ter shook his
head and retired to his own private, sliding the accordion-pleated barrier
into place to shut us out, and the rest of us gathered around the console.
Because it was tape we could get visual as well as sound, and in about ten
seconds  it  crackled  on and we could see poor, angry Trish Bover talking
into  the  camera  and  saying the last words anybody would ever hear from
her.
   Tragedy  can  only  be  tragic  just so long, and we'd heard it all for
three and a half years. Every once in a while we'd play the tape, and look
at  the  scenes  she  had  picked up with her handheld camera. And look at
them.  And  look  at them, freeze-frame and blowup, not because we thought
we'd  get  any  more  information  out  of them than Gateway Corporation's
people  already  had,  although  you never knew. Just because we wanted to
reassure  ourselves  it  was all worth it. The real tragedy was that Trish
didn't know what she had found.
   "This  is  Mission  Report  Oh-Seventy-Four  Dee  Nineteen," she began,
steadily  enough. Her sad, silly face was even trying to smile. "I seem to
be  in  trouble.  I  came  out  at a Heechee artifact kind of thing, and I
docked,  and  now  I can't get away. The lander rockets work. But the main
board  won't.  And I don't want to stay here till I starve." Starve! After
the  boffins  went over Trish's photos they identified what the "artifact"
was-the CHON-Food Factory they had been looking for.
   But  whether  it  was  worth  it  was still an open question, and Trish
surely  didn't  think  it  was worth it. What she thought was that she was
going  to die there, and for nothing, not even going to cash in her awards
for  the  mission. And then at the end, what she finally did, she tried to
make it back in the lander.
   She  got  into the lander and pointed it for the sun, and turned on the
motors,  and  took  a pill. Took a lot of pills; all she had. And then she
turned  the  freezer  up to max and got in and closed the door behind her.
"Defrost me when you find me," she said, "and remember my award."
   And maybe somebody would. When they found her. If they found her. Which
would  likely  be in about ten thousand years. By the time her faint radio
message  was  heard  by  anybody,  on  maybe  its five hundredth automatic
repetition, it was too late to matter to Trish; she never answered.
   Vera  finished  playing  the tape and quietly restowed it as the screen
went dark. "If Trish had been a real pilot instead of one of those Gateway
go-go  prospectors,  jump  in  and push the button and let the ship do its
thing,"  said Lurvy, not for the first time, "she would have known better.
She would have used what little delta-V she had in the lander to kill some
angular momentum instead of wasting it by pointing straight in."
   "Thank  you,  expert  rocket  pilot,"  I  said,  not for the first time
either. "So she could've counted on being inside the asteroids a whole lot
sooner, right? Maybe in as little as six or seven thousand years."
   Lurvy  shrugged.  "I'm  going  to bed," she said, taking a last squeeze
from the bottle. "You, Paul?"
   "Aw,  give me a break, will you?" Janine cut in. "I wanted Paul to help
me go over ignition procedures for the ionthrusters."
   Lurvy's guard went up at once. "You sure that's what you want him to go
over? Don't pout, Janine. You know you've gone over it plenty already, and
anyway it's Paul's job."
   "And what if Paul's out of action?" Janine demanded. "How do we know we
won't hit the crazy time just as we're doing it?"
   Well,  nobody  could  know  that,  and  as  a matter of fact I had been
forming  the  opinion  that we would. It came in cycles of about a hundred
and  thirty  days, give or take a dozen. We were pushing it close. I said,
"Actually, I'm a little tired, Janine. I promise we'll do it tomorrow." Or
whenever  one of the others was awake at the same time-the important thing
was  not  to  be  alone  with Janine. In a ship with the total cubage of a
motel  room,  you'd  be  surprised  how hard that is to arrange. Not hard.
Practically impossible.
   But  I  really wasn't tired, and when Lurvy was tucked alongside me and
out of it, her breathing too quiet to be called anything like a snore, but
diagnostic  of  sleep  all  the same, I stretched against the sheets, wide
awake, counting up our blessings. I needed to do that at least once a day.
When I could find any to count.
