Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

  But everybody wanted it stopped.

  Day 1288. Docking day! Payter was at the controls, wouldn’t trust Vera on a thing like that, while Lurvy was strapped in over his head to call off course corrections. We came to relative rest just outside the thin cloud of particles and gas, no more than a kilometer from the Food Factory itself.

  From where Janine and I were sitting in our life-support gear it was hard to see what was going on outside. Past Payter’s head and Lurvy’s gesticulating arms we could catch glimpses of the enormous old machine, but only glimpses. No more than a glimmer of blue-lit metal and now and then a docking pit or the shape of one of the old ships—

  “Hellfire! I’m drifting away!”

  “No, you aren’t, Payter. The goddam thing’s got a little acceleration!”

  —and maybe a star. We didn’t really need the life-support; Payter was nudging us gently as he would a jellyfish in a tank. I wanted to ask where the acceleration came from, or why; but the two pilots were busy, and besides I did not suppose they knew the answer.

  “That’s got it. Now bring her in to that center docking pit, middle of that row of three.”

  “Why that one?”

  “Why not? Because I say so!”

  And we edged in for a minute or two, and came to relative rest again. And we matched and locked. The Heechee capsule at the forward end mated neatly with the ancient pit.

  Lurvy reached down and killed the board, and we all looked at each other. We were there.

  Or, to put it another way, we were halfway. Halfway home.

  Day 1290. It was no surprise that the Heechee had breathed an atmosphere we could survive in. The surprise was that any of it was left in this place, after all the tens or hundreds of thousands of years since anyone had breathed any of it. And that was not the only surprise. The others came later, and were scarier and worse.

  It was not just the atmosphere that had survived. The whole ship had survived—in working condition! We knew it as soon as we were inside and the samplers had shown us we could take off our helmets. The blue-gleaming metal walls were warm to the touch, and we could feel a faint, steady vibration. The temperature was around twelve—cool, but no worse than some Earthside homes I’ve been in. Do you want to guess what the first words were spoken by human beings inside the Food Factory? They came from Payter, and they were:

  “Ten million dollars! Jesus, maybe even a hundred!”

  And if he hadn’t said it, one or another of us would. Our bonus was going to be astronomical. Trish’s report hadn’t said whether the Food Factory was operational or not—for all we knew, it could have been a riddled hulk, empty of anything that made it worthwhile. But here we had a complete and major Heechee artifact, in working condition! There was simply nothing like it to judge against. The tunnels on Venus, the old ships, even Gateway itself had been carefully emptied of nearly all their contents half a million years before. This place was furnished! Warm, livable, thrumming, soaked with weak microwave radiation, it was alive. It did not seem old at all.

  We had little chance to explore; the sooner we got the thing moving in toward Earth, the sooner we would cash in on its promise. We allowed ourselves an hour to roam around in the breathable air, poking into chambers filled with great gray and blue metal shapes, slithering down corridors, eating as we wandered, telling each other over the pocket communicators (and relayed through Vera to Earth) what we found. Then work. We suited up again and began the job of derigging the side-cargos.

  And that was where we ran into the first trouble.

  The Food Factory was not in free orbit. It was accelerating. Some sort of thrust was driving it. It was not great, less than one percent of a G.

  But the electric rocket assemblies weighed more than ten tons each.

  Even at one percent of perceived weight, that meant over a hundred kilograms of weight, not counting ten tons worth of inertia. As we began to unship the first one it pulled itself free at one end and began to fall away. Payter was there to catch it, but it was more than he could hold for long; I pulled myself over and grabbed the side-cargo with one hand, the brace it had been fastened to with the other, and we managed to keep it in place until Janine could secure a cable over it.

  Then we retired inside the ship to think things over.

  We were already exhausted. After three-plus years in confined quarters, we were not used to hard work. Vera’s bioassay unit reported we were accumulating fatigue poisons. We bickered and worried at each other for a while, then Payter and Lurvy went to sleep while Janine and I schemed out a rigging that would let us secure each side-cargo before it was released and swing it around the Food Factory on three long cables, belayed by smaller guiding cables so that it would not smash into the hull at the far end of its travel and pound itself into scrap. We had allowed ten hours to move a rocket into position. It took three days for the first one. By the time we had it secured we were stark, staring wrecks, our heartbeats pounding, our muscles one solid ache. We took a full sleep shift and a few hours of loafing around the interior of the Food Factory before we went back to securing the rocket so that it could be started. Payter was the most energetic of us; he went prowling as far as he could go down half a dozen corridors. “All come to dead ends,” he reported when he came back. “Looks like the part we can reach is only about a tenth of the object—’less we cut holes through the walls.”

  “Not now,” I said.

  “Not ever!” said Lurvy strongly. “All we do is get this thing back. Anybody wants to start cutting it up, it will be after we’ve collected our money!” She rubbed her biceps, arms folded across her chest, and added regretfully, “And we might as well get started on securing the rocket.”

  It took us another two days to do that, but finally we had it in place. The welding fluxes they had given us to secure steel to Heechee metal actually worked. As far as we could tell from static inspection, it was solid. We retired into the ship and commanded Vera to give it a ten percent thrust.

