h the Dead
Men.  She  assigned  Janine,  with her own help and Wan's, to housekeeping
tasks  like washing their clothes in the tepid tub. She assigned Wan, with
anyone  who  could  be  spared,  to roam the safe parts of Heechee Heaven,
photographing  and recording for transmission to Payter and Earth. Usually
Wan's  compaanion  was  Janine. When someone else could be spared, the two
young people were chaperoned, but that was seldom.
   Janine  did  not seem to mind either way. She had not finished with the
preliminary thrill of Wan's companionship and was in no hurry to move to a
further  stage-except when they touched. Or when she caught him staring at
her.  Or when she saw the knotted bulge in his ragged kilt. Even then, her
fantasies  and  reveries  were almost as good as that next stage, at least
for  now.  She  played  with  the  Dead  Men,  and  munched on berryfruit,
brown-skinned and green-fleshed, and did her chores, and waited to grow up
a little more.
   There  were  not  many  objections to Lurvy's rule, since she had taken
care  to  assign  tasks that the draftees were willing to do anyhow, which
left  for  herself  such drudgery as going through the backed-up cormuands
and persuasions from Payter, and faroff Earth.
   The  communication  was  a  long  way  from satisfactory. Lurvy had not
appreciated  Shipboard-Vera  until  she  had to get along without her. She
could  not command priority messages first, or have the computer sort them
out  by  theme.  There was no computer she could use, except the overtaxed
one  in her own head. The messages came in higgledy-piggledy, and when she
replied,  or  transmitted  reports for downlink relay to Earth, she had no
confidence at all that they were getting where they were supposed to go.
   The Dead Men seemed to be basically read-only memories, interactive but
limited.  And  their  circuits had been further scrambled in the makeshift
attempt  to  use  them  for  communication to the Food Factory, a task for
which  they  had  never  been  designed.  (But  what  had they really been
designed  for?  And  by  whom?)  Wan blustered and bluffed, in his pose as
expert,  and  then  miserably confessed that they were not doing what they
were  supposed  to  do  any more. Sometimes he would dial Tiny Jim and get
Henrietta, and sometimes a former-English Lit professor named Willard; and
once  he  got a voice he had never heard before, shaking and whispering on
the  near  side of inaudibility, muttering on the far side of madness. "Go
to the gold," whimpered Henrietta, fretful as ever, and without pause Tiny
Jim's  thick  tenor  would  override:  "They'll  kill you! They don't like
castaways!"
   That  was frightening. Especially as Wan assured them that Tiny Jim had
always  been  the most sensible of the Dead Men. It puzzled Lurvy that she
was not more terrified than she was, but there had been so many alarms and
terrors  that  she  had  become used to them. Her circuits were scrambled,
too.
   And  the  messages! In one five-minute burst of clear transmission Paul
had  recorded  fourteen hours of them. Commands from downlink: "Report all
control  settings  shuttle ship. Attempt secure tissue samples Heechee/Old
Ones.  Freeze and store berryfruit leaves, fruits, stems. Exercise extreme
caution."  Half  a  dozen  separate communications from her father; he was
lonesome;  he  didn't  feel  well;  he  was  not  receiving proper medical
attention  because  they  had taken the mobile bio-assay unit away; he was
being  barraged by peremptory orders from Earth. Information messages from
Earth: their first reports had been received, analyzed and interpreted for
them,  and  now  there  were  suggestions  for  follow-up  programs beyond
counting.  They  should  interrogate  Henrietta  about  her  references to
cosmological  phenomena-Shipboard-Vera  was  making  a  hash  of  it,  and
Downlink-Vera  could  not communicate in real time, and old Payter did not
know enough astrophysics to ask the right questions, so it was up to them.
They  should interrogate all the Dead Men on their memories of Gateway and
their  missions-assuming  they remembered anything. They should attempt to
find  out  how  living  prospectors  became stored computer programs. They
should...  They  should  do everything. All at once. And almost none of it
was  possible; tissue samples of the Heechee, forsooth! When an occasional
message was clear and personal and undemanding, Lurvy treasured it.
   And some of those were surprises. Besides the fan letters from Janine's
pen-pals  and  the  continuing  plea  for  any information they might come
across from Trish Bover's relict, there was one for Lurvy personally, from
Robinette Broadhead:
   "Dorema,  I know you're being swamped. Your whole mission was important
and  hazardous  to  begin with, and now it turns out about a million times
more  so.  All  I expect from you is that you do the best you can. I don't
have  the  authority  to override Gateway Corp orders. I can't change your
assigned objectives. But I want you to know I'm on your side. Find out all
you  can.  Try  not to get into a spot you can't retreat from. And I'll do
everything I can to see that you get rewarded as fully and lavishly as you
can hope for. I mean it, Lurvy. I give you my word."
