of that
fantasy  something  that,  even in fantasy, she did not have. None of this
was  clear.  Nothing  was  clear.  The  agonies and the insanities came in
waves. Between them, for a second or two now and then, she caught glimpses
of  reality.  The  steely  blue  glow  from the walls. Lurvy, crouched and
whimpering beside her. Her father, vomiting in the passage. The chrome and
blue  cocoon,  with  Wan writhing and babbling inside the mesh. It was not
reason  or  will  that  made her claw at the lid and, on the hundredth, or
thousandth,  try  to get it open; but she did it, at last, and dragged him
whimpering and shaking out.
   The hallucinations stopped at once.
   Not  quite  as  quickly,  the pain, the nausea and the terror. But they
stopped.  They were all shuddering and reeling still, all but the boy, who
was  unconscious  and  breathing  in  a  way that terrified Janine, great,
hoarse,  snoring  gasps.  "Help,  Lurvy!"  she screamed. "He's dying!" Her
sister  was already beside her, thumb on the boy's pulse, shaking her head
to clear it as she peered dizzily at his eyes.
   "Dehydrated.  Fever.  Come  on," she cried, struggling with Wan's arms.
"Help  me  get  him  back  to  the  ship.  He needs saline, antibiotics, a
febrifuge, maybe some gamma globulin..."
   It  took  them nearly twenty minutes to tow Wan to the ship, and Janine
was in terror that he would die at every bounding, slow-motion step. Lurvy
raced  ahead  the last hundred meters, and by the time Paul and Janine had
struggled  him  through the airlock she had already unsealed the medic kit
and  was  shouting  orders.  "Put  him down. Make him swallow this. Take a
blood sample and check virus and antibody titers. Send a priority to base,
tell  them  we  need  medical  instructions-if he lives long enough to get
them!"
   Paul  helped  them  get Wan's clothes off and the boy wrapped in one of
the  Payter's  blankets.  Then  he sent the message. But he knew, they all
knew,  that  the  problem of whether Wan lived or died would not be solved
from  Earth.  Not  with a round-trip time of seven weeks before they could
get  an  answer. Payter was swearing over the bio-assay mobile unit. Lurvy
and Janine were working on the boy. Paul, without saying a word to anyone,
struggled  into  his  EVA  suit and exited into - space, where he spent an
exhausting hour and a half redirecting the transmitter dishes-the main one
to  the  bright  double star that was the planet Neptune and its moon, the
other  to  the  point  in  space  occupied  by  the Garfeld mission. Then,
clinging to the hull, he radio-commanded Vera to repeat the SOS to each of
them  at  max  power.  They  might be monitoring. They might not When Vera
signaled  that the messages were sent he reoriented the big dish to Earth.
It  took them three hours, first to last, and whether either of them would
receive  his  message  was  doubtful.  It was no less doubtful that either
would  have much help to offer. The Garfeld ship was smaller and less well
equipped  than  their  own,  and  the  people  at  the  Triton  base  were
short-timers. But if either did they could hope for a message of aid-or at
least sympathy, a lot faster than from Earth.

   In  an  hour  Wan's fever began to recede. In twelve the twitchings and
babblings diminished and he slept normally. But he was still very sick.
   Mother  and  playmate,  teacher  and  at-least-fantasy wife, now Janine
became Wan's nurse as well. After the first round of medication, she would
not  even  let  Lurvy give him his shots. She went without sleep to sponge
his brow. When he soiled himself in his coma she cleaned him fastidiously.
She  had  no concentration left for anything else. The amused or concerned
looks  and  words  from  her  family left her untouched, until she brushed
Wan's  unkempt  hair  off  his  face, and Paul made a patronizing comment.
Janine heard the jealousy in the tone and flared, "Paul, you're sickening!
Wan needs me to take care of him!"
   "And  you  do enjoy it, don't you?" he snapped. He was really angry. Of
course,  that  sparked more anger in Janine; but her father put in, gently
enough,  "Let  the girl be a girl, Paul. Were you not yourself once young?
Come, let us examine this Trdumeplatz again..."
   Janine surprised herself by letting the peacemaker succeed; it had been
a marvelous chance of a furious spat, but that was not where her interests
lay.  She took time for a tight, small grin about Paul's jealousy, because
that was a new service stripe to sew on her sleeve, and then back to Wan.
   As  he  mended  he  became  even more interesting. From time to time he
woke,  and spoke to her. When he was asleep she studied him. Face so dark,
body  olive;  but from waist to thigh he bad the palest skin, the color of
bread  dough, taut over his sharp bones. Scant body hair. None on his face
except  a  soft,  almost  invisible  strand  or  two-more  lip-lashes than
mustache.
