g somewhat hostile and noncommunicative. I think
part  of it is because I am so much looking forward to the time when I can
play  a  little  trick  on  Sigfrid,  but the other part is because he has
changed around the auditing room. That's the kind of thing they used to do
to  me  when  I had my psychotic episode in Wyoming. Sometimes i'd come in
for  a session and they'd have a hologram of my mother, for Christ's sake.
It looked exactly like her, but it didn't smell like her or feel like her;
in  fact, you couldn't feel it at all, it was only light. Sometimes they'd
have me come in there in the dark and something warm and cuddly would take
me  in  its arms and whisper to me. I didn't like that. I was crazy, but I
wasn't that crazy.

   |      MISSION REPORT
   |
   |      Vessel 1-8, Voyage 013D6. Crew F. Ito.
   |      Transit  time  41  days  2 hours. Position not
   |  identified. Instrument recordings damaged.
   |      Transcript  of  crewman's  tape  follows: "The
   |  planet  seems  to have a surface gravity in excess
   |  of  2.  5,  but  I  am going to attempt a landing.
   |  Neither  visual  nor radar scanning penetrates the
   |  clouds of dust and vapor. It really is not looking
   |  very  good,  but  this is my eleventh launch. I am
   |  setting  the automatic return for 10 days. If I am
   |  not  back  by  then  with  the  lander I think the
   |  capsule  will return by itself. I wish I knew what
   |  the spots and flares on the sun meant."
   |      Crewman  was not aboard when ship returned. no
   |  artifacts or samples. Landing vehicle not secured.
   |  Vessel damaged.