   It was a strange message, and oddly touching. It was also a surprise to
Lurvy  that  Broadhead  even  knew her nickname. They had not exactly been
intimates.  When she and her family were interviewing for the Food Factory
assignment  they had met Broadhead several times. But the relationship had
been  of suppliant and monarch, and there was not much close interpersonal
friendship involved. Nor had she particularly liked him. He was candid and
amiable  enough-high-rolling  multimillionaire  with an easy-going manner,
but sharply on top of every dollar he spent and every development in every
project  he  was  involved  in.  She  did  not  like  being  a client to a
capricious Titan of finance.
   And, to be fair, she had come to their meetings with a faint prejudice.
She  had heard about Robinette Broadhead long before he played any part in
her  own  life.  In  Lurvy's  own  time on the Gateway asteroid and in its
ships,  she had once gone out in a three-person ship with an elderly woman
who  had once been shipmate with Gelle-Kiara Moynlim. From the woman Lurvy
had  heard  the story of Broadhead's last mission, the one that made him a
multimillionaire.  There  was something questionable about it. Nine people
had  died on that mission. Broadhead was the only survivor. And one of the
casualties  had  been  Kiara  Moynlin,  with  whom  (the  old  woman said)
Broadhead  had  been  in  love. Maybe it was Lurvy's own experience with a
mission  in which most of the crew had died that colored her feelings. But
they were there.
   The curious thing about the Broadhead mission was that maybe "died" was
not  the  right  word for the casualties. This Kiara and the rest had been
trapped  in  a  black hole, and perhaps they were still there, and perhaps
still  alive-prisoners of slowed-down time, maybe no more than a few hours
older after all the years.
   So  what  was the hidden agenda in Broadhead's message to Lurvy? Was he
urging  them  on  to  try to find a way to penetrate Gelle-Kiara Moynlin's
prison?  Did he know himself? Lurvy could not tell, but for the first time
she  thought of their employer as a human being. The thought was touching.
It  did  not make Lurvy feel less afraid, but perhaps a little less alone.
When  she  brought  her  latest  batch of tapes to Paul, in the Dead Men's
room,  to  record at high speed and transmit when he could, she tarried to
put her arms around him and cling, which surprised him very much.

   When  Janine  returned  to the Dead Men's room from an exploration with
Wan,  something  told  her  to  move  quietly. She looked in without being
heard, and saw her sister and brother-in-law sitting comfortably against a
wall,  half listening to the maniac chatter of the Dead Men, half chatting
desultorily  with  each  other. She turned, put her finger to her lips and
led Wan away. "I think they want to be alone," she explained. "Anyway, I'm
tired. Let's take a break."
   Wan  shrugged.  They  found  a  convenient  spot  at an intersection of
corridors  a few dozen meters away and he settled himself pensively beside
the girl. "Are they conjugating?" he asked.
   "Cripes, Wan. You've only got the one thing on your mind all the time."
But  she  was  not  annoyed, and let him move close to her, until one hand
approached her breast. "Knock it off," she said mildly.
   He  withdrew his hand. "You are being very disturbed, Janine," he said,
pouting.
   "Oh,  get  off  my  back."  But when he moved millimeters away, she let
herself move a little closer again. She was quite content to have him want
her  and  quite  serene  in  believing  that  when  anything  happened, as
"anything" sooner or later surely would, it would be when she wanted it to
happen.  Nearly  two months with Wan had made her like him, and even trust
him, and the rest could wait. She enjoyed his presence.
   Even  when  he  was  grouchy.  "You  are  not  competing  properly," he
complained.
   "Competing at what, for the Lord's sake?"
   "You  should  talk  to  Tiny Jim," he said severely. "He will teach you
better  strategies  in  the  reproduction race. He has fully explained the
male  role to me, so that I am sure I can compete successfully. Of course,
yours  is  different.  Basically, your best choice would be to allow me to
copulate with you."
   "Yes, you've said that. You know what, Wan? You talk too much."
   He  was  silent  for  a  moment, perplexed. He could not defend himself
against  that charge. He did not even know why it was a charge. In most of
his  life  the  only mode of interaction he had had was talk. He rehearsed
all  of Tiny Jim's teachings in his mind, and then his expression cleared.
"I see. You want to kiss first," he said.
   "No! I don't want to kiss 'first', and get your knee off my bladder."
   He  released her unwillingly. "Janine," he explained, "close contact is
essential  to  'love'.  This is true of the lower orders as well as of us.
Dogs  sniff.  Primates  groom.  Reptiles coil around each other. Even rose
shoots  nestle  close to the mature plant, Tiny Jim says, although he does
not  believe  that  is  a  sexual  manifestation.  But  you  will lose the
reproductive race if you are not careful, Janine."