   Janine knew that Lurvy and her father made a joke of her, and that Paul
was  actually  jealous of the attentions he had avoided so long. It made a
nice  change. She had status. For the first time in her life, what she was
doing  was  the most significant activity of the group. The others came to
her  to  sue  for  permission to question Wan, and when she thought he was
tiring they accepted her command to stop.
   Besides,  Wan  fascinated  her. She mapped him against all her previous
experience  of  Men,  to his advantage. Even against her pen-pals, Wan was
better  looking  than  the  ice-skater, smarter than the actors, almost as
tall as the basketball player. And against all of them, especially against
the  only  two males she had been within tens of millions of kilometers of
in  years, Wan was so marvelously young. And Paul and her father, not. The
backs  of  old  Peter's  hands  bore irregular blotches of caramel-colored
pigment, which was gross. But at least the old man kept himself neat. Even
dainty, in the continental way-even clipped the hairs that grew inside his
ears with tiny silver scissors, because Janine had caught him at it. While
Paul-In one of her skirmishes with Lurvy, Janine had snarled, "That's what
you go to bed With? An ape with hairy ears? I'd puke."
   So  she  fed Wan, and read to him, and drowsed over him while he slept.
She  shampooed his hair, and trimmed it to a soup-bowl mop, allowing Lurvy
to  help her get it even, and blow-dried it smooth. She washed his clothes
and,  spurning  Lurvy  for  this,  patched  them and even cut down some of
Paul's  to  fit him. He accepted it all, every bit, and enjoyed it as much
as she.

   As  he grew stronger, he no longer needed her as much, and she was less
able  to  protect  him  from  the  questions  of the others. But they were
protective,  too.  Even  old  Peter. The computer, Vera, burrowed into its
medical  programs and prepared a long list of tests to be performed on the
boy.  "Assassin!" raged Peter. "Has it no understanding of a young man who
has  been  so  close  to  death  that  it wishes to finish it?" It was not
entirely  consideration.  Peter  had questions of his own, and he had been
asking  them  when  Janine  would allow it, sulking and fidgeting when she
would  not.  "That bed of yours, Wan, tell me again what you feel when you
are  in  it?  As  though you are somehow a part of millions of people? And
also  they  of  you,  isn't  that  so?"  But  when  Janine  accused him of
interfering  with  Wan's  recovery, the old man desisted. Though never for
long.
   Then  Wan  was  well  enough for Janine to allow herself a full night's
sleep  in  her  own  private,  and  when she woke her sister was at Vera's
console.  Wan  was holding to the back of her chair, grinning and frowning
at  the  unfamiliar  machine, and Lurvy was reading off to him his medical
report.  "Your  vital  signs  are  normal, your weight is picking up, your
antibody  levels  are  in  the normal range-I think you're going to be all
right now, Wan."
   "So  now,"  cried  her  father,  "at  last  we  can  talk?  About  this
faster-than-light  radio,  the  machines,  the  place  he  comes from, the
dreaming room?" Janine hurled herself into the group.
   "Leave him alone!" she snarled. But Wan shook his head.
   "Let  them  ask what they like, Janine," he said in his shrill, breathy
voice.
   "Now?"
   "Yes,  now!" stormed her father. "Now, this minute! Paul, come you here
and tell this boy what we must know."
   They  had planned this, Janine realized, the three of them; but Wan did
not  object,  and  she  could not pretend he was unfit for questioning any
longer. She marched over and sat beside him. If she could not prevent this
interrogation, at least she would be there to protect him. She gave formal
permission,  coldly:  "Go ahead, Paul. Say what you want to say, but don't
tire him out."
   Paul looked at her ironically, but spoke to Wan. "For more than a dozen
years," he said, "every hundred and thirty days or so, the whole Earth has
gone crazy. It looks like it's your fault,

   The  boy  frowned, but said nothing. His public defender spoke for him.
"Why are you picking on him?" she demanded.
   "No one is 'picking', Janine. But what we experienced was the fever. It
can't  be a coincidence. When Wan gets into that contraption he broadcasts
to the world." Paul shook his head. "Dear lad, do you have any idea of how
much  trouble you've caused? Ever since you began coming here, your dreams
have  been  shared  by  millions  of  people. Billions! Sometimes you were
peaceful, and your dreams were peaceful, and that wasn't so bad. Sometimes
you  weren't.  I  don't  want  you  to  blame  yourself," he added kindly,
forestalling Janine, "but thousands and thousands of people have died. And
the property damage-Wan, you just can't imagine."
   Wan  shrilled  defensively, "I have never harmed anyone!" he was unable
to take in just what he was accused of, but there was no doubt in his mind
that Paul was accusing. Lurvy put her hand on his arm.