   Sigfrid is still waiting, but I know that he won't wait forever. Pretty
soon he's going to start asking me questions, probably about my dreams.
   "Have you had any dreams since I last saw you, Rob?"
   I  yawn.  The  whole subject is very boring. "I don't think so. Nothing
important, I'm sure."
   "I'd like to hear what they were. Even a fragment."
   "You're a pest, Sigfrid, do you know that?"
   "I'm sorry you feel I'm a pest, Rob."
   "Well... I don't think I can remember even a fragment."
   "Try, please."
   "Oh,  cripes.  Well."  I get comfortable on the couch. The only dream I
can  think of is absolutely trivial, and I know there's nothing in it that
relates  to anything traumatic or pivotal, but if I told him that he would
get  angry. So I say obediently, "I was in a car of a long railroad train.
There  were a number of cars hooked up together, and you could go from one
to  the  other. They were full of people I knew. There was a woman, a sort
of motherly type who coughed a lot, and another woman who-well, she looked
rather  strange.  At  first  I thought she was a man. She was dressed in a
sort  of  utility coverall, so you couldn't tell from that whether she was
male or female, and she had very masculine, bushy eyebrows. But I was sure
she was a woman."
   "Did you talk to either of these women, Rob?"
   "Please don't interrupt, Sigfrid, you make me lose my train of thought."
   "I'm sorry, Rob."
   I  go on with the dream: "I left them-no, I didn't talk to them. I went
back into the next car. That was the last one on the train. It was coupled
to  the  rest  of  the train with a sort of-let's see, I don't know how to
describe  it. It was like one of those expanding gatefold things, made out
of metal, you know? And it stretched."
   I stop for a moment, mostly out of boredom. I feel like apologizing for
having  such  a  dumb,  irrelevant  dream.  "You  say  the metal connector
stretched, Rob?" Sigfrid prompts me.
   "That's  right,  it  stretched.  So  of  course  the  car I was in kept
dropping  back, farther and farther behind the others. All I could see was
the  taillight, which was sort of in the shape of her face, looking at me.
She-"  I  lose  the  thread  of what I am saying. I try to get back on the
track:  "I guess I felt as though it was going to be difficult to get back
to  her,  as  if  she-I'm  sorry,  Sigfrid,  I don't remember clearly what
happened around there. Then I woke up. And," I finish virtuously, "I wrote
it all down as soon as I could, just the way you tell me to."
   "I  appreciate  that, Rob," Sigfrid says gravely. He waits for me to go
on.
   I  shift  restlessly.  "This  couch  isn't nearly as comfortable as the
mat," I complain.
   "I'm sorry about that, Rob. You said you recognized them?"
   "Who?"
   "The  two women on the train, that you were getting farther and farther
away from."
   "Oh.  No, I see what you mean. I recognized them in the dream. Really I
have no idea who they were."
   "Did they look like anyone you knew?"
   "Not a bit. I wondered about that myself."
   Sigfrid  says,  after  a  moment,  which I happen to know is his way of
giving me a chance to change my mind about an answer he doesn't like, "You
mentioned one of the women was a motherly type who coughed-"
   "Yes.  But  I  didn't  recognize  her.  I  think  in a way she did look
familiar, but, you know, the way people in a dream do."
   He  says  patiently,  "Can you think of any woman you've ever known who
was motherly and coughed a lot?"
   I  laugh out loud at that. "Dear friend Sigfrid! I assure you the women
I  know  are  not  at  all the motherly type! And they are all on at least
Major Medical. They're not likely to cough."
   "I see. Are you sure, Robbie?"
   "Don't  be a pain in the ass, Sigfrid," I say, angry because the crappy
couch  is hard to get comfortable on, and also because I need to go to the
bathroom, and this situation looks to be prolonging itself indefinitely.
   "I see." And after a moment he picks up on something else, as I know he
is  going to: he's a pigeon, Sigfrid is, pecking at everything I throw out
before  him, one piece at a time. "How about the other woman, the one with
the bushy eyebrows?"
   "What about her?"
   "Did you ever know any girl who had bushy eyesbrows?"
   "Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, I've gone to bed with five hundred girls! Some of
them had every kind of eyebrows you ever heard of."
   "No particular one?"
   "Not that I can think of offhand."
   "Not offhand, Rob. Please make an effort to remember."
   It  is easier to do what he wants than to argue with him about it, so I
make the effort. "All right, let's see. Ida Mae? No. Sue-Ann? No. S. Ya. ?
No.  Gretchen?  no-well,  to  tell you the truth, Sigfrid, Gretchen was so
blond I couldn't really tell you if she had eyebrows at all."
   "Those  are  girls  you've  known  recently,  aren't they, Rob? Perhaps
someone longer ago?"
   "You  mean way back?" I reflect deeply as far back as I can go, all the
way  to  the food mines and Sylvia. I laugh out loud. "You know something,
Sigfrid? It's funny, but I can hardly remember what Sylvia looked like-oh,
wait  a  minute. No. Now I remember. She used to pluck her eyebrows almost
altogether  away,  and  then pencil them in. The reason I know is one time
when  we  were  in  bed  together  we drew pictures on each other with her
eyebrow pencil."
   I  can  almost  hear  him sigh. "The cars," he says, pecking at another
bright bit. "How would you describe them?"
   "Like  any railroad train. Long. Narrow. Moving pretty fast through the
tunnel."
   "Long and narrow, moving through a tunnel, Rob?"
   I  lose  my  patience  at that. He is so fucking transparent! "Come on,
Sigfrid! You don't get away with any corny penis symbols with me."
   "I'm not trying to get away with anything, Rob."
   "Well, you're being an asshole about this whole dream, I swear you are.
There's  nothing  in  it. The train was just a train. I don't know who the
women  were.  And  listen,  while we're on the subject, I really hate this
goddamned couch. For the kind of money my insurance is paying you, you can
do a lot better than this!"
   He  has  really  got  me  angry now. He keeps trying to get back to the
dream,  but I am determined to get a fair shake from him for the insurance
company's  money,  and  by  the time I leave he has promised to redecorate
before my next visit.
   As  I  go  out that day I feel pretty pleased with myself. He is really
doing  me  a lot of good. I suppose it is because I am getting the courage
to  stand  up to him, and perhaps all this nonsense has been helpful to me
in that way, or in some way, even if it is true that some of his ideas are
pretty crazy.


