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:
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.
"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:
And
"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!"
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 becoming very tired. He had
had little experience of fatigue, because in his timeless life when he was
sleepy he slept and did not get up until he was rested. He did not enjoy
the feeling, or the scratchiness in his throat, or the headache. But he
was too excited to stop, especially when they told him about the female
person named Trish Bover. "She was here? Here in the outpost? And she did
not stay?"
"No, Wan. She didn't know you would come. She thought if she stayed she
would die." What a terrible pity! Although, Wan calculated, he had only
been ten years old when she came, he could have been a companion for her.
And she for him. He would have fed her and cared for her and taken her
with him to see the Old Ones and the Dead Men, and been very happy.
"Then where did she go?" he asked.
For some reason, that question troubled them. They looked at each
other. Lurvy said after a moment, "She got in her ship, Wan."
"She went back to Earth?"
"No. Not yet. It is a very long trip for the kind of ship she had.
Longer than she would live."
The younger man, Paul, the one who coupled with Lurvy, took over. "She
is still traveling, Wan. We don't know where exactly. We are not even sure
she is alive. She froze herself."
"Then she is dead?"
"Well-she is probably not alive. But if she is found, maybe she can be
revived. She's in the freezing compartment of her ship, at minus-forty
degrees. Her body will not decay for some time, I think. She thought. At
any rate, she thought it was the best chance she had."
"I could have given her a better one," Wan said dejectedly. Then he
brightened. There was the other female, Janine, who was not frozen.
Wishing to impress her, he said, "That is a gosh number."
"What is? What kind of a number?"
"A gosh number, Janine. Tiny Jim talks about them. When you say
'minus-forty' you don't have to say whether it is in Celsius or
Fahrenheit, because they are the same." He tittered at the joke.
They were looking at each other again. Wan could see that something was
wrong, but he was feeling stranger, dizzier, more fatigued at every
second. He thought perhaps they had not understood the joke, so he said,
"Let us ask Tiny Jim. He can be reached just down this passage, where the
dreaming couch is."
"Reached? How?" demanded the old man, Payter.
Wan did not answer; he was not feeling well enough to trust what he
said, and, besides, it was easier to show them. He turned abruptly away
and hauled himself toward the dreaming chamber. By the time they followed
he had already keyed the book in and called for number one hundred twelve.
"Tiny Jim?" he tried; then, over his shoulder, "Sometimes he doesn't want
to talk. Please be patient." But he was lucky this time, and the Dead
Man's voice responded quite quickly.
"Wan? Is that you?"
"Of course it is me, Tiny Jim. I want to hear about gosh numbers."
"Very well, Wan. Gosh numbers are numbers which represent more than one
quantity, so that when you perceive the coincidence you say, 'Gosh.' Some
gosh numbers are trivial. Some are perhaps of transcendental importance.
Some religious persons count gosh numbers as a proof of the existence of
God. As to whether or not God exists, I can give you only a broad outline
of..."
"No, Tiny Jim. Please stick to gosh numbers now."
"Yes, Wan. I will now give you a list of a few of the simplest gosh
numbers. Point-five degrees. Minus-forty degrees. One thirty-seven. Two
thousand and twenty-five. Ten to the 39th. Please write one paragraph on
each of these, identifying the characteristics which make them gosh
numbers and..."
"Cancel, cancel," Wan squeaked, his voice rising higher because it
smarted so. "This is not a class."
"Oh, well," said the Dead Man gloomily, "all right. Point-five degrees
is the angular diameter of both the sun and the Moon as seen from Earth.
Gosh! How strange that they should be the same, but also how useful,
because it is partly because of this coincidence that Earth has eclipses.
Minus-forty degrees is the temperature which is the same in both
Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. Gosh. Two thousand twenty-five is the sum
of the cubes of the integers, one cubed plus two cubed plus three cubed
and so on up to nine cubed, all added together. It is also the square of
their sum. Gosh. Ten to the thirty-ninth is a measure of the weakness of
the gravitational force as compared with the electromagnetic. It is also
the age of the universe expressed as a dimensionless number. It is also
the square root of the number of particles in the observable universe,
that is, that part of the universe relative to Earth in which Hubble's
constant is less than point-five. Also-well, never mind, but gosh! Gosh,
gosh, gosh. On these goshes P. A. M. Dirac constructed his Large Numbers
Hypothesis, from which he deduced that the force of gravity must be
weakening as the age of the universe increased. Now, there is a gosh for
you!"