  At once we felt a tiny lurch. It was working. We all grinned at each other, and I reached into my private hold-all for the bottle of champagne I had been saving for this occasion—

  Another lurch.

  Click, click, click, click—one after another our grins snapped off. There should have been only one felt acceleration.

  Lurvy jumped to the cyber board. “Vera! Report delta-V!”

  The screen lighted up with a diagram of forces: the Food Factory imaged in the middle, force arrows showing in two directions. One was our thruster, doing its job of pushing against the hull. The other was not.

  “Additional thrust now affecting course…Lurvy,” Vera reported. “Vector result now same in direction and magnitude as previous delta-V.”

  Our rocket was pushing against the Food Factory. But it wasn’t doing much good. The factory was pushing back.

  Day 1298. So we did what we obviously had to do. We turned everything off and screamed for help.

  We slept, and ate, and wandered around the factory for what seemed like forever, wishing the twenty-five-day delay did not exist. Vera wasn’t much help. “Transmit full telemetry,” she said, and, “Stand by for further directives.” Well, we were doing that already.

  After a day or two I pulled the champagne out anyway, and we all drank up. At .01G the carbonation had more muscle than gravity did, and actually I had to hold my thumb over the bottle and my palm over each glass to squirt and catch the spraying champagne. But after a fashion we toasted. “Not so bad,” said Payter when he had chug-a-lugged his wine. “At least we’ve got a couple million each.”

  “If we ever live to collect it,” snarled Janine.

  “Don’t be such a downer, Janine. We knew when we started out that the mission might bum out.” And so we had; the ship was designed so that we could start back on our basic fuel, then rerig the photon-thrusters to get us home—in another four years or so.

  “And then what, Lurvy? I’ll be an eighteen-year-old virgin! And a fai
lure.”

  “Oh, God. Janine, go explore for a while, won’t you? I’m tired of the sight of you.”

  And so were all of us, of each other. We were more tired of each other, and less tolerant, than we had been all the way out in the cramped quarters of the ship. Now that we had more space to lose each other in, as much as a quarter-kilometer of it at farthest stretch, we were more abrasive on each other than ever. Every twenty hours or so Vera’s small, dull brain would stumble through her contingency programs and come up with some new experiment: test thrusts at one percent of power, at thirty percent of power, even at full power. And we would get together long enough to suit up and carry them out. But they were always the same. No matter how hard we pushed against the Food Factory, the artifact sensed it, and pushed back at exactly the right magnitude and in exactly the right direction to keep its steady acceleration to whatever goal it had in mind. The only useful thing Vera came up with was a theory: the factory had used up the comet it was working on and was moving on to a new one. But that was only intellectually interesting. It did not do a practical thing to help. So we wandered around, mostly alone, carrying the cameras into every room and corridor we could reach. What we saw they saw, and what they saw was transmitted on the time-sharing beam to Earth, and none of it offered much help.

  We found where Trish Bover had entered the factory easily enough—Payter did that, and called us all to look, and we gathered silently to inspect the remnants of a long-decayed lunch, the discarded pantyhose and the graffiti she had scratched on the walls:

  TRISH BOVER WAS HERE

  and

  GOD HELP ME!

  “Maybe God will,” said Lurvy after a while, “but I don’t see how anybody else can.”

  “She must have been here longer than I thought,” Payter said. “There’s junk scattered all around in some of the rooms.”

  “What kind of junk?”

  “Old spoiled food, mostly. Down toward the other landing face, you know where the lights are?” I did, and Janine and I went to see. It was her idea to keep me company, and not an idea I had been enthusiastic about at first. But maybe the 12°C. temperature and the lack of anything like a bed tempered her interest, or maybe she was too depressed and disappointed to be very interested in her ambition to lose her virginity. We found the discarded food easily enough. It didn’t look like Gateway rations to me. It seemed to come in packets; a couple of them were unopened, three biggish ones, the size of a slice of bread, wrapped in bright red something or other—it felt like silk. Two smaller ones, one green, one the same red as the others but mottled with pink dots. We opened one experimentally. It stank of rotten fish and was obviously no longer edible. But it had been.

  I left Janine there to go back to find the others. They opened the little green one. It did not smell spoiled, but was hard as rock. Payter sniffed it, then licked it, then broke off a crumb against the wall and chewed it thoughtfully. “No taste at all,” he reported, then looked up at us, looked startled, then grinned. “You waiting for me to drop dead?” he inquired. “I don’t think so. You chew on it awhile, it gets soft. Like stale crackers, maybe.”

  Lurvy frowned. “If it really was food—” She stopped and thought. “If it really was food, and Trish left it there, why didn’t she just stay here? Or why didn’t she mention it?”

  “She was scared silly,” I suggested.

  “Sure she was. But she did tape a report. She didn’t say a word about food. The Gateway techs were the ones who decided this was a Food Factory, remember? And all they had to go on was the wrecked one they found around Phyllis’s World.”

  “Maybe she just forgot.”

  “I don’t think she forgot,” said Lurvy slowly, but she didn’t say any more than that. There wasn’t anything more to be said. But for the next day or two we did not do much solitary exploring.