   "I  wish  it  were  so,  Wan,"  she  said. "The important thing is, you
mustn't do that again."
   "No more dreaming in the couch?"
   "No,  Wan."  He looked to Janine for guidance, then shrugged. "But that
is  not  all,"  Paul  put in. "You have to help us. Tell us everything you
know.  About  the  couch.  About the Dead Men. About the faster-than-light
radio, the food..."
   "Why should I?" Wan demanded.
   Patiently,  Paul  coaxed:  "Because in that way you can make up for the
fever.  I  don't  think  you  understand  how  important you are, Wan. The
knowledge  in your head might mean saving people from starvation. Millions
of lives, Wan."
   Wan  frowned  over  that  concept  for  a  moment,  but  "millions" was
meaningless  to him as applying to human beings-he had not yet adjusted to
"five". "You make me angry," he scolded.
   "I don't mean to, Wan."
   "It  is  not what you mean to, it is what you do. You have just told me
that," the boy grumbled spitefully. "All right. What do you want?"
   "We  want you to tell us everything you know," Paul said promptly. "Oh,
not  all  at once. But as you remember. And we want you to go through this
whole Food Factory with us and explain everything in it-as far as you can,
I mean."
   "This place? There is nothing here but the dreaming room, and you won't
let me use that!"
   "It is all new to us, Wan."
   "It  is  nothing! The water does not run, there is no library, the Dead
Men  are  hard  to  talk to, nothing grows! At home I have everything, and
much of it is working, so you can see for yourself."
   "You make it sound like heaven, Wan."
   "See for yourself! If I can't dream, there is no reason to stay here!"
   Paul looked at the others, perplexed. "Could we do that?"
   "Of  course!  My  ship  will  take  us  there-not  all of you, no," Wan
corrected  himself.  "But some. We can leave the old man here. There is no
woman  for  him,  anyway,  so there is no pairing to destroy. Or even," he
added  cunningly,  "only Janine and I can go. Then there will be more room
in the ship. We can bring you back machines, books, treasures..."
   "Forget that, Wan," Janine said wisely. "They'll never let us do that."
   "Not  so  fast,  my  girl,"  her  father  said. "That is not for you to
decide. What the boy is saying is interesting. If he can open the gates of
heaven for us, who are we to stand outside in the cold?"
   Janine  studied  her  father,  but his expression was bland. "You don't
mean you'd let Wan and me go there alone?"
   "That," he said, "is not the question. The question is, how can we most
rapidly complete this God-bedamned mission and return to our reward. There
is no other."
   "Well,"  said Lurvy after a moment, "we don't have to decide that right
now. Heaven will wait for us, for all our lives."
   Her father said, "That is true, yes. But, expressed concretely, some of
us have less lives to wait than others."

   Every day new messages came in from Earth. Infuriatingly, these related
only  to  a  remote  past,  before Wan, irrelevant to everything they were
doing  or  planning  now:  Submit  chemical  analyses of this. X-ray that.
Measure  these  other  things.  By  now  the  slow packets of photons that
transmitted  the  word  of  their reaching the Food Factory had arrived at
Downlink-Vera on Earth, and perhaps replies were already on their way. But
they would not arrive for weeks. The base at Triton had a smarter computer
than Vera, and Paul and Lurvy argued for transmitting all their data there
for  interpretation  and  advice.  Old  Peter rejected the idea with fury.
"Those  wanderers,  gypsies? Why should we give them what costs us so much
to get!"
   "But  nobody's  questioning  us, Pa," Lurvy coaxed. "It's all ours. The
contracts spell it all out."
   "No!"
   So  they  fed  all  that  Wan told them into Shipboard-Vera, and Vera's
small,  slow  intelligence  painfully  sorted the bits into patterns. Even
into  graphics.  The external appearance of the place Wan had come from-it
was  probably  not  a very good likeness, because it was apparent that Wan
had  not  had  the  curiosity to study it very closely. The corridors. The
machines. The Heechee themselves; and each time Wan offered corrections:
   "Ah,  no.  They both have beards, males and females. Even when they are
quite  young.  And the breasts on the females are:" He held his hands just
below  his rib cage, to show how low they swung. "And you do not give them
the right smell."
   "Holos don't smell at all, Wan," said Paul.
   "Yes, exactly! But they do, you see. In rut, they smell very much."
   And  Vera mumbled and whined over the new data, and shakily drew in the
new  revisions.  After  hours of this, what had been a game for Wan turned
into  drudgery. When he began saying, "Yes, it is perfect, that is exactly
how  the  Dead  Men's  room looks," they all understood that he was merely
agreeing  with  anything that would stop the boredom for a while, and gave
him a rest. Then Janine would take him for a wander through the corridors,
sound  and  vision  pickups  strapped  to  her  shoulder,  in case he said
something  of  value  or  pointed  out a treasure, and they spoke of other
things.  His  knowledge  was  as  astonishing  as his ignorance. Both were
unpredictable.