"You left out one thirty-seven," the boy accused.
The Dead Man cackled. "Good for you, Wan! I wanted to see if you were
listening. One thirty-seven is Eddington's fine structure constant, of
course, and turns up over and over in nuclear physics. But it is more than
that. Suppose you take the inverse, that is one over one thirty-seven, and
express it as a decimal. The first three digits are Double Ought Seven,
James Bond's identification as a killer. There is the lethality of the
universe for you! The first eight digits are Clarke's Palindrome, point oh
seven two nine nine two seven oh. There is its symmetry. Deadly, and
two-faced, that is the fine structure constant! Or," he mused, "perhaps I
should say, there is its inverse. Which would imply that the universe
itself is the inverse of that? Namely kind and uneven? Help me, Wan. I am
not sure how to interpret this symbol."
"Oh, cancel, cancel," said Wan angrily. "Cancel and out." He was
feeling irritable and shaky, as well as more ill than he had ever been,
even when the Dead Men had given him shots. "He goes on like that," he
apologized to the others. "That's why I don't usually speak to him from
here."
"He doesn't look well," said Lurvy worriedly to her husband, and then
to Wan, "Do you feel all right?" He shook his head, because he did not
know how to answer.
Paul said, "You ought to rest. But-what did you mean, 'from here.'
Where is, uh, Tiny Jim?"
"Oh, he is in the main station," said Wan weakly, sneezing.
"You mean..." Paul swallowed hard. "But you said it was forty-five days
away by ship. That must be a very long way."
The old man, Payter, cried: "Radio? Are you talking to him by radio?
Faster-than-light radio?"
Wan shrugged. Paul had been right; he needed to rest, and there was the
couch, which had always been the exact proper place to make him feel good
and rested.
"Tell me, boy!" shouted the old man. "If you have a working FU
radio...The bonus..."
"I am very tired," said Wan hoarsely. "I must sleep." He felt himself
falling. He evaded their clutching arms, dove between them and plunged
into the couch, its comforting webbing closing around him.
Essie and I were water-skiing on the Tappan Sea when my neck radio
buzzed to tell me that a stranger had turned up on the Food Factory. I
ordered the boat to turn immediately and take us back to the long stretch
of waterfront property owned by Robin Broadhead, Inc. before I told Essie
what it was. "A boy, Robin?" she shouted over the noise of the hydrogen
motor and the wind. "Where in hell a boy comes to Food Factory?"
"That's what we have to find out," I yelled back. The boat skillfully
snaked us in to shallow water and waited while we jumped out and ran up
the grass. When it recognized that we were gone, it purred down the
shoreline to put itself away.
Wet as we were, we ran directly to the brain room. We had begun to get
opticals already, and the holo tank showed a skinny, scraggly youth
wearing a sort of divided kilt and a dirty tunic. He did not seem
threatening in any way, but he sure as hell had no right to be there.
"Voice," I ordered, and the moving lips began to speak-queer, shrill,
high-pitched, but good enough English to understand:
"From the main station, yes. It is about seven seven-days...weeks, I
mean. I come here often."
"For God's sake, how?" I could not see the speaker, but it was male and
had no accent: Paul Hall.
"In a ship, to be sure. Do you not have a ship? The Dead Men speak only
of traveling in ships, I do not know any other way."
"Incredible," said Essie over my shoulder. She backed away, not taking
her eyes off the tank, and came back with a terrycloth robe to throw over
my shoulders and one for herself. "What do you suppose is 'main station'?"
"I wish to God I knew. Harriet?"
The voices from the tank grew fainter, and my secretary's voice said,
"Yes, Mr. Broadhead?"
"When did he get there?"
"About seventeen point four minutes ago, Mr. Broadhead. Plus transit
time from the Food Factory, of course. He was discovered by Janine Herter.
She did not appear to have had a camera with her, so we received only
voice until one of the other members of the party arrived." As soon as she
stopped speaking the voice from the figure in the tank came up again;
Harriet is a very good program, one of Essie's best.
"...sorry if I behaved improperly," the boy was saying. Pause. Then,
old Peter Herter:
"Never mind that, by God. Are there other people on this main station?"
The boy pursed his lips. "That," he said philosophically, "would
depend, would it not, on how one defines 'person'? In the sense of a
living organism of our species, no. The closest is the Dead Men."
A woman's voice-Dorema Herter-Hall. "Are you hungry? Do you need
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:
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.