   This  time  I  found  a  good  one.  Four thousand A. U. plus is a long
trip-and  that's  as  the  crow  flies. Or, actually, as the photon fires,
because  of course there aren't a lot of crows in near-interstellar space.
Call  it  half  a  trillion kilometers, near enough. And we were spiraling
out,  which meant most of a revolution around the sun before we got there.
Our  track  wasn't  just  25  light-days,  it  was more like 60. And, even
power-on the whole way, we weren't coming up to anything like the speed of
light.  Three  and a half years... and all the way we were thinking, Jeez,
suppose  someone  figures  out  the  Heechee drive before we get there? It
wouldn't  have helped us a bit. It would've been a lot more than three and
a half years before they got around to doing all the things they wanted to
do  when  that  happened.  And  guess where on that list the job of coming
after us would have been?
   So  the  good  thing  I  found to dwell on was that at least we weren't
going to find the trip was for nothing, because we were almost there!
   All  that remained was to strap the big ion-thrusters onto it see if it
worked...  start  the slow return trip, shoving the thing back down toward
the Earth... and, somehow, survive till we got there. Call it, oh, another
four years; I went back to cherishing the fact that we were almost there.

   The  idea  of mining comets for food wasn't new, it went back to Krafft
Ehricke  in  the  1950s  anyway,  only  what  he suggested was that people
colonize  them.  It  made  sense.  Bring  along  a  little  iron and trace
elements-the  iron to build a place to live in, the trace elements to turn
CHON-chow into quiche lorraine or hamburgers-and you can live indefinitely
on  the  food around you. Because that's what comets are made of. A little
bit  of  dust,  a few rocks, and a hell of a lot of frozen gases. And what
are the gases? Oxygen. Nitrogen. Hydrogen. Carbon dioxide. Water. Methane.
Ammonia.  The  same  four  elements  over  and  over  again. CHON. Carbon,
hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and what does CHON spell?
   Wrong.  What  comets are made of is the same thing you are made of, and
what C-H-O-N spells is "food."
   The  Oort  cloud  was  made up of millions of megaton-sized servings of
chow. Back on Earth there were ten or twelve billion hungry people looking
toward it and licking their lips.
   There  was  still a lot of argument about what comets were doing there,
out  in  the  cloud. It was still arguable about whether they even came in
families.  Opik  a  hundred  years ago said more than half the comets ever
sighted  fit  into well-defined groups, so there, and so did his followers
ever  since.  Whipple  said bullshit, there's not a group you can identify
that has more than three comets in it. And so did his followers. Then Oort
came  along  to  try to make sense of it. His idea was that there was this
great shell of comets all the hell around the solar system, and every once
in  a  while  the sun would reach out and pluck one out, and it would come
loping  in  to  perihelion.  Then we would have Halley's comet, or the one
that  was supposed to have been the Star of Bethlehem, or whatever. Then a
bunch  of  the  guys  began  kicking  that around, asking why exactly that
should  happen.  It  turned  out  it couldn't-not if you assume Maxwellian
distribution   for   the  Oort  cloud.  In  fact,  if  you  assume  normal
distribution,  you  also have to assume that there isn't any Oort cloud in
the first place. You can't get the observed nearly parabolic orbits out of
an Oort cloud; so said R. A. Lyttleton. But then somebody else said, well,
who  says the distribution can't be non-Maxwellian? And so it proved. It's
all  lumpy.  There are clusters of comets, and great volumes of space with
almost none.
   And  while  no doubt the Heechee had set their machine to graze in rich
comet pastures, that had been a lot of hundreds of thousands of years ago,
and  it  was now in a kind of cometary desert. If it worked, it had little
left to work on. (Maybe it had eaten them all up?)
   I fell asleep wondering what CHON-food would taste like. It couldn't be
a lot worse than what we had been eating for three and a half years, which
was mainly recycled us.

   Day 1285. Janine almost got to me today. I was playing chess with Vera,
everybody  asleep,  happy  enough,  when  her  hands  came  around the big
earpieces and covered my eyes. "Cut it out, Janine," I said. When I turned
around she was pouting.