   It  was  not  only Wan that needed study. Every hour Lurvy or old Peter
would  come  up  with  a  new idea for diverting the Food Factory from its
programmed  drive,  so  that  they  could try to accomplish their original
purpose.  None  worked.  Every  day more messages came in from Earth. They
were still not relevant. They were not even very interesting; Janine let a
score of letters from her pen-pals stay in Vera's memory without bothering
to  retrieve  them, since the messages she was getting from Wan filled her
needs.  Sometimes the communications were odd. For Lurvy, the announcement
that  her  college  had  named her its Woman of the Year. For old Peter, a
formal  petition  from  the city he had been born in. He read it and burst
into  laughter.  "Dortmund  still wishes me to run for Burgermeister! What
nonsense!"
   "Why,  that's  really  nice,"  Lurvy  said  agreeably.  "It's  quite  a
compliment."
   "It  is quite nothing," he corrected her severely. "Burgermeister! With
what  we  have  I  could  be elected president of the Federal Republic, or
even..."  He  fell silent, and then said gloomily, "If, to be sure, I ever
see  the Federal Republic again." He paused, looking over their heads. His
lips worked silently for a moment, and then he said: "Perhaps we should go
back now."
   "Aw, Pop," Janine began. And stopped, because the old man turned on her
the look of an alpha wolf on a cub. There was a sudden tension among them,
until Paul cleared his throat and said:
   "Well,  that's certainly one of our options. Of course, there's a legal
question of contract..."
   Peter  shook  his  head.  "I  have thought of that. They owe us so much
already! Simply for stopping the fever, if they pay us only one percent of
the  damage we save it is millions. Billions. And if they won't pay..." He
hesitated,  and  then said, "No, there is no question that they won't pay.
We  simply must speak to them. Report that we have stopped the fever, that
we  cannot  move  the Food Factory, that we are coming home. By the time a
return message can arrive we will be weeks on our way."
   "And what about Wan?" Janine demanded.
   "He will come with us, to he sure. He will be among his own kind again,
and that is surely what is best for him."
   "Don't  you think we ought to let Wan decide that? And what happened to
sending a bunch of us to investigate his heaven?"
   "That  was a dream," her father said coldly. "Reality is that we cannot
do  everything.  Let  someone else explore his heaven, there is plenty for
all; and we will be back in our homes, enjoying riches and fame. It is not
just  a  matter  of  the contract," he went on, almost pleadingly. "We are
saviors! There will be lecture tours and endorsements for the advertising!
We will be persons of great power!"
   "No,  Pop,"  Janine  said, "listen to me. You've all been talking about
our  duty  to  help  the  world-feed people, bring them new things to make
their lives better. Well, aren't we going to do our duty?"
   He  turned on her furiously. "Little minx, what do you know about duty?
Without me you would be in some gutter in Chicago, waiting for the welfare
check! We must think of ourselves as well!"
   She  would have replied, but Wan's wide-eyed, frightened stare made her
stop.  "I hate this!" she announced. "Wan and I are going to go for a walk
to get away from the lot of you!"
   "He  is  not  really a bad person," she told Wan, once they were beyond
the  sound of the others. Quarreling voices had followed them and Wan, who
had little experience of disagreements, was obviously upset.
   Wan  did  not reply directly. He pointed to a bulge in the glowing blue
wall.  "This  is a place for water," he said, "but it is a dead one. There
are dozens of them, but almost all dead."
   Out  of duty, Janine inspected it, pointing her shoulder-held camera at
it  as she slid the rounded cover back and forth. There was a protuberance
like  a  nose at the top of it, and what must be a drain at the bottom; it
was  almost  large enough to get into, but bone dry. "You said one of them
still works, but the water isn't drinkable?"
   "Yes, Janine. Would you like me to show it to you?"
   "Well, I guess so." She added, "Really, don't let them get to you. They
just get excited."
   "Yes, Janine." But he was not in a talkative mood.
   She  said,  "When  I was little he used to tell me stories. Mostly they
were  scary,  but  sometimes not. He told me about Schwarze Peter, who, as
far  as I can figure out, was something like Santa Claus. He said if I was
a  good little girl Schwarze Peter would bring me a doll at Christmas, but
if  I wasn't he'd bring me a lump of coal. Or worse. That's what I used to
call  him,  Schwarze  Peter.  But he never gave me a lump of coal." He was
listening intently as they moved down the glowing corridor, but he did not
respond.  "Then my mother died," she said, "and Paul and Lurvy got married
and  I  went to live with them for a while. But Pop wasn't so bad, really.