"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:
And
"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!"
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 becoming very tired. He had
had little experience of fatigue, because in his timeless life when he was
sleepy he slept and did not get up until he was rested. He did not enjoy
the feeling, or the scratchiness in his throat, or the headache. But he
was too excited to stop, especially when they told him about the female
person named Trish Bover. "She was here? Here in the outpost? And she did
not stay?"
"No, Wan. She didn't know you would come. She thought if she stayed she
would die." What a terrible pity! Although, Wan calculated, he had only
been ten years old when she came, he could have been a companion for her.
And she for him. He would have fed her and cared for her and taken her
with him to see the Old Ones and the Dead Men, and been very happy.
"Then where did she go?" he asked.
For some reason, that question troubled them. They looked at each
other. Lurvy said after a moment, "She got in her ship, Wan."
"She went back to Earth?"
"No. Not yet. It is a very long trip for the kind of ship she had.
Longer than she would live."
The younger man, Paul, the one who coupled with Lurvy, took over. "She
is still traveling, Wan. We don't know where exactly. We are not even sure
she is alive. She froze herself."
"Then she is dead?"
"Well-she is probably not alive. But if she is found, maybe she can be
revived. She's in the freezing compartment of her ship, at minus-forty
degrees. Her body will not decay for some time, I think. She thought. At
any rate, she thought it was the best chance she had."
"I could have given her a better one," Wan said dejectedly. Then he
brightened. There was the other female, Janine, who was not frozen.
Wishing to impress her, he said, "That is a gosh number."
"What is? What kind of a number?"
"A gosh number, Janine. Tiny Jim talks about them. When you say
'minus-forty' you don't have to say whether it is in Celsius or
Fahrenheit, because they are the same." He tittered at the joke.
They were looking at each other again. Wan could see that something was
wrong, but he was feeling stranger, dizzier, more fatigued at every
second. He thought perhaps they had not understood the joke, so he said,
"Let us ask Tiny Jim. He can be reached just down this passage, where the
dreaming couch is."
"Reached? How?" demanded the old man, Payter.
Wan did not answer; he was not feeling well enough to trust what he
said, and, besides, it was easier to show them. He turned abruptly away
and hauled himself toward the dreaming chamber. By the time they followed
he had already keyed the book in and called for number one hundred twelve.
"Tiny Jim?" he tried; then, over his shoulder, "Sometimes he doesn't want
to talk. Please be patient." But he was lucky this time, and the Dead
Man's voice responded quite quickly.
"Wan? Is that you?"
"Of course it is me, Tiny Jim. I want to hear about gosh numbers."
"Very well, Wan. Gosh numbers are numbers which represent more than one
quantity, so that when you perceive the coincidence you say, 'Gosh.' Some
gosh numbers are trivial. Some are perhaps of transcendental importance.
Some religious persons count gosh numbers as a proof of the existence of
God. As to whether or not God exists, I can give you only a broad outline
of..."
"No, Tiny Jim. Please stick to gosh numbers now."
"Yes, Wan. I will now give you a list of a few of the simplest gosh
numbers. Point-five degrees. Minus-forty degrees. One thirty-seven. Two
thousand and twenty-five. Ten to the 39th. Please write one paragraph on
each of these, identifying the characteristics which make them gosh
numbers and..."
"Cancel, cancel," Wan squeaked, his voice rising higher because it
smarted so. "This is not a class."
"Oh, well," said the Dead Man gloomily, "all right. Point-five degrees
is the angular diameter of both the sun and the Moon as seen from Earth.
Gosh! How strange that they should be the same, but also how useful,
because it is partly because of this coincidence that Earth has eclipses.
Minus-forty degrees is the temperature which is the same in both
Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. Gosh. Two thousand twenty-five is the sum
of the cubes of the integers, one cubed plus two cubed plus three cubed
and so on up to nine cubed, all added together. It is also the square of
their sum. Gosh. Ten to the thirty-ninth is a measure of the weakness of
the gravitational force as compared with the electromagnetic. It is also
the age of the universe expressed as a dimensionless number. It is also
the square root of the number of particles in the observable universe,
that is, that part of the universe relative to Earth in which Hubble's
constant is less than point-five. Also-well, never mind, but gosh! Gosh,
gosh, gosh. On these goshes P. A. M. Dirac constructed his Large Numbers
Hypothesis, from which he deduced that the force of gravity must be
weakening as the age of the universe increased. Now, there is a gosh for
you!"