        Chapter 14

   I  struggled  out of my sling to get out of the way of Klara's knee and
bumped  into Sam Kahane's elbow. "Sorry," he said, not even looking around
to see who he was sorry about. His hand was still on the go-teat, although
we  were  ten minutes on our way. He was studying the flickering colors on
the Heechee instrument board, and the only time he looked away was when he
glanced at the viewsereen overhead.
   I  sat  up,  feeling  very queasy. It had taken me weeks to get used to
Gateway's  virtual  absence  of  gravity.  The fluctuating G forces in the
capsule  were  something  else. They were very light, but they didn't stay
the  same  for  more  than  a  minute  at  a  time,  and  my inner ear was
complaining.
   I  squeezed  out  of the way into the kitchen area, with one eye on the
door  to  the  toilet.  Ham Tayeh was still in there. If he didn't get out
pretty  soon  my  situation  was  going to become critical. Klara laughed,
reached  out  from her sling, and put an arm around me. "Poor Robbie," she
said. "And we're just beginning."
   I  swallowed  a pill and recklessly lit a cigarette and concentrated on
not  throwing up. I don't know how much it was actually motion sickness. A
lot  of  it  was fear. There is something very fright-citing about knowing
that  there  is  nothing between you and instant, ugly death except a thin
skin  of  metal  made by some peculiar strangers half a million years ago.
And  about knowing that you're committed to go somewhere over which you no
longer have any control, which may turn out to be extremely unpleasant.
   I  crawled  back  into  my  sling, stubbed out the cigarette, closed my
eyes, and concentrated on making the time pass.
   There was going to be a lot of it to pass. The average trip lasts maybe
forty-five  days  each  way. It doesn't matter as much as you might think,
how  far  you are going. Ten light-years or ten thousand: it matters some,
but not linearly. They tell me that the ships are continually accelerating
and accelerating the rate of acceleration the whole time. That delta isn't
linear,  either,  or  even exponential, in any way that anybody can figure
out.  You  hit the speed of light very quickly, in less than an hour. Then
it  seems  to  take  quite a while before you exceed it by very much. Then
they really pick up speed.
   You can tell all this (they say) by watching the stars displayed on the
overhead  Heechee  navigation screen (they say). Inside the first hour the
stars  all begin to change color and swim around. When you pass c you know
it  because they've all clustered in the center of the screen, which is in
front of the ship as it ifies.
   Actually  the  stars  haven't  moved. You're catching up with the light
emitted  by  sources  behind  you,  or  to  one side. The photons that are
hitting the front viewer were emitted a day, or a week, or a hundred years
ago.  After a day or two they stop even looking like stars. There's just a
sort of mottled gray surface. It looks a little like a holofilm held up to
the  light,  but  you  can  make  a virtual image out of a holofllm with a
flashlight and nobody has ever made anything but pebbly gray out of what's
on the Heechee screens.
   By the time I finally got into the toilet, the emergency didn't seem as
emergent;  and  when  I  came out Klara was alone in the capsule, checking
star  images  with  the  theodolitic camera. She turned to regard me, then
nodded. "You're looking a little less green," she said approvingly.
   "I'll live; Where are the boys?"
   "Where  would they be? They're down in the lander. Dred thinks maybe we
should  split  things  up so you and I get the lander to ourselves part of
the time while they're up here, then we come up here and they take it."
   "Hmm."  That  sounded  pretty nice; actually, I'd been wondering how we
were  going  to work out anything like privacy. "Okay. What do you want me
to do now?"
   She  reached  over  and gave me an absentminded kiss. "Just stay out of
the  way.  Know  what?  We  look  like  we're going almost toward straight
Galactic North."
   I   received   that  information  with  the  weighty  consideration  of
ignorance. Then I said, "Is that good?"
   She grinned. "How can you tell?" I lay back and watched her. If she was
as  frightened as I was, and I had little doubt she was, she certainly was
not letting it show.
   I  began  wondering what was toward Galactic North-and, more important,
how long it would take us to get there.
   The  shortest  trip to another star system on record was eighteen days.
That was Barnard's Star, and it was a bust, nothing there. The longest, or
anyway  the  longest  anybody  knows  of  so  far-who knows how many ships
containing  dead prospectors are still on their way back from, maybe, M-31
in  Andromeda?-was a hundred and seventy-five days each way. They did come
back  dead.  Hard  to  tell where they were. The pictures they took didn't
show  much,  and  the prospectors themselves, of course, were no longer in
condition to say.
   When  you  start  out  it's  pretty  scary even for a veteran. You know
you're  accelerating.  You don't know how long the acceleration will last.
When  you  hit  turnaround  you  can  tell. First thing, you know formally
because  that golden coil in every Heechee ship flickers a little bit. (No
one  knows  why.)  But  you  know  that you're turning around even without
looking,  because the little pseudo-grav that had been dragging you toward
the  back  of  the  ship  now starts dragging you toward the front. Bottom
becomes top.
   Why didn't the Heechee just turn their ships around in midflight, so as
to  use the same propulsive thrust for both acceleration and deceleration?
I wouldn't know. You'd have to be a Heechee to know that.
   Maybe  it  has  something  to  do  with the fact that all their viewing
equipment  seems  to be in front. Maybe it's because the front part of the
ship  is  always heavily armored, even in the lightweight ships-against, I
guess,  the  impact  of  stray  molecules  of gas or dust. But some of the
bigger ships, a few Threes and almost all the Fives, are armored all over.
They don't turn around either.

   |      Classifieds.
   |
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   |  read Gibran to me. Nudity optional. 86-004.
   |
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   |  condominial  nation  in West Africa. Favorable tax
   |  laws,   proven   growth   record.  Our  Registered
   |  Representative  is here on Gateway to explain how.
   |  Free  tape  lecture,  refreshments, the Blue Hell,
   |  Wednesday  1500  hours.  "Dahomey  Is  the  Luxury
   |  Resort of Tomorrow."
   |
   |      ANYONE FROM Aberdeen? Let's talk. 87-396.
   |
   |      YOUR  PORTRAIT  in pastels, oils, other, $150.
   |  Other subjects. 86-569.

