After they had practiced kissing again she said, “I think we should not be standing up now.” And some time later, when they were lying down, she opened her eyes to stare into his wide-open ones.
As he raised himself for better leverage he hesitated. “If I do that,” he said, “perhaps you will get pregnant.”
“If you don’t do that,” she said, “I think I will die.”
When Janine woke up, hours later, Wan was already awake and dressed, sitting at the side of the room, leaning against the gold-skeined wall. Janine’s heart went out to him. He looked like himself fifty years later. The youthful face seemed to have lines graven by decades of trouble and pain.
“I love you, Wan,” she said.
He stirred and shrilled, “Oh, yes—” Then he caught himself and dropped his voice to a grumble, “Oh, yes, Janine. And I love you. But I do not know what they will do.”
“Probably they won’t hurt you, Wan.”
Scornfully, “Me? It is you I worry about, Janine. This is where I have lived all my life and sooner or later this would have happened. But you—I am worried about you.” He added gloomily, “They are very noisy out there, too. Something is happening.”
“I don’t think they will hurt us—any more, I mean,” Janine corrected herself, thinking about the dreaming couch. The distant chirping cries were coming closer. She dressed quickly and looked around, as Tor’s voice hailed Hooay outside the door.
There was nothing to show what had happened. Not even a drop of blood. But when Tor opened the door, fussed and worried, he stopped to squint at them suspiciously, then sniffed the air. “Perhaps I will not have to breed you, Danine, after all,” he said, kind but frightened. “But Danine! Oowan! There is a terrible thing! Tar has fallen asleep and the old female has run away!”
Wan and Janine were dragged to the spindle, filled with nearly all of the Old Ones. They were milling around in panic. Three of them lay sprawled and snoring where they had been dumped—Tar and two others of Lurvy’s guards, failures in their missions, found sound asleep and brought back in fear and disgrace for the judgment of the Oldest One. Who lay motionless but alert on his pedestal, cascades of color rippling around his perimeter.
To the flesh-and-blood creatures the Oldest One showed nothing of his thoughts. He was metal. He was formidable. He could be neither understood nor challenged. Neither Wan nor Janine, nor any of his near hundred quaking children, could perceive the fear and anger that raced through his circulating memories. Fear that his plans were in jeopardy. Rage that his children had failed to carry out their orders.
The three that had failed would have to be punished, to set an example. The hundred-odd others would also have to be punished—somewhat more lightly, so that the race would not become extinct—for failing to keep the three to their duty. As for the intruders—there was no punishment grave enough for them! Perhaps they should be abolished, like any other challenging organism that threatened to damage its host. Perhaps worse than that. Perhaps nothing within his powers was quite severe enough.
But what was still in his power? He forced himself to stand. Janine saw the ripple of lights flicker and freeze into a pattern as the Oldest One rose to his extended height and spoke. “The female is to be recaptured and preserved,” he said. “This is to be done at once.”
He stood there, wobbling uneasily; the effectors for his limbs were performing erratically. He allowed himself to kneel once more while he pondered his options. The exertion of going to the control room to set course—the turmoil in his mind that had led him to do it—half a million years of existence, all had taken their toll. He needed time to “rest”—time, that is, for his autonomic systems to retrace and repair what damage they could, and perhaps time no longer would be enough. “Do not wake me again till this is done,” he said, and the lights resumed their random flicker, and slowly dwindled to darkness.
Janine, circled in Wan’s arm—his body half toward the Oldest One, half sheltering her, trembling with fear—knew without being told that “preserved” meant killed. She was frightened, too.
But she was also puzzled.
The Old Ones who lay snoring through their trial and judgment had not fallen asleep by chance. Janine recognized the results of a sleep-gun. Janine knew also that none of her party had had one.
For that reason, Janine was not entirely surprised when, an hour later and back in their pen, they heard a stifled grunt from outside.
She was not surprised to see her sister run in, waving a gun and calling to them; not surprised that behind Lurvy a tattered Paul stepped over the sleeping form of Tor. She was not even surprised, or not very much surprised, to see that with them was another armed man she almost recognized. She was not sure. She had met him only when she was a child. But he looked like the person she had seen on the relayed PV broadcasts from Earth, and in jolly messages that came from him on anniversaries and holidays: Robin Broadhead.
15
Older Than the Oldest One
Not at his worst—not even when he was feeling older than the Oldest One himself and as dead as dead Payter—had Paul looked as bad as the pitiful creature waving a gun at him from the hatch of his own ship. Under the skungy, month-old beard the man’s face looked like a mummy’s. He stank.
“You’d better take a bath!” Paul snapped. “And put that silly gun away.”
The mummy slumped against the hatch of the ship. “You’re Paul Hall,” it said, squinting at him. “For God’s sake, do you have anything to eat?”
Paul stared past him. “Isn’t there plenty still left in there?” He pushed into the ship and found that, of course, there were stacks of CHON-food packets exactly as they had been left. The mummy had been into the water bags, had ripped at least three of them open; the floor of the ship was puddled and muddied. Paul offered a ration. “Keep your voice down,” he ordered. “And by the way, who are you?”