  Day 1311. Vera received the information about the food packages in silence. After a while she displayed an instruction to submit the contents of the packages to chemical- and bioassay. We had already done that on our own, and if she drew conclusions she did not say what they were.

  For that matter, neither did we. On the occasions when we were all awake together what we mostly talked about was what we would do if Base could not figure out a way for us to move the Food Factory. Vera had already suggested that we install the other five side-cargos, turn them all on full-power at once and see if the factory could out-muscle six thrusters. Vera’s suggestions were not orders, and Lurvy spoke for all of us when she said, “If we turn them on full and they don’t work, the next step is to turn them on to over rated capacity. They could get damaged. And we could get stuck.”

  “What do we do if we hear from Earth and they make it an order?” I asked.

  Payter cut in ahead of her. “We bargain,” he said, nodding sagely. “They want us to take extra risks, they give us extra pay.”

  “Are you going to do the bargaining, Pa?”

  “You bet I am. And listen. Suppose it don’t work. Suppose we have to go back. You know what we do then?” He nodded to us again. “We load up the ship with everything we can carry. We find little machines that we can take out, you know? Maybe we see if they work. We stuff that ship with everything it can hold, throw away everything we can spare. Leave most of the side-cargos here and load on big machines outside, you see? We could come back with, God, I don’t know, another twenty, thirty million dollars’ worth of artifacts.”

  “Like prayer fans!” Janine cried, clapping her hands. There were piles of them in the room where Payter had found the food. There were other things there, too, a sort of metal-mesh couch, tulip-shaped things that looked like candleholders on the walls. But hundreds of prayer fans. By my quick guess, at a thousand dollars each, there was half a million dollars’ worth of prayer fans in that room alone, delivered to the curio markets in Chicago and Rome…if we lived to deliver them. Not counting all the other things I could think of, that I was inventorying in my mind. I wasn’t the only one.

  “Prayer fans are the least of it,” Lurvy said thoughtfully. “But that’s not in our contract, Pa.”

  “Contract! So what are they going to do with us, shoot us? Cheat us? After we give up eight years of our lives? No. They’ll give us the bonuses.”

  The more we thought about it, the better that sounded. I went to sleep thinking about which of the gadgets and what-you-call-’ems I’d seen could be carried back, and what among them seemed the most valuable, and had my first pleasant dreams since we had tested the thruster—

  And woke up with Janine’s urgent whisper in my ear. “Pop? Paul? Lurvy? Can you hear me?”

  I swam up to a sitting position and looked around. She wasn’t speaking in my ear; it was my radio. Lurvy was awake beside me, and Payter came hurrying around a corner to join us, their radios going too. I said, “We hear you, Janine. What—”

  “Shut up!” the whisper came, hissing out with white sound as though her lips were pressed against the microphone. “Don’t answer me, just listen. There’s someone here.”

  We stared at each other. Lurvy whispered, “Where are you?”

  “I said shut up! I’m out at the far docking area, you know? Where we found that food. I was looking for something we could bring back with us, like Pop said, only—Well, I saw something on the floor. Like an apple, only it wasn’t—kind of reddish brown on the outside and green on the inside, and it smelled like—I don’t know what it smelled like. Strawberries. And it wasn’t any hundred thousand years old, either. It was fresh. And I heard—wait a minute.”

  We did not dare answer, just listened to her breathing for a moment. When she spoke again her whisper sounded scared. “It’s coming this way. It’s between me and you, and I’m stuck. I—keep thinking it’s a Heechee, and it’s going to be—”

  Her voice stopped. We heard her gasp; then, out loud, “Don’t you come any closer!”

  I had heard enough. “Let’s go,” I said, jumping toward the corridor. Payter and Lurvy
were right behind me as we hurried in long, swimming leaps down the blue-walled tunnel. When we got near the docks we stopped, looking around irresolutely.

  Before we could make a decision on which way to search, Janine’s voice came again. It was neither whisper nor terrified cry. “He—he stopped when I told him,” she said unbelievingly. “And I don’t think he’s a Heechee. He looks like just an ordinary person to me—well, kind of scruffy. He’s just standing there staring at me, kind of sniffing the air.”

  “Janine!” I shouted into the radio. “We’re at the docks—which way from here?”

  Pause. Then, strangely, a kind of shocked giggle. “Just keep coming straight,” she said shakily. “Come on quick. You—you wouldn’t believe what he’s doing now!”

  3

  Wan in Love

  The trip to the outpost seemed longer than usual to Wan, because he was troubled in his mind. He missed the companionship of the Dead Men. He missed even more what he had never had. A female. The notion of Wan in love was a fantasy for him, but it was a fantasy he wanted to make real. So many of the books helped it along, Romeo and Juliet and Anna Karenina and the old romantic Chinese classics.

  What drove the fantasies out of his mind at last was the sight of the outpost as he drew near. The board lighted up to signal the beginning of docking maneuvers, the flow lines on the screen melted away, and the shape of the outpost snapped into vision. But it was not the same shape as always. There was a new ship in one of the docking hatches, and a strange jagged structure strapped to one side of the hull.