   So,  anyway,  when  the  coil flickers and you feel the turnaround, you
know you've done one-quarter of your actual travel time. Not necessarily a
quarter  of  your  total  out-time,  of  course. How long you stay at your
destination  is  another  matter entirely. You make up your own mind about
that. But you've gone half of the automatically controlled trip out.
   So  you multiply the number of days elapsed so far by four, and if that
number  is  less  than  the number of days your life-support capability is
good  for,  then you know that at least you don't have to starve to death.
The  difference between the two numbers is how long you can hang around at
destination.
   Your  basic  ration, food, water, air replenishment, is for two hundred
fifty  days. You can stretch it to three hundred without much trouble (you
just  come  back  skinny, and maybe with a few deficiency diseases). So if
you  get  up  to  sixty  or  sixty-five  days  on the outbound leg without
turnaround,  then  you  know  you  may  be having a problem, and you begin
eating  lighter.  If  you  get  up  to eighty or ninety, then your problem
solves itself, because you don't have any options anymore, you're going to
die  before  you get back. You could try changing the course settings. But
that's  just  another  way  of  dying, as far as can be told from what the
survivors say.
   Presumably the Heechee could change course when they wanted to, but how
they  did it is one of those great unanswered questions about the Heechee,
like  why  did  they tidy everything up before they left? Or what did they
look like? Or where did they go?
   There used to be a jokey kind of book they sold at the fairs when I was
a  kid.  It  was  called  Everything  We  Know About the Heechee. It had a
hundred and twenty-eight pages, and they were all blank.