   "I just wanted to use Vera," she said.
   "For what? Another hot love letter to one of your movie stars?"
   "You  treat  me  like  a  child," she said. For a wonder, she was fully
dressed; her face shone, her hair was damp and pulled down straight to the
back  of  her  neck.  She  looked  like  your  model  serious-minded young
teen-ager.  "What I wanted," she said, "was to go over thruster alignments
with Vera. Since you won't help me."
   One  of  the reasons Janine was along with us was that she was smart-we
all  were; had to be to be accepted for the mission. And one of the things
she  was  smart  at was getting at me. "All right," I said, "you're right,
what  can  I  say?  Vera?  Recess  the  game  and  give us the program for
providing propulsion for the Food Factory."
   "Certainly," she said,"... Paul." And the board disappeared, and in its
place  she  built up a holo of the Food Factory. She had updated her specs
from  the  telescopic  views we had obtained, and so it was shown complete
with  its  dust cloud and the glob of dirty snowball adhering to one side.
"Cancel the cloud, Vera," I ordered, and the blur disappeared and the Food
Factory  showed  up like an engineering drawing. "Okay, Janine. What's the
first step?"
   "We dock," she said at once. "We hope the lander facsimile fits, and we
dock  it.  If  we  can't  dock we link up with braces to some point on the
surface; either way, our ship becomes a rigid part of the structure, so we
can use our thrust for attitude control."
   "Next?"
   "We  all  dismount  the  number-one  thruster  and  brace it to the aft
section  of the factory-there." She pointed out the place on the holo. "We
slave it to the board here, and as soon as it is installed we activate."
   "Guidance?"
   "Vera  will  give  us  coordinates-oops,  sorry,  Paul."  She  had been
drifting  out  of orientation with me and Vera, and she caught my shoulder
with  her  hand  to  pull  herself back. She kept her hand there. "Then we
repeat  the process with the other five. By the time we have all six going
we  have  a  delta-V  of two meters per second per second, running off the
239pu generator. Then we start spreading the mirror foils..."
   "No."
   "Oh,  sure,  we  inspect  all  the moorings to see that they're holding
under  thrust  first;  well,  I  take that for granted. Then we start with
solar power, and when we've got it all spread we should be up to maybe two
and a quarter meters..."
   "At  first,  Janine.  The  closer we get in, the more power we get. All
right.  Now  let's go through the hardware. You're bracing our ship to the
Heechee-metal hull; how do you go about it?"
   And  she  told me, and kept on telling me; and by gosh she knew it all.
The only thing was her hand on my shoulder became a hand under my arm, and
it  moved  across  my  chest,  and began to roam; and all the time she was
giving  me  the  specs  for coldwelding and how to get collimation for the
thrusters, her face serious and concerned, and her hand stroking my belly.
Fourteen  years  old.  But  she didn't look fourteen, or feel fourteen, or
smell  fourteen-she'd  been  into Lurvy's quarter of an ounce of remaining
Chanel. What saved me was Vera; good thing, everything considered, because
I  was  losing  interest in saving myself. The holo froze while Janine was
adding  an  extra  strut  to  one of the thrusters, and Vera said, "Action
message coming in. Shall I read it out for you... Paul?"
   "Go  ahead." Janine withdrew her hand slightly as the holo winked away,
and the screen produced the message:
<i>
          We've  been  requested  to  ask you for a favor. The next
       outbreak  of  the  130-day  syndrome  is  estimated to occur
       within  the next two months. HEW thinks that a full-coverage
       visual  of  all  of  you  describing  the  Food  Factory and
       emphasizing  how  well things are going and how important it
       is will significantly reduce tensions and consequent damage.
       Please  follow  the  accompanying script. Request compliance
       soonest  possible so that we may tape and schedule broadcast
       for maximum effect.
</i>
   "Shall I give you the script?" Vera asked.
   "Go ahead-hard copy," I added.