   She giggled. "To what? Old dead Henrietta?" But he was scowling and she
took  pity  on  him.  She sat up and announced, kindly enough, "You've got
some  really wrong ideas, do you know that? The last thing I want, even if
we  ever  do  get around to your goddam conjugation, is to get caught in a
place like this."
   "Caught'?"
   "Pregnant,"  she  explained.  "Winning  the  goddam  reproductive race.
Knocked  up.  Oh,  Wan," she said, nuzzling the top of his head, "you just
don't  know  where it's all at. I bet you and I are going to conjugate the
hell  out  of  each  other,  some  time or other, and maybe we'll even get
married,  or  something,  and  we'll just win that old reproductive race a
whole  bunch.  But  right now you're just a snotty-nosed kid, and so am I.
You don't want to reproduce. You just want to make love."
   "Well, that is true, yes, but Tiny Jim..."
   "Will  you shut up about Tiny Jim?" She stood up and regarded him for a
moment,  and  said  affectionately,  "Tell you what. I'm going back to the
Dead Men's room. Why don't you go read a book for a while to cool off?"
   "You are silly!" he scolded. "I have no book here, or reader."
   "Oh,  for  the  Lord's  sake! Then go somewhere and whack off until you
feel better."
   Wan looked up at her, then down at his freshly laundered kilt. No bulge
was  visible, but there was a pale, spreading spot of damp. He grinned. "I
guess I don't need to any more," he said.

   By  the  time  they  got  back,  Paul  and  Lurvy were no longer cozily
nestling  each other, but Janine could detect that they were more at peace
than  usual.  What  Lurvy  could  detect  about  Wan  and  Janine was less
tangible. She looked at them thoughtfully, considered asking what they had
been up to, decided against it. Paul was, in any event, more interested in
what  they  had  just discovered. He said, "Hey, kids, listen to this." He
dialed  Henrietta's  number, waited until her weepy voice said a tentative
hello and then asked: "Who are you?"
   The voice strengthened. "I am a computer analog," it said firmly. "When
I  was  alive I was Mrs. Arnold Meacham of mission Orbit Seventy-four, Day
Nineteen.  I  have  a bachelor of science and master's from Tulane and the
Ph.  D.  from the University of Pennsylvania, and my special discipline is
astrophysics.  After  twenty-two  days  we  docked at an artifact and were
subsequently  captured  by  its  occupants.  At the time of my death I was
thirty-eight  years  old,  two years younger than..." the voice hesitated,
"than  Doris  Filgren,  our pilot, who..." it hesitated again, "who-who my
husband  seemed to-who had an affair with... who..." The voice was sobbing
now, and Paul turned it off.
   "Well,  it doesn't last," he said, "but there it is. Poor dumb old Vera
has  sorted  out  some  kind of a connection with reality for her. And not
just for her. Do you want to know your mother's name, Wan?"
   The boy was staring at him, pop-eyed. "My mother's name?" he shrilled.
   "Or  anybody else's. Tiny Jim, for instance. He was actually an airbody
pilot  from  Venus  who  got  to Gateway, and then here. His name is James
Cornwell.  Willard  was  an  English  teacher. He embezzled money from the
students'  fund  to  pay  his way to Gateway-didn't get much out of it, of
course. His first flight brought him here. The downlink computers wrote an
interrogation  program  for  Vera, and she's been working at it all along,
and-what's the matter, Wan?"
   The boy licked his lips. "My mother's name?" he repeated.
   "Oh.  Sorry," Paul apologized, reminded to be kind. It had not occurred
to  him  that  Wan's  emotions  would  be  involved.  "Her name was Elfega
Zamorra. But she doesn't seem to be one of the Dead Men, Wan. I don't know
why. And your father-well, that's a funny thing. Your real father was dead
before she came here. The man you talk about must have been somebody else,
but  I  don't  know who. Any idea why that is?" Wan shrugged. "I mean, why
your  mother  or, I guess you'd call him, your step-father doesn't seem to
be stored?" Wan spread his hands.
   Lurvy  moved  closer  to him. The poor kid! Responding to his distress,
she put her arm around him and said, "I guess this is a shock to you, Wan.
I'm  sure  we'll  find out a lot more." She gestured at the mare's nest of
recorders,  encoders  and  processors  that  littered  the once bare room.
"Everything  we  find  out  gets  transmitted back to Earth," she said. He
looked  up at her politely, but not entirely comprehendingly, as she tired
to  explain  the  vast complex of information-handling machinery on Earth,
and  how  it  systematically analyzed, compared, collated, and interpreted
every  scrap from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory-not to mention every
other bit of data, wherever derived. Until Janine intervened.