   If  Sam and Dred and Mohamad were gay, and I had no reason to doubt it,
they didn't show much of it in the first few days. They followed their own
interests. Reading. Listening to music tapes with earphones. Playing chess
and,  when  they could talk Klara and me into it, Chinese poker. We didn't
play  for  money,  we played for shift time. (After a couple of days Klara
said it was more like winning to lose, because if you lost you had more to
occupy  your time.) They were quite benignly tolerant of Klara and me, the
oppressed  heterosexual minority in the dominantly homosexual culture that
occupied  our  ship,  and gave us the lander an exact fifty percent of the
time even though we comprised only forty percent of the population.
   We  got  along. It was good that we did. We were living in each other's
shadow and stink every minute.
   The  inside  of a Heechee ship, even a Five, is not much bigger than an
apartment  kitchen.  The  lander gives you a little extra space-add on the
equivalent  of  a  fair-sized  closet-but  on  the  outleg at least that's
usually  filled with supplies and equipment. And from that total available
cubage, say forty-two or forty-three cubic meters, subtract what else goes
into it besides me and thee and the other prospectors.
   When you're in tau space, you have a steady low thrust of acceleration.
It isn't really acceleration, it is only a reluctance of the atoms of your
body  to exceed c, and it can as well be described as friction as gravity.
But  it  feels like a little gravity. You feel as though you weighed about
two kilos.
   This  means  you need something to rest in when you are resting, and so
each  person  in your crew has a personal folding sling that opens out and
wraps around you to sleep in, or folds to become a sort of a chair. Add to
that  each  person's own personal space: cupboards for tapes and disks and
clothing  (you don't wear much of that); for toilet articles; for pictures
of  the near and dear (if any); for whatever you have elected to bring, up
to  your  total  allowance  of weight and bulk (75 kilograms, % of a cubic
meter); and you have a certain amount of crowding already.
   Add   onto   that   the   original   Heechee  equipment  of  the  ship.
Three-quarters  of  that  you will never use. Most of it you wouldn't know
how  to  use  if you had to; what you do with it, most of all, is leave it
alone.  But you can't remove it. Heechee machinery is integrally designed.
If you amputate a piece of it, it dies.
   Perhaps  if we knew how to heal the wound we could take out some of the
junk and the ship would operate anyway. But we don't, and so it stays: the
great  diamond-shaped  golden box that explodes if you try to open it; the
flimsy  spiral  of  golden tubing that, from time to time, glows, and even
more  often,  becomes  unneighborly hot (no one knows why, exactly) and so
on. It all stays there, and you bump against it all the time.
   Add  on to that the human equipment. The spacesuits: one apiece, fitted
to  your  form and figure. The photographic equipment. The toilet and bath
installations.  The  food-preparing section. The waste disposers. The test
kits,  the  weapons, the drills, the sample boxes, the entire rig that you
take down to the surface of the planet with you, if you happen to be lucky
enough to reach a planet you can land on.
   What  you  have  left  is not very much. It is a little like living for
weeks  on end under the hood of a very large truck, with the engine going,
and with four other people competing for space.
   After  the  first two days I developed an unreasoning prejudice against
Ham Tayeh. He was too big. He took more than his fair share.
   To  be  truthful,  Ham  wasn't even as tall as I was, though he weighed
more.  But I didn't mind the amount of space I took up. I only minded when
other  people  got in the way of it. Sam Kahane was a better size, no more
than  a  hundred  and sixty centimeters, with stiff black beard and coarse
crinkled hair all up his abdomen over his cache-sexe to his chest, and all
up and down his back as well. I didn't think of Sam as violating my living
space  until I found a long, black beard hair in my food. Ham at least was
almost  hairless,  with  a  soft  golden  skin  that  made him look like a
Jordanian  harem  eunuch.  (Did  the Jordanian kings have eunuchs in their
harems? Did they have harems? Ham didn't seem to know much about that; his
parents had lived in New Jersey for three generations.)
   I  even found myself contrasting Klara with Sheri, who was at least two
sizes  smaller.  (Not  usually.  Usually  Klara  was just right.) And Dred
Frauenglass,  who  came  with  Sam's set, was a gentle, thin young man who
didn't talk much and seemed to take up less room than anyone else.
   I  was the virgin in the group, and everybody took turns showing me how
to  do what little we had to do. You have to make the routine photographic
and  spectrometer  readings.  Keep  a  tape  of  readouts from the Heechee
control  panel,  where  there  are  constant  minute variations in hue and
intensity  from the colored lights. (They still keep studying them, hoping
to  understand  what  they  mean.)  Snap  and  analyze  the spectra of the
tau-space  stars  in  the viewscreen. And all that put together takes, oh,
maybe,  two  manhours  a  day.  The household tasks of preparing meals and
cleaning up take about another two.
   So you have used up some four man-hours out of each day for the five of
you, in which you have collectively something like eighty man-hours to use
up.
   I'm  lying.  That's  not really what you do with your time. What you do
with your time is wait for turnaround.
   Three  days, four days, a week; and I became conscious that there was a
building  tension  that I didn't share. Two weeks, and I knew what it was,
because  I was feeling it, too. We were all waiting for it to happen. When
we  went  to  sleep  our  last  look  was  at  the golden spiral to see if
miraculously  it  had  flickered alight. When we woke up our first thought
was  whether  the  ceiling had become the floor. By the third week we were
all  definitely  edgy.  Ham  showed it the most, plump, golden-skinned Ham
with the jolly genie's face:
   "Let's play some poker, Rob."
   "No, thanks."
   "Come  on,  Rob.  We need a fourth." (In Chinese poker you deal out the
whole  deck,  thirteen  cards  to each player. You can't play it any other
way.)
   "I don't want to."
   And  suddenly furious: "Piss on you! You're not worth a snake's fart as
crew, now you won't even play cards!"
   And  then  he would sit cutting the cards moodily for half an hour at a
time,  as though it were a skill he needed to perfect for his life's sake.
And,  come  right  down  to  it,  it almost was. Because figure it out for
yourself.  Suppose you're in a Five and you pass seventy-five days without
turnaround.  Right away you know that you're in trouble: the rations won't
support five people for more than three hundred days.
   But they might support four.
   Or three. Or two. Or one.
   At that point it has become clear that at least one person is not going
to  come back from the trip alive, and what most crews do is start cutting
the  cards.  Loser  politely  cuts his throat. If loser is not polite, the
other four give him etiquette lessons.
   A  lot  of ships that went out as Fives have come back as Threes. A few
come back as Ones.
   So we made the time pass, not easily and certainly not fast.
   Sex was a sovereign anodyne for a while, and Klara and I spent hours on
end  wrapped  in each other's arms, drowsing off for a while and waking to
wake  the other to sex again. I suppose the boys did much the same; it was
not  long before the lander began to smell like the locker room in a boys'
gym.  Then  we  began seeking solitude, all five of us. Well, there wasn't
enough  solitude on the ship to split five ways, but we did what we could;
by  common  consent  we began letting one of us have the lander to himself
(or  herself)  for  an  hour or two at a time. While I was there Klara was
tolerated  in  the  capsule.  While Klara was there I usually played cards
with  the boys. While one of them was there the other two kept us company.
I  have  no idea what the others did with their solo time; what I did with
mine  was mostly stare into space. I mean that literally: I looked out the
lander  ports  at absolute blackness. There was nothing to see, but it was
better  than seeing what I had grown infinitely tired of seeing inside the
ship.
   Then,  after a while, we began developing our own routines. I played my
tapes, Dred watched his pornodisks, Ham unrolled a flexible piano keyboard
and  played electronic music into earplugs (even so, some of it leaked out
if  you  listened  hard,  and  I  got  terribly,  terribly  sick  of Bach,
Palestrina  and  Mozart). Sam Kahane gently organized us into classes, and
we  spent  a  lot  of  time humoring him, discussing the nature of neutron
stars,  black  holes and Seyfert galaxies, when we were not reviewing test
procedures  before  landing  on a new world. The good thing about that was
that  we  managed  not  to hate each other for half an hour at a time. The
rest of the time-well, yes, usually we hated each other. I could not stand
Ham Tayeh's constant shuffling of the cards. Dred developed an unreasoning
hostility  toward  my  occasional  cigarette. Sam's armpits were a horror,
even in the festering reek of the inside of the capsule, against which the
worst  of  Gateway's  air would have seemed a rose garden. And Klara-well,
Klara  had this bad habit. She liked asparagus. She had brought four kilos
of  dehydrated  foods  with her, just for variety and for something to do;
and  although  she shared them with me, and sometimes with the others, she
insisted  on eating asparagus now and then all by herself. Asparagus makes
your  urine  smell  funny.  It  is  not a romantic thing to know when your
darling  has  been  eating  asparagus  by the change in air quality in the
common toilet.
   And  yet-she was my darling, all right, she really was. We had not just
been screwing in those endless hours in the lander; we had been talking. I
have  never known the inside of anyone's head a fraction as well as I came
to  know  Klara's. I had to love her. I could not help it, and I could not
stop.
   Ever.

