions to amend her strategies. The big machines would tell Vera what they thought my strategies might be, and how to counteract them; and when Downlink-Vera guessed right, Shipboard-Vera had me. I never bothered to make her stop. I just didn’t recess games any more, and then after a while we were so far away that there just wasn’t time for her to get help and I went back to beating her every game.
And the chess games were about the only games I won, those three and a half years. There was no way for me to win anything in the big one that kept going on between my wife, Lurvy, and her horny fourteen-year-old half-sister, Janine. Old Payter was a long time between begats, and Lurvy tried to be a mother to Janine, who tried to be an enemy to Lurvy. And succeeded. It wasn’t all Janine’s fault. Lurvy would take a few drinks—that was her way of relieving the boredom—and then she would discover that Janine had used her toothbrush, or that Janine had unwillingly done as she had been told and cleaned up the food-preparation area before it began to stink, but hadn’t put the organics in the digester. Then they were off. From time to time they would go through ritualized performances of woman talk, punctuated by explosions—
“I really love those blue pants on you, Janine. Do you want me to tack that seam?”
“All right, so I’m getting fat, is that what you’re saying? Well, it’s better than drinking myself stupid all the time!”—and then back to blow-drying each other’s hair. And I would go back to playing chess with Vera. It was the only safe thing to do. Every time I tried to intervene I achieved instant success by uniting them against me: “Fucking male chauvinist pig, why don’t you scrub the kitchen floor?”
The funny thing was, I did love them both. In different ways, of course, though I had trouble getting that across to Janine.
We were told what we were getting into when we signed up for the mission. Besides the regular long-voyage psychiatric briefing, all four of us went through a dozen session hours on the problem during the preflight, and what the shrink said boiled down to “do the best you can.” It appeared that during the refamilying process I would have to learn to parent. Payter was too old, even if he was the biological father. Lurvy was undomestic, as you would expect from a former Gateway pilot. It was up to me; the shrink was very clear about that. It just didn’t say how.
So there I was at forty-one, umpty zillion kilometers from Earth, way past the orbit of Pluto, about fifteen degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic, trying not to make love to my half-sister-in-law, trying to make peace with my wife, trying to maintain the truce with my father-in-law. Those were the big things that I woke up with (every time I was allowed to go to sleep), just staying alive for another day. To get my mind off them, I would try to think about the two million dollars apiece we would get for completing the mission. When even that failed I would try to think about the long-range importance of our mission, not just to us, but to every human being alive. That was real enough. If it all worked out, we would be keeping most of the human race from dying of starvation.
That was obviously important. Sometimes it even seemed important. But it was the human race that had jammed us all into this smelly concentration-camp for what looked like forever; and there were times when—you know?—I kind of hoped they would starve.
Day 1283. I was just waking up when I heard Vera beeping and crackling to herself, the way she does when there’s an action message coming in. I unzipped the restraining sheet and pushed myself out of our private, but old Payter was already hanging over the printer.
He swore creakily. “Gott sei dammt! We have a course changing.” I caught hold of a rail and pushed myself over to see, but Janine, busily inspecting her cheekbones for pimples in the wall mirror, got there ahead of me. She ducked her head in front of Payter’s, read the message, and slid herself away disdainfully. Payter worked his mouth for a minute and then said savagely, “This does not interest you?” Janine shrugged minutely without looking at him.
Lurvy was coming out of the private after me, zipping up her skivvies. “Leave her alone, Pa,” she said. “Paul, go put some clothes on.” It was better to do what she said, besides which she was right. The best way to stay out of trouble with Janine was to behave like a puritan. By the time I fished my shorts out of the tangle of sheets, Lurvy had already read the message. Reasonably enough; she was our pilot. She looked up, grinning. “Paul! We have to make a correction in about eleven hours, and maybe it’s the last one! Back away,” she ordered Payter, who was still hanging over the terminal, and pulled herself down to work Vera’s calculator keys. She watched while the trajectories formed, pressed for a solution and then crowed: “Seventy-three hours eight minutes to touchdown!”
“I myself could have done that,” her father complained.
“Don’t be grouchy, Pa! Three days and we’re there. Why, we ought to be able to see it in the scopes when we turn!”
Janine, back to picking at her cheekbones, commented over her shoulder, “We could have been seeing it for months if somebody hadn’t busted the big scope.”
“Janine!” Lurvy was marvelous at holding her temper in—when she was able to do it at all—and this time she managed to stay in control. She said in her voice of quiet reason, “Wouldn’t you say this was an occasion for rejoicing, not for starting arguments? Of course you would, Janine. I suggest we all have a drink—you, too.”
I stepped in quickly, belting my shorts—I knew the rest of that script. “Are you going to use the chemical rockets, Lurvy? Right, then Janine and I will have to go out and check the side-cargos. Why don’t we have the drink when we come back?”
Lurvy smiled sunnily. “Good idea, dear. But perhaps Pa and I will have one short one now—then we’ll join you for another round later, if you like.”
“Suit up,” I ordered Janine, preventing her from saying whatever inflammatory remark was in her mind. She obviously had decided to be placatory for the moment, because she did as she was told without comment. We checked each other’s seals, let Lurvy and Payter double-check us, crowded one by one into the exit and swung out into space on our tethers. The first thing we both did was look toward home—not very satisfying; the sun was only a bright star and I couldn’t see the Earth at all, though Janine usually claimed she could. The second thing was to look toward the Food Factory, but I couldn’t see
anything there. One star looks a lot like another one, especially down to the lower limits of brightness when there are fifty or sixty thousand of them in the sky.
Janine worked quickly and efficiently, tapping the bolts of the big ion-thrusters strapped to the side of our ship while I inspected for tightness in the steel straps. Janine was really not a bad kid. She was fourteen years old and sexually excitable, true, but it was not at all her fault that she had no satisfactory person to practice being a woman on. Except me and, even less satisfactorily, her father. Everything checked out, as of course we had been pretty sure it would. She was waiting by the stub of the big telescope’s mounting by the time I finished, and a measure of her good humor was that she didn’t even say anything about who let it crack loose and float away in the crazy time. I let her go back in the ship first. I took an extra couple of minutes to float out there. Not because I particularly enjoyed the view. Only because those minutes in space were about the only time I had had in three and a half years to be anything approaching alone.
We were still moving at better than three kilometers a second, but of course you couldn’t tell that with nothing around to compare. It felt a lot as though we weren’t moving at all. It had felt that way, a lot, for all of the three and a half years. One of the stories we had all been hearing for all that time from old Peter—he pronounces it “Pay-ter”—was about his father, the S.S. Werewolf. The werewolf couldn’t have been more than sixteen when The Big One ended. His special job was transporting jet engines to a Luftwaffe squadron that had just been fitted out with ME-210s. Payter says his daddy went to his death apologizing for not getting the engines up to the squadron in time to cream the Lancs and the B-17s and change the outcome of the war. We all thought that was pretty funny—anyway, the first time we heard it. But that wasn’t the real funny part. The real funny part was how the old Nazi freighted them. With a team. Not horses. Oxen. Not even pulling a wagon—it was a sledge! The newest, up to the minute, state of the art jet turbines—and what it took to get them operational was a tow-headed kid with a willow switch, ankle deep in cowflop.