He  came  to  see  me as often as he could-I guess. Wan! Do you understand
what I'm saying to you?"
   "No," he said. "What's Santa Claus?"
   "Oh, Wan!"
   So  she  explained  Santa  Claus to him, and Christmas, and then had to
explain  winter  and snow and gift-giving. His face smoothed, and he began
to  smile;  and  curiously,  as  Wan's  mood improved Janine's grew worse.
Trying to make Wan understand the world she lived in made her confront the
world  ahead.  Almost,  she  thought,  it would be better to do what Peter
proposed,  pack  it  all  in,  go  back  to  their  real  lives.  All  the
alternatives were frightening. Where they were was frightening, if she let
herself  feel it-in some kind of an artifact that was doggedly plowing its
way  through  space  to some unknown destination. What if it arrived? What
would  they  confront? Or if they went back with Wan, what would be there?
Heechee? Heechee! There was fear! Janine had lived all her young life with
the  Heechee  just outside it-terrifying if real, less real than mythical.
Like  Schwarze  Peter  or Santa Claus. Like God. All myths and deities are
tolerable enough to believe in; but what if they become real?
   She  knew  that her family were as fearful as she, though she could not
tell  that from anything they said-they were setting an example of courage
to  her.  She  could only guess. She guessed that Paul and her sister were
afraid  but  had  made  up their minds to gamble against that fear for the
sake  of  what  might  come  of  it.  Her  own  fear was of a very special
kind-less  fear  of  what  might happen than of how badly she might behave
while  it  was  happening  to  her.  What  her  father felt was obvious to
everyone.  He  was  angry  and afraid, and what he was afraid of was dying
before he cashed in on his courage.
   And  what  did  Wan  feel?  He seemed so uncomplicated as he showed her
about  his  domain,  like one child guiding another through his toy chest.
Janine  knew better. If she had learned anything in her fourteen years, it
was that nobody was uncomplicated. Wan's complications were merely not the
same  as  her own, as she saw at once when he showed her the water fixture
that  worked.  He had not been able to drink the water, but he had used it
for  a  toilet.  Janine, brought up in the great conspiracy of the Western
world  to pretend that excretion does not happen, would never have brought
Wan   to  see  this  place  of  stains  and  smells,  but  he  was  wholly
unembarrassed.  She  could  not  even  make  him embarrassed. "I had to go
somewhere,"  he  said  sullenly, when she reproached him for not using the
ship's sanitary like everybody else.
   "Yes,  but  if  you did it the right way Vera would have known you were
sick, don't you see? She's always analyzing our, uh, the bathroom stuff."
   "There ought to be some other way."
   "Well,  there  is." There was the mobile bioassay unit, which took tiny
samples  from  each  of  them-which had, in fact, been put to work on Wan,
once  the necessity was perceived. But Vera was not a very smart computer,
and had not thought to program her mobile unit to sample Wan until told to
do so, a little late. "What's the matter?"
   He was acting uncomfortable. "When the Dead Men give me a medical check
they stick things in me. I don't like that."
   "It's for your own good, Wan," she said severely. "Hey! That's an idea.
Let's go talk to the Dead Men."
   And  there  was Janine's own complicatedness. She didn't really want to
talk  to  the  Dead Men. She just wanted to get away from the embarrassing
place  they  were in; but by the time they had propelled themselves to the
place  where  the  Dead  Men  were,  which  was also the place where Wan's
dreaming  couch was, Janine had decided to want something else. "Wan," she
said, "I want to try the couch."
   He  tilted his head back and narrowed his eyes, appraising her over his
long nose. "Lurvy told me not to do that any more," he stated.
   "I know she did. How do I get in?"
   "First  you  tell  me I must do what you all say," he complained, "then
you all tell me to do different things. It is very confusing."
   She  had  already stepped into the cocoon and stretched out. "Do I just
pull the top down over me?"
   "Oh,"  he  said,  shrugging, "if you've made up your mind-yes. It snaps
shut,  there,  where  your hand is, but when you want to come out you just
push."
   She  reached  for the webby top and pulled it toward her, looking up at
his petulant, concerned face. "Does it-hurt?"
   "Hurt? No! What an idea!"
   "Well, what does it feel like?"
   "Janine,"  he  said  severely,  "you  are very childish. Why do you ask
questions  when  you  can  see  for  yourself?"  And he pushed down on the
shimmery  wire  covering,  and  the catch midway down the side rustled and
locked.  "It  is  best if you go to sleep," he called down to her, through
the shining blue network of wire.