   "Oh,  leave  him  alone. He understands enough," she said wisely. "Just
let  him  live  with  it  for  a  while." She rummaged through the case of
rations  for  one of the slate-green packages, and then said casually, "By
the way. Why is that thing beeping at us?"
   Paul  listened,  then  sprang  to  his  clutter of gadgets. The monitor
slaved to their portable cameras was emitting a faint Queep. Queep. Queep.
He spun it around so they could all see, swearing to himself.
   It  was  the camera they had left by the berryfruit bush, set patiently
to  record the unchanging scene and to sound an alarm whenever it detected
movement.
   It had. There was a face scowling out at them.
   Lurvy felt a thrill of terror. "Heechee," she breathed.
   But  if so, the face showed no evidence of concealing a mind that could
colonize a galaxy. It seemed to be down on all fours, peering worriedly at
the  camera,  and behind it were four or five others like it. The face had
no  chin. The brow slanted down from a fuzzy scalp; there was more hair on
the  face  than  on  the head. If the skull had had an occipital ridge, it
would  have  looked  like a gorilla. Taken all in all, it was not far from
the  shipboard  computer's  reconstruction  of Wan's description, but on a
cruder,  more  animal design. Yet they were not animals. As the face moved
to  one  side  Lurvy  saw that the others, clustered around the berryfruit
bush,  wore what no animal had ever spontaneously worn. They were clothed.
There  were  even evidences of fashion in what they wore, patches of color
sewn  to  their  tunics,  what looked like tattoos on exposed skin, even a
string  of  sharp-edged  beads  around  the  neck  of one of the males. "I
suppose,"  Lurvy  said shakily, "that even the Heechee might degenerate in
time. And they've had lots of time."
   The  view  in  the camera spun dizzily. "Damn him," Paul snapped. "He's
not so degenerate he doesn't notice the camera. He's picked the damn thing
up. Wan! Do you suppose they know we're here?"
   The boy shrugged disinterestedly. "Of course they do. They always have,
you know. They simply do not care."
   Lurvy's  heart  caught.  "What  do  you mean, Wan? How do you know they
won't come after us?"
   The  view  in the camera steadied; the Old One who had picked it up was
handing  it to another. Wan glanced at it and said, "I have told you, they
almost  never  come into this part of the blue. Or ever, into the red; and
there is no reason to go into the green. Nothing works there, not even the
food  chutes  or the readers. Almost always, they stay in the gold. Unless
they have eaten all the berryfruit there, and want more."
   There  was  a mewling cry from the sound system of the monitor, and the
view  whirled again. It stopped momentarily on one of the female Old Ones,
sucking  a  finger; then she reached out balefully for the camera. It spun
and then went blank. "Paul! What did they do?" Lurvy demanded.
   "Broke  it,  I suppose," he said, failing to get the picture back after
manipulating  the  controls.  "Question  is, what do we do? Haven't we got
enough here? Shouldn't we think about going back?"

   And  think about it Lurvy did. They all did. But however carefully they
questioned Wan, the boy stubbornly insisted there was nothing to fear. The
Old Ones had never troubled him in the corridors walled with red skeins of
light.  He  had never seen them in the green-though, to be sure, he seldom
went  there  himself.  Rarely  in  the blue. And, yes, of course they knew
there  were people here-the Dead Men assured him the Old Ones had machines
that  listened,  and  sometimes  watched,  everywhere  when  they were not
broken,  of  course.  They  simply did not care very much. "If we don't go
into  the  gold they will not trouble us," he said positively. "Except, of
course, if they come out."
   "Wan," Paul snarled, "I can't tell you how confident you make me feel."
   But  it  developed  that that was only the boy's way of saying that the
odds  were very good. "I go to the gold for excitement often," he boasted.
"Also for books. I have never been caught, you know."
   "And  what  if  the  Heechee  come here for excitement, or books?" Paul
demanded.
   "Books! What would they do with books? For berryfruit, maybe. Sometimes
they go with the machines-Tiny Jim says they are for repairing things that
break.  But  not  always.  And the machines do not work very well, or very
often. Besides, you can hear them far away!"
   They  all  sat  silent  for a moment, looking at each other. Then Lurvy
said,  "Here's  what  I think. Let's give ourselves one week here. I don't
think  that's  stretching  our  luck  too much. We have, what is it, Paul?
-five  cameras  left.  We'll  plant them around, slave them to the monitor
here  and  leave  them.  If we take care, maybe we can conceal them so the
Heechee  won't  find  them.  We'll  explore all the red corridors, because
they're  safe,  and  as  many  of  the  blue  and green as we can. Collect
samples.  Take pictures-I want to get a look at those repair machines. And
when  we've  done as much of that as we can, we'll-we'll see how much time
we have. And then we'll make a decision about going into the gold."