   |      A NOTE ON STELLAR BIRTH
   |
   |      Dr.  Asmenion.  I suppose most of you are here
   |  more  because  you hope to collect a science bonus
   |  than   because   you're   really   interested   in
   |  astrophysics.  But  you  don't  have to worry. The
   |  instruments  do  most  of  the  work.  You do your
   |  routine  scan,  and  if  you hit anything special,
   |  it'll come out in the evaluation when you're back.
   |      Question.  Isn't  there  anything  special  we
   |  should look out for?
   |      Dr.  Asmenion.  Oh,  sure. For instance, there
   |  was  a prospector who cleaned up half a million, I
   |  think,  by  coming  out  in  the  Orion Nebula and
   |  realizing  that  one  part  of  the  gas cloud was
   |  showing  a hotter temperature than the rest of it.
   |  He   decided  a  star  was  being  born.  Gas  was
   |  condensing  and  beginning  to heat up. In another
   |  ten   thousand   years   there'll  probably  be  a
   |  recognizable  solar  system  forming there, and he
   |  did  a  special  scan mosaic of that whole part of
   |  the sky. So he got the bonus. And now, every year,
   |  the  Corporation  sends that ship out there to get
   |  new  readings.  They pay a hundred-thousand dollar
   |  bonus,  and fifty thousand of it goes to him. I'll
   |  give  you  the  coordinates for some likely spots,
   |  like  the  Trifid  nebula,  if you want me to. You
   |  won't   get   a   half  million,  but  you'll  get
   |  something.

   On  the twenty-third day I was playing with Ham's electronic piano when
I  suddenly  felt  seasick.  The  fluctuating  gray force, that I had come
hardly to notice, was abruptly intensifying.
   I  looked  up  and met Klara's eyes. She was timorously, almost weepily
smiling.  She pointed, and all up through the sinuous curves of the spiral
of  glass,  golden sparks were chasing themselves like bright minnows in a
stream.
   We grabbed each other and held on, laughing, as space swooped around us
and  bottom  became  top.  We had reached turnaround. And we had margin to
spare.


        Chapter 15

   Sigfrid's office is of course under the Bubble, like anybody else's. It
can't  be  too  hot or too cold. But sometimes it feels that way. I say to
him, "Christ, it's hot in here. Your air conditioner is malfunctioning."
   "I  don't have an air conditioner, Robbie," he says patiently. "Getting
back to your mother-"
   "Screw my mother," I say. "Screw yours, too."
   There  is  a pause. I know what his circuits are thinking, and I feel I
will  regret  that impetuous remark. So I add quickly, "I mean, I'm really
uncomfortable, Sigfrid. It's hot in here."
   "You are hot in here," he corrects me.
   "What?"
   "My  sensors  indicate  that  your  temperature goes up almost a degree
whenever   we   talk  about  certain  subjects:  your  mother,  the  woman
Gelle-Klara Moynlin, your first trip, your third trip, Dane Metchnikov and
excretion."
   "Well,  that's  great,"  I yell, suddenly angry. "You're telling me you
spy on me?"
   "You  know  that  I  monitor  your  external  signs,  Robbie,"  he says
reprovingly.  "There  is no harm in that. It is no more significant than a
friend observing that you blush or stammer, or drum your fingers."
   "So you say."
   "I  do  say  that, Rob. I tell you this because I think you should know
that  these  subjects  are  charged  with some emotional overload for you.
Would you like to talk about why that might be?"
   "No!  What  I'd  like  to talk about is you, Sigfrid! What other little
secrets  are you holding out on me? Do you count my erections? Bug my bed?
Tap my phone?"
   "No, Rob. I don't do any of those things."
   "I  certainly hope that's the truth, Sigfrid. I have my ways of knowing
when you lie."
   Pause. "I don't think I understand what you are saying, Rob."
   "You don't have to," I sneer. "You're just a machine." It's enough that
I  understand.  It is very important to me to have that little secret from
Sigfrid.  In  my pocket is the slip of paper that S. Ya. Lavorovna gave me
one  night,  full of pot, wine, and great sex. One day soon I will take it
out  of  my pocket, and then we will see which of us is the boss. I really
enjoy  this  contest  with  Sigfrid.  It  gets me angry. When I am angry I
forget  that  very  large place where I hurt, and go on hurting, and don't
know how to stop.