   "But  I'm  not  sleepy,"  she objected reasonably. "I'm not anything. I
don't feel a thing..."
   And then she did.
   It  was  not  what  she  had  expected out of her own experience of the
fever;  there  was  no obsessive interference with her own personality, no
point  source  of feelings. There was only a warm and saturating glow. She
was  surrounded.  She  was an atom in a soup of sensation. The other atoms
had  no  shape or individuality. They were not tangible or hard-edged. She
could  still  see Wan, peering worriedly down at her through the wire when
she  opened her eyes, and these other-souls? were not at all as real or as
immediate.  But  she  could  feel  them,  as  she  had  never felt another
presence.  Around  her.  Beside her. Within her. They were warm. They were
comforting.
   When  Wan  at  last wrenched open the metal wire and pulled at her arm,
she  lay  there  staring at him. She did not have the strength to rise, or
the  desire. He had to help her up, and she leaned on his shoulder as they
started back.
   They were less than halfway back to the Herter-Hall ship when the other
members  of  the  family  interrupted them, and they were furious. "Stupid
little  brat!"  Paul raged. "You ever do anything like that again and I'll
paddle your pink little ass for you!"
   "She  won't!"  her  father said grimly. "I will see to that, right now;
and as to you, little miss, I will see to you later."

   They  had all become so quarrelsome! no one paddled Janine's bottom for
trying  out  the  dreaming  couch.  no  one  punished her at all. They all
punished  each other, instead, and did it all the time. The truce that had
held  for  three  and  a  half years, because each of them enforced it for
himself,  the alternative being mutual murder, dissolved. Paul and the old
man  did  not  speak  for two days, because Peter had dismantled the couch
without  consultation. Lurvy and her father spat and shouted at each other
because  she  had  programmed too much salt in their meal, and then again,
when  it  was  his  turn,  because he had programmed too little. And as to
Lurvy  and  Paul-they  no  longer  slept together; they hardly spoke; they
would  surely  not  have stayed married, if there had been a divorce court
within 5,000 A. U.
   But if there had been a source of authority of any kind within 5,000 A.
U.,  at  least  the  disputes could have been resolved. Someone could have
made their decisions. Should they return? Should they try to overpower the
Food  Factory's  guidance?  Should  they  go with Wan to explore the other
place-and  if  so,  who should go and who should remain behind? They could
not  agree  on  grand plans. They could not even agree on the decisions of
every  hour, to take a machine apart and risk its destruction, or to leave
it  alone  and  give  up  the  hope of some wonderful discovery that could
change everything. They could not agree on who should talk to the Dead Men
by  radio,  or what to ask them. Wan showed them, willingly enough, how to
try  to  tempt  the  Dead Men into conversation, and they put Vera's sound
system  in  linkage  with the "radio". But Vera could not handle much give
and  take;  and when the Dead Men did not understand her questions, or did
not  want to participate, or were simply too insane to be of any use, Vera
was beaten.
   All  this  was  awful for Janine, but worst of all was Wan himself. The
squabbling  made  him  confused  and  indignant.  He stopped following her
around. And after one sleep, when she sat up and looked around for him, he
was gone.
   Fortunately  for  Janine's  pride, everyone else was gone, too-Paul and
Lurvy  outside  the  ship  to reorient the antennae; her father asleep, so
that  she  had  time  to  deal  with  her  jealousy. Let him be a pig! she
thought.  It  was  stupid of him not to realize that she had many friends,
while  he  had  only her; but he would find out! She was busy writing long
letters to her neglected correspondents when she heard Paul and her sister
returning;  and  when she told them that Wan had been gone for at least an
hour she was unprepared for their reaction. "Pa!" Lurvy cried, rattling at
the curtain of her father's private. "Wake up! Wan's gone!"
   As  the  old  man  came  blinking  out, Janine said disagreeably, "Now,
what's the matter with all of you?"
   "You  don't understand, do you?" Paul asked coldly. "What if he's taken
the ship?"
   It was a possibility that had never occurred to Janine, and it was like
a blow in the face. "He wouldn't!"
   "Would  he  not?" snarled her father. "And how do you know that, little
minx?  And  if  he does, what of us?" He finished zipping his coverall and
stood up, glowering at them. "I have told you all," he said-but looking at
Lurvy  and  Paul,  so  that  Janine understood she was not a part of their
"all"-"I have told you that we must find a definite solution. If we are to
go  with  him  in his ship, we must do it. If not, we cannot take the risk
that  he  will  take  it  into  his foolish little mind to go back without
warning. That is assuredly certain."
   "And  how  do we do that?" Lurvy demanded. "You're preposterous, Pa. We
can't guard the ship day and night."