   "Very well... Paul." The screen turned pale and empty, and she began to
squirt  out  typed  sheets of paper. I picked them up to read while I sent
Janine  off to wake up her sister and father. She didn't object. She loved
doing television for the folks back home, it always meant fan letters from
famous people for the brave young astronette.
   The  script was what you would expect. I programmed Vera to roll it for
us line by line, and we could have read it in ten minutes. That was not to
be.  Janine insisted her sister had to do her hair, and even Lurvy decided
she  had to make up and Payter wanted his beard trimmed. By me. So, all in
all,  counting  four rehearsals, we blew six hours, not counting a month's
power,  on  the  TV  broadcast. We all gathered before the camera, looking
domestic and dedicated, and explained what we were going to be doing to an
audience  that  wouldn't  be seeing it for a month, by which time we would
already  be  there.  But if it would do them any good, it was worth it. We
had  been through eight or nine attacks of the 130-day fever since we took
off  from  Earth.  Each  time  it  had  its  own  syndrome,  satyriasis or
depression,  lethargy or light-hearted joy. I had been outside when one of
them  hit-that  was how the big telescope got broken-and it had been about
an  even  bet  whether I would ever make it back inside the ship. I simply
didn't  care.  I  was  hallucinating loneliness and anger, being chased by
apelike  creatures  and  wishing  I  were  dead.  And  back on Earth, with
billions  of people, nearly all of them affected to one degree or another,
in  one  or  another  way,  each time it hit it was pure bell. It had been
building  up  for  ten  years-eight  since  it  was  first identified as a
recurring scourge-and no one knew what caused it.
   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  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 bio-assay 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  25-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
failure."
   "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 1 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 12C 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 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 bio-assay. 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.
   What  could  such  things mean? When the docking was complete Wan poked
his head through the hatch and stared around, sniffing and listening.
   After  a  time he concluded that no one was near. He did not remove his
books  or  other  possessions  from the ship. He resolved to stay ready to
flee  at  a  moment's notice, but he decided to explore. Once before, long
ago,  some  other  person  had been at the outpost, and he believed it had
been  a female. Tiny Jim had helped him identify the garment then. Perhaps
he should ask Tiny Jim for advice now? Munching on a berryfruit, he handed
himself  easily  along  the  rails  toward  the  dreaming  room, where the
pleasure couch lay surrounded by the book machines.
   And stopped.
   Had that been a sound? A laugh or a cry, from far away?
   He  threw  the  berryfruit  away and stood for a moment, all his senses
tensely  extended.  The  sound was not repeated. But there was something-a
smell,  very  faint,  quite pleasant, quite strange. It was not unlike the
smell  in the garment he had found, and carried around for many days until
the last vestige of scent was gone from it and he put it back where it was
found.
   Had that person come back?
   Wan  began  to  shake. A person! It had been a dozen years since be had
smelled  or  touched a person! And then only his parents. But it might not
be  a  person,  it could be something else. He launched himself toward the
dock  where  that  other  person  had  been,  craftily  avoiding  the main
passages, hurling himself down narrower, less direct ways where he did not
think  any  stranger was likely to go. Wan knew every inch of the outpost,
at  least  as far within it as it was possible to travel without coming to
the  dead-end  locked  walls that he did not know how to open. It took him
only  a  few  minutes to reach the place where he had carefully rearranged
the debris left by the outpost's one visitor.
   Everything  was  there. But not, he saw, as he had left it. Some things
bad been picked up and dropped again.
   Wan  knew he had not done that. Apart from the discipline he had always
imposed  upon  himself, of leaving the outpost exactly as he had found it,
so  that  no  one  could  ever  know  he  was there, this time he had been
especially  careful  to  arrange the litter precisely as it had been left.
Someone else was on the outpost.
   and he was many minutes away from his ship.
   Cautiously  but  quickly  he  returned  to the docks on the other side,
pausing at every intersection to look and smell and listen. He reached his
ship and hovered at the hatch, indecisively. Run or explore?
   But the smell was stronger now, and irresistible.
   Step  by  step  he  ventured  down one of the long, dead-end corridors,
ready to retreat instantly.