   "But  no  more  than  one  week.  From  now," Paul repeated. He was not
insisting. He was only making sure he understood.
   "No more," Lurvy agreed, and Janine and Wan nodded.

   But  forty-eight  hours later they were in the gold, all the same. They
had  decided  to  replace  the  broken  camera,  and  so, all four of them
together,  they  retraced  their steps to the three-way intersection where
the  berryfruit bush rose, bare of ripe fruit. Wan was first, hand in hand
with  Janine,  and  she detached herself to swoop down on the wreck of the
camera.  "They  really  bashed it," she marveled. "You didn't tell us they
were so strong, Wan. Look, is that blood?"
   Paul  snatched it from her hand, turning it over, frowning at the crust
of  black along one edge. "It looks like they were trying to get it open,"
he  said.  "I don't think I could do that with my bare hands. He must have
slipped and cut himself."
   "Oh,  yes,"  shrilled  Wan  absently,  "they  are  quite  strong."  His
attention  was  not  on  the  camera.  He  was  peering down the long gold
corridor,  sniffing the air, listening more for distant sounds than to the
others.
   "You're making me nervous," Lurvy said. "Do you hear anything?"
   He  shrugged irritably. "You smell them before you hear them but, no, I
do not smell anything. They are not very near. And I am not afraid! I come
here often, to get books or to watch the funny things they do."
   "I bet," said Janine, taking the old camera from Paul while he hunted a
place  to  conceal  the new one. There were not many places. Heechee decor
was stark.
   Wan  bristled.  "I have gone down that corridor as far as you can see!"
he  boasted.  "Even  the  place where the books is is far down-do you see?
Some of them are in the corridor."
   Lurvy  looked, but was not sure what Wan meant. A few dozen meters away
was  a  heap  of glittering trash, but no books. Paul, peeling tape from a
sticky bracket to mount it as high as he could on the wall, said, "The way
you  carry  on  about those books of yours. I've seen them, you know, Moby
Dick  and  The  Adventures of Don Quixote. What would the Heechee be doing
with them?"
   Wan  shrilled  with dignity, "You are stupid, Paul. Those are only what
the  Dead  Men  gave  me,  they are not the real books. Those are the real
books."
   Janine  looked  at  him  curiously,  then  moved  a  few  step down the
corridor. "They're not books," she called over her shoulder.
   "Of course they are! I have told you they are!"
   "No,  they  aren't.  Come and look." Lurvy opened her mouth to call her
back,  hesitated,  then  followed. The corridor was empty, and Wan did not
seem  more  than  usually agitated. When she was halfway to the glittering
scatter  she recognized what she was looking at, and quickly joined Janine
to pick one up.
   "Wan,"  she said, "I've seen these before. They're Heechee prayer fans.
There are hundreds of them on Earth."
   "No, no!" He was getting angry. "Why do you say that I lie?"
   "I'm  not saying you lie, Wan." She unrolled the thing in her hands. It
was  like  a tapering scroll of plastic; it opened easily in her hand, but
as  soon as she released it it closed again. It was the commonest artifact
of Heechee culture, found by the scores in the abandoned tunnels on Venus,
brought  back by Gateway prospectors from every successful mission. no one
had  ever  found what the Heechee did with them, and whether the name that
they had been given was appropriate only the Heechee knew. "They're called
'prayer fans', Wan."
   "No,  no,"  he  shrilled  crossly, taking it away from her and marching
into  the  chamber. "You do not pray with them. You read them. Like this."
He  started to put the scroll into one of the tulip-shaped fixtures on the
wall,  glanced  at  it,  threw it down. "That is not a good one," he said,
rummaging in the heaps of fans on the floor. "Wait. Yes. This is not good,
either,  but  it  is  at least something one can recognize." He slipped it
into the tulip. There was a quick tiny flutter of electronic whispers, and
then  the  tulip  and  scroll  disappeared.  A lemon-shaped cloud of color
enveloped them, and shaped itself to display a sewn book, opened at a page
of  vertical  lines  of ideographs. A tinny voice-a human voice! -began to
declaim something in a staccato, highly tonal language.
   Lurvy could not understand the words, but two years on Gateway had made
her  cosmopolitan.  She gasped, "I-I think that's Japanese! And those look
like haiku! Wan, what are the Heechee doing with books in Japanese?"
   He  said in a superior tone, "These are not really the Old Ones, Lurvy,
they are only copies of other books. The good ones are all like that. Tiny
Jim  says  that all the tapes and books of the Dead Men, all the Dead Men,
even  the  ones  that are no longer here, are stored in these. I read them
all the time."