        Chapter 16

   After forty-six days of superlight travel the capsule dropped back into
a  velocity  that  felt  like no velocity at all: we were in orbit, around
something, and all the engines were still.
   We  stank  to high heaven and we were incredibly tired of one another's
company,  but  we clustered around the viewscreens locked arm to arm, like
dearest  lovers, in the zero gravity, staring at the sun before us. It was
a larger and oranger star than Sol; either larger, or we were closer to it
than  one A. U. But it wasn't the star we were orbiting. Our primary was a
gas-giant planet with one large moon, half again as big as Luna.
   Neither  Klara  nor the boys were whooping and cheering, so I waited as
long as I could and then said, "What's the matter?"
   Klara  said  absently,  "I doubt we can land on that." She did not seem
disappointed. She didn't seem to care at all.
   Sam  Kahane  blew  a long, soft sigh through his beard and said: "Well.
First thing, we'd better get some clean spectra. Rob and I will do it. The
rest of you start sweeping for Heechee signatures."
   "Fat  chance," said one of the others, but so softly that I wasn't sure
who.  It  could  even  have  been Klara. I wanted to ask more, but I had a
feeling that if I asked why they weren't happy, one of them would tell me,
and  then  I  wouldn't  like  the answer. So I squeezed after Sam into the
lander,  and  we  got  in each other's way while we pulled on our topgear,
checked  our  life-support  systems and comms, and sealed up. Sam waved me
into  the  lock; I heard the flash-pumps sucking the air out, and then the
little bit left puffed me out into space as the lock door opened.
   For a moment I was in naked terror, all alone in the middle of no place
any  human  being  had  ever been, terrified that I'd forgotten to snap my
tether.  But I hadn't had to; the magnetic clamp had slipped itself into a
lock  position,  and I came to the end of the cable, twitched sharply, and
began more slowly to recoil back toward the ship.
   Before  I got there Sam was out, too, spinning toward me. We managed to
grab each other, and began setting up to take photographs.
   Sam  gestured  at  a  point between the immense saucer-shaped gas-giant
disk  and  the  hurtfully bright orange sun, and I visored my eyes with my
gauntlets  until  I  saw  what  he  was  indicating: M-31 in Andromeda. Of
course,  from  where  we were it wasn't in the constellation of Andromeda.
There  wasn't  anything  in  sight that looked like Andromeda, or for that
matter  like  any other constellation I have ever seen. But M-31 is so big
and  so bright that you can even pick it out from the surface of the Earth
when the smog isn't too bad, whirlpool-lens-shaped fog of stars. It is the
brightest  of  the external galaxies, and you can recognize it fairly well
from  almost  anywhere  a  Heechee  ship  is  likely  to go. With a little
magnification   you  can  be  sure  of  the  spiral  shape,  and  you  can
double-check by comparing the smaller galaxies in roughly the same line of
sight.
   While  I  was  zeroing  in  with  M-31, Sam was doing the same with the
Magellanic  clouds,  or  what  he  thought were the Magellanic clouds. (He
claimed  he  had  identified  S Doradus.) We both began taking theodolitic
shots.  The  purpose  of all that, of course, is so that the academics who
belong to the Corporation can triangulate and locate where we've been. You
might  wonder  why  they care, but they do; so much that you don't qualify
for  any  scientific  bonus unless you do the full series of photos. You'd
think  they  would  know where we were going from the pictures we take out
the windows while in superlight travel. It doesn't work out that way. They
can  get the main direction of thrust, but after the first few light-years
it  gets harder and harder to track identifiable stars, and it's not clear
that  the  line  of  flight  is  a straight line; some say it follows some
wrinkly configuration in the curvature of space.
   Anyway, the bigheads use everything they can get-including a measure of
how  far  the Magellanic clouds have rotated, and in which direction. Know
why  that  is? Because you can tell from that how many light-years away we
are  from  them,  and  thus  how  deep  we are into the Galaxy. The clouds
revolve in about eighty million years. Careful mapping can show changes of
one  part  in  two  or  three  millions-say, differences in ranging of 150
light-years or so.
   What with Sam's group-study courses I had got pretty interested in that
sort  of thing. Actually taking the photos and trying to guess how Gateway
would  interpret  them  I  almost forgot to be scared. And almost, but not
quite,  forgot to worry that this trip, taken at so great an investment in
courage, was turning out to be a bust.