"You left out one thirty-seven," the boy accused.
The Dead Man cackled. "Good for you, Wan! I wanted to see if you were
listening. One thirty-seven is Eddington's fine structure constant, of
course, and turns up over and over in nuclear physics. But it is more than
that. Suppose you take the inverse, that is one over one thirty-seven, and
express it as a decimal. The first three digits are Double Ought Seven,
James Bond's identification as a killer. There is the lethality of the
universe for you! The first eight digits are Clarke's Palindrome, point oh
seven two nine nine two seven oh. There is its symmetry. Deadly, and
two-faced, that is the fine structure constant! Or," he mused, "perhaps I
should say, there is its inverse. Which would imply that the universe
itself is the inverse of that? Namely kind and uneven? Help me, Wan. I am
not sure how to interpret this symbol."
"Oh, cancel, cancel," said Wan angrily. "Cancel and out." He was
feeling irritable and shaky, as well as more ill than he had ever been,
even when the Dead Men had given him shots. "He goes on like that," he
apologized to the others. "That's why I don't usually speak to him from
here."
"He doesn't look well," said Lurvy worriedly to her husband, and then
to Wan, "Do you feel all right?" He shook his head, because he did not
know how to answer.
Paul said, "You ought to rest. But-what did you mean, 'from here.'
Where is, uh, Tiny Jim?"
"Oh, he is in the main station," said Wan weakly, sneezing.
"You mean..." Paul swallowed hard. "But you said it was forty-five days
away by ship. That must be a very long way."
The old man, Payter, cried: "Radio? Are you talking to him by radio?
Faster-than-light radio?"
Wan shrugged. Paul had been right; he needed to rest, and there was the
couch, which had always been the exact proper place to make him feel good
and rested.
"Tell me, boy!" shouted the old man. "If you have a working FU
radio...The bonus..."
"I am very tired," said Wan hoarsely. "I must sleep." He felt himself
falling. He evaded their clutching arms, dove between them and plunged
into the couch, its comforting webbing closing around him.
Essie and I were water-skiing on the Tappan Sea when my neck radio
buzzed to tell me that a stranger had turned up on the Food Factory. I
ordered the boat to turn immediately and take us back to the long stretch
of waterfront property owned by Robin Broadhead, Inc. before I told Essie
what it was. "A boy, Robin?" she shouted over the noise of the hydrogen
motor and the wind. "Where in hell a boy comes to Food Factory?"
"That's what we have to find out," I yelled back. The boat skillfully
snaked us in to shallow water and waited while we jumped out and ran up
the grass. When it recognized that we were gone, it purred down the
shoreline to put itself away.
Wet as we were, we ran directly to the brain room. We had begun to get
opticals already, and the holo tank showed a skinny, scraggly youth
wearing a sort of divided kilt and a dirty tunic. He did not seem
threatening in any way, but he sure as hell had no right to be there.
"Voice," I ordered, and the moving lips began to speak-queer, shrill,
high-pitched, but good enough English to understand:
"From the main station, yes. It is about seven seven-days...weeks, I
mean. I come here often."
"For God's sake, how?" I could not see the speaker, but it was male and
had no accent: Paul Hall.
"In a ship, to be sure. Do you not have a ship? The Dead Men speak only
of traveling in ships, I do not know any other way."
"Incredible," said Essie over my shoulder. She backed away, not taking
her eyes off the tank, and came back with a terrycloth robe to throw over
my shoulders and one for herself. "What do you suppose is 'main station'?"
"I wish to God I knew. Harriet?"
The voices from the tank grew fainter, and my secretary's voice said,
"Yes, Mr. Broadhead?"
"When did he get there?"
"About seventeen point four minutes ago, Mr. Broadhead. Plus transit
time from the Food Factory, of course. He was discovered by Janine Herter.
She did not appear to have had a camera with her, so we received only
voice until one of the other members of the party arrived." As soon as she
stopped speaking the voice from the figure in the tank came up again;
Harriet is a very good program, one of Essie's best.
"...sorry if I behaved improperly," the boy was saying. Pause. Then,
old Peter Herter:
"Never mind that, by God. Are there other people on this main station?"
The boy pursed his lips. "That," he said philosophically, "would
depend, would it not, on how one defines 'person'? In the sense of a
living organism of our species, no. The closest is the Dead Men."
A woman's voice-Dorema Herter-Hall. "Are you hungry? Do you need