   "My God," said Lurvy. "And how many times have I had one of those in my
hands and not known what it was for?"
   Paul  shook his head wonderingly. He reached into the glowing image and
pulled the fan out of its tulip. It came away easily; the picture vanished
and  voice  stopped  in mid-syllable, and he turned the scroll over in his
hands.  "That  beats me," he said. "Every scientist in the world has had a
go at these things. How come nobody ever figured out what they were?"
   Wan  shrugged.  He  was no longer angry; he was enjoying the triumph of
showing  these  people  how much more than they he knew. "Perhaps they are
stupid  too,"  he shrilled. Then, charitably, "Or perhaps they merely have
only  the  ones that no one can understand-except perhaps the Old Ones, If
they ever bothered to read them."
   "Have you got one of those handy, Wan?" Lurvy asked.
   He  shrugged  petulantly.  "I  never  bother with those," he explained.
"Still,  if you do not believe me..." He rummaged around in the heaps, his
expression  making it clear that they were wasting time with things he had
already  explored and found without interest. "Yes. I think this is one of
the worthless ones."
   When  he  slipped  it  into  the tulip, the hologram that sprang up was
bright-and  baffling.  It was as hard to read as the play of colors on the
controls  of a Heechee spacecraft. Harder. Strange, oscillating lines that
twined  around each other, leaped apart in a spray of color, and then drew
together  again.  If  it  was  written language, it was as remote from any
Western  alphabet  as  cuneiform.  More  so.  All  Earthly  languages  had
characteristics  in  common, if only that they were almost all represented
by  symbols on a plane surface. This seemed meant to be perceived in three
dimensions.  And  with  it  came  a  sort of interrupted mosquito-whine of
sound,  like  telemetry  which, by mistake, was being received on a pocket
radio. All in all, it was unnerving.
   "I did not think you would enjoy it," Wan observed spitefully. "Turn it
off,  Wan,"  Lurvy said; and then, energetically, "We want to take as many
of  these  things as we can. Paul, take off your shirt. Load up as many as
you  can  and  take  them  back  to the Dead Men's room. And take that old
camera,  too;  give  it  to  the  bio-assay  unit,  and see if it can make
anything out of the Heechee blood."
   "And  what are you going to do?" Paul asked. But he had already slipped
off his blouse and was filling it with the glittery "books".
   "We'll  be  right  along.  Go  ahead, Paul. Wan? Can you tell which are
which-I mean, which are the ones you don't bother with?"
   "Of  course  I can, Lurvy. They are very much older, sometimes a little
chipped-you can see."
   "All  right. You two, take off your top clothes too-as much as you need
to make a carrying-bag out of. Go ahead. We'll be modest some other time,"
she  said,  slipping  out  of  her coverall. She stood in bra and panties,
tying  knots  in  the arms and legs of the garment. She could fit at least
fifty  or  sixty  of the fans in that, she calculated-with Wan's tunic and
Janine's  dress  they  could  carry at least half of the objects away. And
that  would  be enough. She would not be greedy. There were plenty more on
the  Food  Factory,  anyway-although  probably  they were the ones Wan had
brought  there,  and  thus only the ones he had found he could understand.
"Are there readers on the Food Factory, Wan?"
   "Of  course,"  he  said.  "Why  else would I bring books there?" He was
sorting  irritably through the fans, muttering to himself as he tossed the
oldest, "useless" ones to Janine and Lurvy. "I am cold," he complained.
   "We  all  are.  I wish you'd worn a bra, Janine," she said, frowning at
her sister.
   Janine  said  indignantly,  "I  wasn't planning to take my clothes off.
Wan's right. I'm cold, too."
   "It's only for a little while. Hurry it up, Wan. You too, Janine, let's
see  how  fast  we  can  pick out the Heechee ones." They had her coverall
nearly full, and Wan, scowling and dignified in his kilt, was beginning to
stuff the fans into his. It would be possible, Lurvy calculated, to wrap a
few  dozen more in the kilt. After all, he had a breechcloth under it. But
they  were  really doing very well. Paul had already taken at least thirty
or  forty.  Her  coverall seemed able to hold nearly seventy-five. And, in
any  event, they could always come back another time for the rest, if they
chose,
   Lurvy  did  not  think  she would choose to do that. Enough was enough.
Whatever  else  they might do in Heechee Heaven, they had already acquired
one  priceless  fact. The prayer fans were books! Knowing that that was so
was  half  the  battle;  with that certainty before them, scientists would
surely  be able to unlock the secret of reading them. If they could not do
it from scratch, there were the readers on the Food Factory; if worst came
to  worst  they  could read every fan before one of Vera's remotes, encode
sound and image, and transmit the whole thing to Earth. Perhaps they could
wrench  a  reading  machine loose and bring it back with them.... And back
they  would  go,  Lurvy was suddenly sure. If they could not find a way to
move  the  Food  Factory,  they would abandon it. no one could fault them.