   A  voice!  Whispering,  almost  inaudible.  But it was there. He peered
around a doorway, and his heart pounded. A person! Huddled against a wall,
with  a  metal  object  at  its lips, staring at him in terror. The person
cried out at him: "Don't you come any closer!" But he could not have if he
had  wanted to; he was frozen. It was not merely a person. It was a female
person! The diagnostic signs were clear, as Tiny Jim had explained them to
him:  two  swellings  at  the  chest,  a  swelling  around  the hips and a
narrowing  at  the  waist,  a  smooth  brow  with  no  bulges over the eye
sockets-yes,  female!  And  young.  And dressed in something that revealed
bare  legs  and, oh, bare arms; smooth hair tied behind the head in a long
tail, great eyes staring at him.
   Wan  responded  as  he  had  learned  to respond. He fell gently to his
knees,  opened  his  garment and touched his sex. It had been several days
since  he had masturbated, and with no such stimulus as this; he was erect
at once and shuddering with excitement.
   He  hardly  noticed  the  noises behind him as three other persons came
racing up. It was not until he was finished that he stood up, adjusted his
clothing  and  smiled  politely  to them where they were ranged around the
young  female, talking excitedly and almost hysterically among themselves.
"Hello,"  he  said. "I am Wan." When they did not respond, he repeated the
greeting  in  Spanish  and  Cantonese, and would have gone on to his other
languages except that the second female person stepped forward and said:
   "Hello,  Wan.  I'm  Dorema Herter-Hall-they call me 'Lurvy'. We're very
glad to see you."

   In  all  of  Wan's  fifteen  years there had never been twelve hours as
exciting,  as  frightening and as heart-stoppingly thrilling, as these. So
many  questions! So much to say and to hear. So shuddery-pleasant to touch
these  other  persons,  and to smell their smells and feel their presence.
They knew so incredibly little, and so astonishingly much-did not know how
to  get  food from the lockers, had not used the dreaming couch, had never
seen an Old One or talked with a Dead Man. And yet they knew of spaceships
and  cities,  of walking under an open sky ("sky"? it took a long time for
Wan  to  grasp  what they were talking about) and of Making Love. He could
see  that the younger female was willing to show him more of that, but the
older one did not wish her to; how strange. The older male did not seem to
make  love  with anyone; even stranger. But it was all strange, and he was
expiring  of  the  delights and terrors of so much strangeness. After they
had  talked  for  a long time, and he had shown them some of the tricks of
the  outpost,  and they had shown him some of the wonders of their ship (a
thing  like a Dead Man, but which had never been alive; pictures of people
on  Earth;  a  flush toilet) after all these wonders, the Lurvy person had
commanded  that  they all rest. He had at once started toward the dreaming
couch,  but she had invited him to stay near them and he could not say no,
though  all  through  the  sleep  he woke from time to time, trembling and
sniffing and staring around in the dim blue light.
   So  much  excitement was bad for him. When they were all awake again he
found himself still shaking, his body aching as though he had not slept at
all. no matter. The questions and the chatter began again at once:
   "And who are the Dead Men?"
   "I  don't know. Let us ask them? Perhaps-sometimes they call themselves
'prospectors'. From a place called 'Gateway'."
   "And this place they are in, is it a Heechee artifact?"
   "Heechee?"  He thought; he had heard the word, long ago, but he did not
know what it meant. "Do you mean the Old Ones?"
   "What  do  the  Old  Ones look like?" And he could not say in words, so
they  gave  him  a  sketch pad again and he tried to draw the big waggling
jaws, the frowsty beards, and as each sketch was finished they snatched it
up and held it before the machine they called "Vera".
   "This  machine  is  like a Dead Man," he offered, and they flew in with
questions again:
   "Do you mean the Dead Men are computers?"
   "What is a 'computer'?"
   And  then  the  questions  would  go the other way for a while, as they
explained  to  him  the meaning of "computer", and presidential elections,
and the 130-day fever. And all the while they were roaming the ship, as he
explained  to them what he knew of it. Wan was bec