“I’m Robin Broadhead. What do you do with this?”
“Bite into it,” snapped Paul, exasperated—less because of the man himself, or even because of the way he smelled, than because he was still shaking. He had been terrified that it would be an Old One he had come across so unexpectedly. But—Robin Broadhead! What was he doing here?
But he could not put the question just then. Broadhead was almost literally starving. He turned the flat pillow of food over in his hands, frowning and shaking, and then bit into a corner of it. As soon as he found it could be chewed he wolfed it down, crumbs spilling from his mouth. He stared up at Paul while he jammed his mouth full faster than his teeth could deal with it. “Take it easy,” Paul said, alarmed. But he was too late. The unfamiliar food, after so long deprivation, did what could have been expected of it. Broadhead choked, gagged and vomited it up. “Damn you!” Paul snarled. “They’ll smell you all the way to the spindle!”
Broadhead leaned back, gasping. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I—thought I was going to die. I pretty near did. Can you give me some water?”
Paul did, a couple of sips at a time, and then allowed the man just a corner of one of the brown and yellow packets, the blandest there was. “Slowly!” he ordered. “I’ll give you more later.” But he was beginning to realize how good it was to have another human being there after—what was it?—it must have been two months, at least, of his solitary skulking and hiding and plotting. “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” he said at last, “but I’m glad to see you.”
Broadhead licked the last crumbs off his lips and managed to grin. “Why, that’s simple,” he said, eyes avidly on the rest of the food in Paul’s hands. “I came here to rescue you.”
Broadhead had been dehydrated and almost asphyxiated, but not really starved. He kept down the crumbs Paul let him have and demanded more; kept that down too, and was even able to help Paul clean up the mess he had made. Paul found him clean clothes from Wan’s sparse store in the ship—the garments were too long and too slim by far, but the waistband of the kilt did not really need to close
all the way—and led him to the largest of the water troughs to get himself clean. It wasn’t daintiness. It was fear. The Old Ones did not hear any better than human beings, nor see even quite as well. But their noses were astonishingly acute. After two weeks of the narrowest of escapes, in his first terrified blundering around Heechee Heaven after Wan and Lurvy had been captured, Paul had learned to bathe three times a day.
And much more.
He took post at a juncture of three corridors, mounting guard while Broadhead got the worst of his thirty days in a Heechee ship off his skin. Rescue them! In the first place, it wasn’t true—Broadhead’s intentions were more subtle and complicated than that. In the second place, Broadhead’s plans were not the same as those Paul had been maturing for two months. He had some notion of tricking information out of the Dead Men and only the haziest notion of what to do with the information when he got it. And he expected Paul to help him carry two or three metric tons of machinery around Heechee Heaven, never mind the risk, never mind that Paul might have ideas of his own. The trouble with being rescued was that the rescuers expected to be in charge of the operation. And expected Paul to be grateful!
Well, he admitted to himself, turning slowly to keep each corridor in view—though the Old Ones were less diligent in patrolling than they had been at first—he would have been grateful enough if Broadhead had showed up at first, in those days of panic when he ran and hid and did not dare either stay or leave; or again, a couple of weeks later, when he had begun to work out a plan, had dared to go to the Dead Men’s room and make contact with the Food Factory—and learned that Peter Herter was dead. The shipboard computer was no use to him, too stupid and too overburdened even to relay his messages to Earth. The Dead Men were maddeningly—were maddening. He was entirely on his own. And slowly his nerve came back and he began to plan. Even to act. When he found that he could dare coming quite near the Old Ones provided he bathed enough to leave no odor trace, he began his plan. Spying. Scheming. Studying. Recording—that was one of the hardest parts. It is very difficult to keep records of how your enemy behaves, what paths are frequented and on what occasions none of them are likely to be about, when you have nothing to write with. Or a watch. Or even the change of day and night, unheard of in the steady blue glow from the Heechee-metal walls. It had finally occurred to him to use the habits of the Old Ones themselves as his chronometer of their behavior. When he saw a party of them going back toward the spindle where the Oldest One lay motionless, they were getting ready to sleep. When he saw a party moving away, it meant the beginning of a new day. They all slept at once, or almost all, out of some imperative he could not imagine; and so there were times when he dared come nearer and nearer to the place where Wan, Janine and Lurvy were kept. Had even seen them once or twice, daring to hide behind a berryfruit bush as the Old Ones were beginning to stir, peering between the branches and then racing breathless away. He knew. He had it all worked out. There were no more than a hundred or so of the Old Ones, and they traveled usually in parties of only two or three.
Remained the question of how to deal with, even, a party of two or three.
Paul Hall, leaner and angrier than he had ever been in his life, thought he knew how to do that. In his first panicked days of flight and hiding, after the others had been captured, he had blundered far and far into the green and red corridors of Heechee Heaven. In some of them even the lights were fading and sparse. In some of them the air had a sour and unhealthful tang, and when he slept there he awoke with his head pounding and thick. In all of them there were objects, machines, gadgets—things—some of them still purring or ticking quietly to themselves, some flickering with a ceaseless rainbow of lights.