They  had  done  enough. If there was a need for more, other parties could
follow  them,  but  meanwhile...  Meanwhile  they  would have brought back
richer  gifts  than  any  other  human  beings  since the discovery of the
Gateway  asteroid itself! They would be rewarded accordingly, there was no
question  of  that-she  even had Robinette Broadhead's word. For the first
time  since  they had left the Moon on the searing chemical flame of their
takeoff rockets, Lurvy let herself think of herself not as someone who was
striving for a prize, but as someone who had won. And how happy her father
would be...
   "That's  enough,"  she  said,  helping Janine grip the spilling sack of
prayer fans. "Let's take them right to the ship."
   Janine  hugged  the  clumsy bundle to her small breasts and picked up a
few more with a free hand. "You sound as if we're going home," she said.
   "Maybe  so," Lurvy grinned. "Of course, we'll have to have a conference
and decide. Wan? What's the matter?"
   He  was  at  the door, his shirtful of fans under an arm. And he looked
stricken.  "We  waited too long," he whispered, peering down the corridor.
"There are Old Ones by the berryfruit."
   "Oh,  no."  But  it  was  true.  Lurvy  peered  cautiously out into the
corridor  and  there they were, staring up at the camera Paul had fixed to
the  wall.  One  reached  up  and  effortlessly  pulled it loose while she
watched. "Wan? Is there another way home?"
   "Yes,  through  the  gold, but..." His nose was working. "I think there
are some there, too. I can smell them and, yes, I can hear them!" And that
was  true, too; Lurvy could hear a faint sound of mellow, chirrupy grunts,
from where the corridor bent.
   "We  don't  have  a choice," she said. "There are only two of them back
the  way  we  came.  We'll  take  them  by  surprise and just push our way
through.  Come on!" Still carrying the tapes, she hustled the others ahead
of her. The Heechee might be strong, but Wan had said they were slow. With
any  luck at all. They had no luck at all. As they reached the opening she
saw  that there were more than two, half a dozen more, standing around and
looking  toward  them in the entrances to the other corridors. "Paul!" she
shouted at the camera. "We're caught! Get in the ship, and if we don't get
away..."  And she could say no more, because they were upon her; and, yes,
they were strong!

   They  were hustled up through half a dozen levels, their captors one to
each  arm,  stolidly  chirping at each other, ignoring their struggles and
their  words.  Wan  did not speak. He let them pull him as they would, all
the  way  up to a great open spindleshaped volume, where another dozen Old
Ones  waited  and  a huge blue-lit machine sat silent behind them. Did the
Heechee  believe  in  sacrifice? Or perform experiments on captives? Would
they  wind up as Dead Men themselves, rambling and obsessed, ready for the
next  batch  of  visitors?  Lurvy  looked upon all of these as interesting
questions, and had no answers for any of them. She was not yet afraid. Her
feelings  had  not  caught up with the facts; it was too recently that she
had  allowed herself to feel triumph. The realization of defeat would have
to wait.
   The  Old  Ones  chirruped  to  each  other,  gesticulating  toward  the
prisoners,  the  corridors,  the  great silent machine, like a battle tank
without guns. Like a nightmare. Lurvy could not understand any of it, even
though  the  situation was clear enough. After minutes of jabber they were
pushed  into  a  cubicle,  and  found in it-astonishingly! -quite familiar
objects.  Behind  the  closed door Lurvy shuffled through them-clothing; a
chess  set;  long  desiccated  rations. In the toe of one shoe was a thick
roll  of  Brazilian  currency, more than a quarter of a million dollars of
it, she guessed. They had not been the first captives here! But in none of
the rubble was anything like a weapon. She turned to Wan, who was pale and
shaking. "What will happen?" she demanded.
   He  waggled  his  head like an Old One. It was the only answer he could
give.  "My  father..." he began, and had to swallow before he could go on.
"They  captured my father once and, yes, truly, they let him go again. But
I  do  not  think that is a rule, since my father told me I must never let
myself be caught."
   Janine  said,  "At  least  Paul  got  away.  Maybe-maybe  he  can bring
help...." But she stopped there, and did not expect an answer. Any hopeful
answer  would  have  been fantasy, defined by the four years it would take
another  vessel  like  theirs  to reach the Food Factory. If help came, it
would  not  be soon. She began to sort through the old clothing. "At least
we can get something on," she said. "Come on, Wan. Get yourself dressed."