   "And your sister cannot guard the boy, yes," the old man nodded. "So we
must either immobilize the ship, or immobilize the boy."
   Janine  flew  at him. "You monsters!" she choked. "You've been planning
this all out when we weren't around!" Her sister caught and held her.
   "Calm  down,  Janine,"  she ordered. "Yes, it's true we've talked about
it-we had to! But nothing's settled, certainly not that we will hurt Wan."
   "Then settle it!" Janine flared. "I vote we go with Wan!"
   "If he hasn't gone already, by himself," Paul put in.
   "He hasn't!"
   Lurvy said practically, "If he has, it's too late for us to do anything
about it. Outside of that, I'm with Janine. We go! What do you say, Paul?"
   He hesitated. "I-guess so," he conceded. "Peter?"
   The  old  man said with dignity, "If you are all agreed, then what does
it  matter  how  I vote? There is only the question remaining who is to go
and who is to stay. I propose..."
   Lurvy  stopped  him. "Pa," she said, "I know what you are going to say,
but  it  won't work. We need to leave at least one person here, to keep in
contact  with  Earth.  Janine's too young. It can't be me, because I'm the
best  pilot  and  this  is  a  chance  to learn something about piloting a
Heechee ship. I don't want to go without Paul, and that leaves you."

   They  took  Vera  apart,  component by component, and redistributed her
around  the  Food Factory. Fast memory, inputs, and displays went into the
dreaming  chamber, slow memory lining the passageway outside, transmission
still in their old ship. Peter helped, silent and taciturn; the meaning of
what  they  were  doing  was that further communications of interest would
come from the exploring party, via the radio system of the Dead Men. Peter
was helping to write himself off, and knew it. There was plenty of food in
the  ship,  Wan  told  them;  but  Paul  would  not  be satisfied with the
automatic  replenishment of God knew what product of the Food Factory, and
he  made  them  carry  aboard  rations of their own, as much as they could
stow.  Whereupon  Wan  insisted that they stock up with water, and so they
depleted  the  recycling  stocks  in the ship to fill his plastic bags and
loaded  them,  too.  Wan's ship had no beds, None were needed, Wan pointed
out,  because  the acceleration cocoons were enough to protect them during
maneuvers,  and  to keep them from floating around while they slept in the
rest  of  the  voyage-suggestion  vetoed  by  both  Lurvy  and  Paul,  who
dismantled the sleeping pouches from their private and reinstalled them in
the  ship. Personal possessions: Janine wanted her secret stash of perfume
and books, Lurvy her personal locked bag, Paul his cards for solitaire. It
was  long  and  hard  work,  though  they discovered they could ease it by
sailing  the  plastic waterbags and the softer, solider other stores along
the  corridors  in  a  game of slow-motion catch; but at last it was done.
Peter sat sourly propped against a corridor wall, watching the others mill
about,  and tried to think of what had been forgotten. To Janine it seemed
as  though they were already treating him as though he were absent, if not
dead, and she said, "Pop? Don't take it so hard. We'll all be back as soon
as we can."
   He nodded. "Which comes to," he said, "let me see, forty-nine days each
way, plus as long as you decide to stay in this place." But then he pushed
himself  up,  and allowed Lurvy and Janine to kiss him. Almost cheerfully,
he said, "Bon voyage. Are you sure you have forgotten nothing?"
   Lurvy  looked  around,  considering.  "I  think not-unless you think we
should tell your friends we are coming, Wan?"
   "The  Dead  Men?"  he shrilled, grinning. "They will not know. They are
not alive, you know, they have no sense of time."
   "Then why do you like them so much?" Janine demanded.
   Wan  caught  the  note  of  jealousy  and  scowled at her. "They are my
friends,"  he said. "They cannot be taken seriously all the time, and they
often lie. But they do not ever make me feel afraid of them."
   Lurvy  caught her breath. "Oh, Wan," she said, touching him. "I know we
haven't  been  as  nice  as we might. We've all been under a great strain.
We're really better people than we must seem to you."
   Old Peter had had enough. "Go you now," he snarled. "Prove this to him,
do not stand talking forever. And then come back and prove it to me!"


        6 After the Fever

   Less  than  two hours-the fever had never been so short before. Nor had
it  ever  been  as  intense.  The  most  susceptible  one  percent  of the
population  had  simply been out of it for four hours, and nearly everyone
had been severely affected.
   I  was  one of the lucky ones, because after the fever I was only stuck
in my room, with nothing more than a bump on the head from falling over. I
wasn't  trapped  in a wrecked bus, crashed out of a jet-liner, struck by a
runaway car, or bleeding to death on an operating table while surgeons and
nurses  writhed helplessly on the floor. All I had was one hour, fifty-one
minutes  and  forty-four  seconds  of  delirious  misery, and that diluted
because it was shared with eleven billion other people.