   But it was a bust.
   Ham  grabbed  the sphere-sweep tapes from Sam Kahane as soon as we were
back  in the ship and fed them into the scanner. The first subject was the
big  planet itself. In every octave of the electromagnetic spectrum, there
was nothing coming out of it that suggested artifactual radiation.
   So  he began looking for other planets. Finding them was slow, even for
the  automatic  scanner,  and  probably  there  could have been a dozen we
couldn't  locate  in  the  time  we spent there (but that hardly mattered,
because  if  we  couldn't  locate them they would have been too distant to
reach  anyway).  The  way  Ham  did it was by taking key signatures from a
spectrogram  of the primary star's radiation, then programming the scanner
to  look  for  reflections  of it. It picked out five objects. Two of them
turned out to be stars with similar spectra. The other three were planets,
all  right,  but  they  showed  no  artifactual  radiation, either. Not to
mention that they were both small and distant.
   Which left the gas-giant's one big moon.
   "Check it out," Sam commanded.
   Mohamad grumbled, "It doesn't look very good."
   "I  don't  want  your  opinion, I only want you to do what you're told.
Check it out."
   "Out loud, please," Klara added. Ham looked at her in surprise, perhaps
at the word "please," but he did what she asked.

   |      Classifieds.
   |
   |      RECORDER LESSONS or play at parties. 87-429.
   |
   |      CHRISTMAS  IS coming! Remember your loved ones
   |  at  home with a Genuine Recomposed Heechee-Plastic
   |  model of Gateway or Gateway Two; lift it and see a
   |  lovely  whirling  snowfall  of  authentic  Peggy's
   |  World  glitterdust. Scenic holofiches, hand-etched
   |  Junior Launch Bracelets, many other gift items. Ph
   |  88-542.
   |
   |      DO YOU have a sister, daughter, female friends
   |  back  on  Earth?  I'd like to correspond. Ultimate
   |  object matrimony. 86-032.

   He  punched  a  button  and said: "Signatures for coded electromagnetic
radiation."  A  slow  sine  curve leaped onto the scanner's readout plate,
wiggled  briefly  for  a  moment,  and  then straightened to an absolutely
motionless line.
   "Negative," said Ham. "Anomalous time-variant temperatures."
   That   was   a  new  one  on  me.  "What's  an  anomalous  time-variant
temperature?" I asked.
   "Like  if  something  gets  warmer  when  the  sun  sets,"  said  Klara
impatiently. "Well?"
   But  that  line  was  flat,  too.  "None  of  them,  either," said Ham.
"High-albedo surface metal?"
   Slow  sine  wave, then nothing. "Hum," said Ham. "Ha. Well, the rest of
the  signatures  don't  apply;  there  won't be any methane, because there
isn't any atmosphere, and so on. So what do we do, boss?"
   Sam  opened  his lips to speak, but Klara was ahead of him. "I beg your
pardon," she said tightly, "but who do you mean when you say 'boss'?"
   "Oh, shut up," Ham said impatiently. "Sam?"
   Kahane  gave  Klara  a  slight,  forgiving  smile.  "If you want to say
something,  go  ahead  and  say  it," he invited. "Me, I think we ought to
orbit the moon."
   "Plain waste of fuel!" Klara snapped. "I think that's crazy."
   "Have you got a better idea?"
   "What do you mean, 'better'? What's the point?"
   "Well," said Sam reasonably, "we haven't looked all over the moon. It's
rotating  pretty slow. We could take the lander and look all around; there
might be a whole Heechee city on the far side."
   "Fat  chance,"  Klara  sniffed,  almost inaudibly, thus clearing up the
question  of who had said it before. The boys weren't listening. All three
of  them were already on their way down into the lander, leaving Klara and
me in sole possession of the capsule.
   Klara disappeared into the toilet. I lit a cigarette, almost the last I
had, and blew smoke plumes through the expanding smoke plumes before them,
hanging motionless in the unmoving air. The capsule was tumbling slightly,
and  I  could  see  the  distant  brownish disk of the planet's moon slide
upward across the viewscreen, and a minute later the tiny, bright hydrogen
flame  of the lander heading toward it. I wondered what I would do if they
ran  out of fuel, or crashed, or suffered some s