   Lurvy  followed  her  example, and then stopped at a strange sound from
her sister. It was almost a laugh! "What's so funny?" she snapped.
   Janine  pulled  a sweater over her head before she answered. It was too
big,  but  it was warm. "I was just thinking about the orders we got," she
said.  "To  get  Heechee tissue samples, you know? Well, the way it worked
out-they got ours instead. All of them."


        8 Schwarze Peter

   When  the  shipboard computer's mail bell rang, Payter woke quickly and
completely.  It  was an advantage of age that one slept shallowly and woke
at  once.  There  were  not  many advantages. He got up, rinsed his mouth,
urinated  into  the  sanitary, washed his hands, and took two food packets
with  him to the terminal. "Display the mail now," he ordered, munching on
something  that  tasted  like  sour  rye bread but was meant to be a sweet
roll.
   When  he  saw  what  the mail was, his good mood passed. Most of it was
interminable mission orders. Six letters for Janine, one each for Paul and
Dorema,  and  for  himself only a petition addressed to Schwarze Peter and
signed  by  eight  hundred and thirty school-children of Dortmund, begging
him  to return and become their Burgermeister. "Dumb head!" he scolded the
computer.  "Why  do  you  wake  me  for  this trash?" Vera did not answer,
because  he  did not give her time to identify him and rummage through her
slow magnetic bubbles to locate his name.
   Long  before  then,  he was complaining, "Also this food is not fit for
pigs! Attend to it at once!"
   Poor  Vera  erased  the  attempt  to  interpret  his first question and
patiently  attended  to the second. "The recycling system is below optimal
mass  levels,"  she  said,"...  Mr.  Herter.  In  addition,  my processing
routines  have  been subject to overload for some time. Many programs have
been deferred."
   "Do  not  defer  the  food question any more," he snarled, "or you will
kill  me,  and there's an end to it." He gloomily commanded display of the
mission  orders  while  he  forced  himself  to  chew the remainder of his
breakfast.  The  orders rolled for ten solid minutes. What marvelous ideas
they  had for him, back on Earth! And if only there were a hundred of him,
perhaps  they could do one one-hundredth of the tasks proposed. He allowed
the  end  of  it  to run unwatched, while he carefully shaved his pink old
face  and  brushed  his  sparse  hair.  And  why  was the recycling system
depleted,  so  that  it could not function properly? Because his daughters
and   their   consorts  had  removed  themselves  and  thus  their  useful
by-products,  as  well  as  all  the water Wan had stolen from the system.
Stolen!  Yes,  there  was  no  other  word for it. Also they had taken the
mobile  bio-assay unit, so that there was only the sampler in the sanitary
to  monitor  his  health,  and what could that tell of fever or arrhythmic
heart,  if  he  should have either? Also they had taken all but one of the
cameras,  so  that  he must carry that one with him wherever he went. Also
they  had  taken.  They  had taken themselves, and Schwarze Peter, for the
first time in his life, was wholly alone.
   He was not only alone, he was powerless to change it. Family came back,
they  would do so in their own good time and not before. Until then he was
a  reserve  unit,  a  pillbox  soldier,  a  standby  program. He was given
excessive tasks to do, but the real center of action was somewhere else.
   In  his  long  life Payter had taught himself to be patient, but he had
never  taught  himself to enjoy it. It was maddening to be forced to wait!
To  wait  fifty  days for an answer from Earth to his perfectly reasonable
proposals  and  questions.  To wait almost as long for his family and that
hooligan boy to get to where they were going (if they ever did) and report
to him (if they should happen to choose to). Waiting was not so bad if one
had enough of a life left to wait in. But how much, realistically, had he?
Suppose  he  had a stroke. Suppose he developed a cancer. Suppose any part
of the complicated interactions that kept, his heart beating and his blood
flowing  and  his  bowels  moving and his brain thinking broke down in any
place. What then?
   And  some  day  they  surely would, because Payter was old. He had lied
about his age so many times that he was no longer sure of what it was. Not
even  his children knew; the stories he told about his grandfather's youth
were  really  about  his  own.  Age in itself did not matter. Full Medical
could  deal  with  anything,  repair or replace, as long as it was not the
brain itself that was damaged-and Payter's brain was in the best of shape,
because had it not schemed and contrived to get him here?
   But  "here"  there was no Full Medical, and age began to matter a great
deal.
   He  was  no  longer  a  boy! But once he had been, and even then he had
known  that somehow, some day, he would possess exactly what he owned now:
the  key  to  heart's desire. Burgermeister of Dortmund? That was nothing!
Skinny  young Peter, shortest and youngest in his unit of the Hitler Youth
but  their  leader  all  the same, had promised himself he would have much
more.  He had even known that it would turn out to be something like this,
some  grand futuristic pattern