   Of  course,  everybody in all those eleven billion was trying to get in
touch  with everybody else, all at once, and so communications were jammed
for  fair.  Harriet  formed  herself  in the tank to tell me that at least
twenty-five  calls  were  coming  in  for  me-my science program, my legal
program,  three or four accountancy programs from my holdings, and quite a
few  real,  live  people.  None of them, she told me apologetically when I
asked,  was Essie; the circuits to Tucson were out entirely at the moment,
and  I  couldn't place a call from my end either. None of the machines had
been  affected  by  the  madness. They never were. The only time something
went  wrong  with them was when some live person had injected himself into
the  circuit,  for maintenance or redesign. But, as statistically that was
happening  a  million  times  a  minute, somewhere in the world, with some
machine  or  another, it was not surprising that some things took a little
while to get going again.
   First  order  of  business was business; I had to pick up the pieces. I
gave  Harriet a hierarchy of priorities, and she began feeding me reports.
Quick  bulletin  from  the food mines: no significant damage. Real estate:
some  minor incidents of fire and flooding, nothing that mattered. Someone
had  left  a  barrier  open  in the fish factories and six hundred million
fingerlings  swam out to lose themselves in the open sea; but I was only a
minority  stockholder  in them anyway. Taken all in all, I had come out of
the  fever smelling of roses, I thought, or anyway a lot better than a lot
of  others. The fever had struck the Indian subcontinent after midnight of
a  day that already had seen one of the worst hurricanes the Bay of Bengal
had  produced  in  fifty years. The death toll was immense. Rescue efforts
had  simply  stopped for two hours. Tens, maybe even hundreds, of millions
of  people  had  been simply unable to drag themselves to high ground, and
southern Bangladesh was a swamp of corpses. Add in a refinery explosion in
California,  a  train  wreck  in  Wales,  and  a  few  as yet uncatalogued
disasters-the  computers  did  not yet have an estimate of deaths, but the
news reports were calling it the worst ever.
   By  the time I had taken all the urgent-urgent calls the elevators were
running  again.  I  wasn't  a  captive any more. Looking out the window, I
could see the Washington streets were normal enough. My trip to Tucson, on
the other hand, was well bollixed. Since half the jets in the air had been
on automatic pilot for two hours, seriously depleting their fuel, they had
been landing where they could, and the lines had equipment in all sorts of
wrong places. The schedules were scrambled. Harriet booked me the best she
could,  but  the first space she could confirm was not until noon the next
day.  I  couldn't even call Essie, because the circuits were still jammed.
That  was  only  an  annoyance,  not  a problem. If I really wanted to get
through,  there  were priorities at my disposal-the rich have their perks.
But  the  rich have their pleasures, too, and I decided it would be fun to
surprise Essie by dropping in on her.
   And meanwhile I had time to spare.
   And  all  this time my science program had been bursting with things to
tell  me.  That  was the dessert after the spinach and liver. I had put it
off  until  I  had  a  chance  for  a good, long natter; and that time had
arrived, "Harriet," I said, "put him on." And Albert Einstein took form in
the tank, leaning forward and twitching with excitement. "What is it, Al,"
I asked, "something good?"
   "Sure thing, Robin! We've found out where the fever comes from-it's the
Food Factory!"

   It  was  my own fault. If I had let Albert tell me what was on his mind
at  once, I wouldn't have been just about the last person on Earth to find
out  that  I owned the place all the trouble came from. That was the first
thing  that  hit  me,  and  I  was  thinking  about possible liability and
sniffing for advantages all the time he was explaining the evidence to me.
First  and conclusive, of course, was the on-the-spot pickup from the Food
Factory  itself.  But we should have known all along. "If I had only timed
the  Onsets carefully," Albert berated himself, "we could have located the
source  years  ago.  And there were plenty of other clues, consistent with
their photonic nature."
   "Their what nature?"
   "They are electromagnetic, Robin," he explained. He tamped tobacco into
his  pipe  and  reached for a match. "You realize, of course, that this is
established  by  transmission  time-we received whatever signal caused the
madness at the same time as the transmission showing it happening."
   "Wait  a minute. If the Heechee have faster-than-light radio, why isn't
this the same?"
   "Ah,  Robin!  If we only knew that!" he twinkled, lighting his pipe. "I
can  only  conjecture..."  puff, puff, "that this particular effect is not
compatible with their other mode of transmission, but the reasons for that
I  cannot  even  speculate  on  at this time. And, of course," he went on,
"there are certain questions raised at once to which we do not as yet have
any answers."
   "Of  course