He could not stay in those places, because there was no food or water, and he could not find what he most sought. There were no real weapons. Perhaps the Heechee had not needed them. But there was one machine that had a gate of metal strips at one side and, when he wrenched them away, it did not blow up or electrocute him, as he had half thought it would. And he had a spear. And half a dozen times he encountered what looked like smaller, more complicated versions of the Heechee tunnelers.
And some of them still worked. When the Heechee built they built forever.
It took Paul three frightened, thirsty, baffling days of experiment to make any of them function, stopping to creep back to the gold corridors or the ship for food and water, always sure that the thundering noise of the machine would draw the Old Ones down on him before he was ready. But it did not. He learned to squeeze the nipple that hung down from the steering yoke to make the ready lights spring into life, to shove the ponderous knurled wheel forward or back to make it advance or retreat, to tread on the oval floorplate that caused the blue-violet glow to lance out before the machine, softening even the Heechee metal it touched. That was the noisy part. Paul feared greatly that he would destroy something that would wreck Heechee Heaven itself, if he did not bring down a search party. When he came to move the machine to the place he had picked out it was almost quiet, oozing forward on its rollogons. And he stopped to consider.
He knew where the Old Ones went, and when.
He had a spear that could kill a single Old One, maybe could let him defeat even two or three if he came on them by surprise.
He possessed a machine that could annihilate any number of Old Ones, if he could only get them to mass in front of it.
It all added up to a strategy that might even work. It was chancy—oh, God, it was chancy! It depended on at least half a dozen trials by combat. Even though the Old Ones did not seem to seek him armed, who was to say that they might not learn? And what arms might they have? It meant killing some of them, one by one, so expertly and carefully that he did not attract the attention of the whole tribe until he was ready for it—and then attracting them all at once, or so large a majority of them that he could handle the rest with his spear. (Was that really a good gambling bet?) And, above all, it meant that the Oldest One, the great machine Paul had only glimpsed once or twice at long range and about whose powers he knew nothing, must not intervene, and how likely was that?
He had no sure answers. He did have hopes. The Oldest One was too large to move easily through any of the corridors but the gold-skeined ones. Nor did it seem to move frequently at all. And perhaps he could somehow trick it, too, before the devouring haze of the tunneling machine—which could not, in this place, really be a tunneling machine, but seemed to work in about the same way. At every step the odds were against him, true.
But at every step there was at least a slim chance for success. And it was not the risk that stopped him at the last.
The Paul Hall who stole about and schemed in the tunnels of Heechee Heaven, half crazed with anger and fear and worry for his wife and the others, was not entirely crazy. He was the same Paul Hall whose gentleness and patience had made Dorema Herter marry him, who had accepted her saucy, sometimes bratty little sister and abrasive father as part of the bargain. He wanted very much to save them and bring them to freedom. Even at risk. There was always a way out of the risk for him, if only to crawl aboard Wan’s ship and return to the Food Factory and thus—slowly, alone and mournful, but safe—ultimately to Earth and wealth.
But, apart from risk, what was the cost?
The cost was wiping out perhaps an entire population of living and intelligent creatures. They had taken his wife from him, but they had not really harmed her. And, try as he would, Paul could not convince himself he had the right to exterminate them.
And now here was this “rescuer,” this nearly dead castaway named Robin Broadhead, who listened sketchily to Paul’s plan and smiled loftily and said, politely enough, “You’re still working for me, Hall. We’ll do it my way.”
“The hell we will!”
Broadhead stayed polite enough, and even reasonable—it was amazing what a bath and a little food had done for him. “The key,” he said, “is to find out what we’re up against. Help me lug this information-processing stuf
f to where the Dead Men are, and we’ll take care of that. That’s the first thing.”
“The first thing is rescuing my wife!”
“But why, Hall? She’s all right where she is—you said so yourself. I’m not talking about forever. One day, maybe. We find out what we can from the Dead Men. We tape it all, pump them dry if we can. Then we take the tapes and stick them in my ship, and then—”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“No, and keep your goddamned voice down!” They squared off like kids in a schoolyard, both flushed and furious, their eyes locked. Until Robin Broadhead grimaced and shook his head and said, “Oh, hell. Paul? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Paul Hall let himself relax. After a second he said, “Actually, I’m thinking the two of us would do better to figure out what is the best thing to do, instead of arguing about who makes the decision.”
Broadhead grinned. “That was what I was thinking, all right. You know what my trouble is? I’m so surprised to be still alive that I don’t know how to adjust to it.”
It only took them six hours to haul and set up the PMAL-2 processor where they wanted it, but it was six hours of hard work. They were both near the frayed end of exhaustion and it would have made sense to sleep, but they were itching with impatience, both of them. Once they had the main power source connected to the program banks Albert’s prerecorded voice instructed them, step by step, on how to do the rest—the processor itself sprawled across the corridor, the voice terminals inside the Dead Men’s chamber, next to the radio link. Robin looked at Paul, Paul shrugged to Robin, Robin started the program. From just outside the door they could hear the flat, wheedling voice from the terminal: “Henrietta? Henrietta, dear, can you answer me?”