anything?"
"No, why should I?"
"Harriet? What's that about behaving improperly?" I asked. Harriet's
voice came hesitantly. "He, uh, he brought himself to orgasm, Mr.
Broadhead. Right in front of Janine Herter."
I couldn't help it, I broke out laughing. "Essie," I said to my wife,
"I think you made her a little too ladylike." But that wasn't what I was
laughing at. It was the plain incongruity of the thing. I had
guessed-anything. Anything but this: a Heechee, a space pirate,
Martians-God knows what, but not a horny teen-aged boy.
There was a scrabble of steel claws from behind and something jumped on
my shoulder. "Down, Squiffy," I snapped.
Essie said, "Just let him nuzzle neck for a minute. He'll go away."
"He isn't dainty in his personal habits," I snarled. "Can't we get rid
of him?"
"Na, na, galubka," she said soothingly, patting the top of my head as
she got up. "Want Full Medical, don't you? Squiffy comes along." She
kissed me and wandered out of the room, leaving me to think about the
thing that, to my somewhat surprise, was making all sorts of tiny but
discomforting stirrings inside me. To see a Heechee! Well, we hadn't-but
what if we did?
When the first Venus explorers discovered the traces the Heechee had
left, glowing blue-lined empty tunnels, spindle-shaped caves, it was a
shock. A few artifacts, another shock-what were they? There were the
scrolls of metal somebody named "prayer fans" (but did the Heechee pray,
and if so to whom?) There were the glowing little beads called "fire
pearls", but they weren't pearls, and they weren't burning. Then someone
found the Gateway asteroid, and the biggest shock of all, because on it
were a couple of hundred working spaceships. Only you couldn't direct
them. You could get in and go, and that was it... and what you found when
you got there was shock, shock, shock, shock.
I knew. I had had the shocks, on my three silly missions-No. Two silly
missions. And then one terribly unsilly one. It had made me rich and
deprived me of somebody I loved, and what is silly about either of those
things?
And ever since then the Heechee, dead half a million years, not even a
written word left to tell what they were up to, had permeated every part
of our world. It was all questions, and not very many answers. We didn't
even know what they called themselves, certainly not "Heechee", because
that was just a name the explorers made up for them. We had no idea what
these remote and godlike creatures called themselves. But we didn't know
what God called Himself, either. Jehovah, Jupiter, Baal, Allah-those were
names people made up. Who knew by what name He was known to His buddies?
I was trying to let myself feel what I might have felt if the stranger
in the Food Factory had actually been Heechee when the toilet flushed,
Essie came out and Squiffy made a dash for the bowl. There are indignities
to having Full Medical coverage, and a mobile bio-assay unit is one of
them.
"You are wasting my program time!" Essie scolded, and I realized that
Harriet had been sitting patiently in the tank, waiting to be told to get
on with her information about the other claims on my attention. The report
from the Food Factory was all being taped and stored in any case, so Essie
went to her own office to deal with her own priorities, I told Harriet to
start the cook on lunch, and then I let her do her secretarial duties.
"You have an appointment to testify before the Senate Ways and Means
Committee tomorrow morning, Mr. Broadhead."
"I know. I'll be there."
"You're due for your next checkup this weekend. Shall I confirm the
appointment?"
That's one of the penalties of Full Medical, and besides Essie
insists-she's twenty years younger than I, and reminds me of it. "All
right, let's get it over with."
"You are being sued by one Hanson Bover, and Morton wants to talk to
you about it. Your consolidated statement for the quarter came in and is
on your desk file-except for the food mine holdings, which will not be
complete until tomorrow. And there are a number of minor messages-most of
which I have already dealt with-for your review at your convenience."
"Thank you. That's all for now." The tank went transparent and I leaned
back in my chair to think.
I didn't need to see the consolidated statement-I already pretty well
knew what it would say. The real estate investments were performing
nicely; the little bit I had left in sea farming was moving toward a
record profit year. Everything was solid, except for the food mines. The
last 130-day fever had cost us. I couldn't blame the guys in Cody, they
weren't any more responsible than I was when the fever bit. But they had
somehow let the thermal drilling get out of control, and five thousand
acres of our shale were burning away underground. It had taken three
months to get the mine back in operation at all, and we still didn't know
what it was going to cost. no wonder their quarterly statement was late.
But that was only an annoyance, not a disaster. I was too well
diversified to be killed by any one sector going bad. I wouldn't have been
in the food mines except for Morton's advice; the extraction allowance
made it a really good thing, tax-wise. (But I'd sold most of my
sea-farming holdings to buy in.) Then Morton figured out that I still
needed a tax shelter, so we started The Broadhead Institute for
Extra-Solar Research. The Institute owns all my stock, but I vote it, and
I vote it for what I want to do. I got us into the coownership with the
Gateway Corporation that financed probes to four detected but unvisited
Heechee-metal sources in or near the solar system, and one of them had
been the Food Factory. As soon as they made contact we spun off a separate
exploitation company to deal with it-and now it was looking really
interesting.
"Harriet? Let me have the direct from the Food Factory again," I said.
The holo sprang up, the boy still talking excitedly in his shrill, squeaky
voice. I tried to catch the thread of what he was saying-something about a
Dead Man (only it wasn't a man, because its name was Henrietta) speaking
to him (so it wasn't dead?) about a Gateway mission she had been on (when?
why hadn't I heard of her?). It was all perplexing, so I had a better
idea. "Albert Einstein, please," I said, and the holo swirled to show the
sweet old lined face peering at me.
"Yes, Robin?" said my science program, reaching for his pipe and
tobacco as he almost always does when we talk.
"I'd like some best-guess estimates from you on the Food Factory and
the boy that turned up there."
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, tamping the tobacco with his thumb. "The
boy's name is Wan. He appears to be between fourteen and nineteen years of
age, probably toward the young end of the spread, and I would guess that
he is fully genetically human."
"Where does he come from?"
"Ah, that is conjectural, Robin. He speaks of a 'main station',
presumably another Heechee artifact in some ways resembling Gateway,
Gateway Two and the Food Factory itself, but without any self-evident
function. There do not appear to be any other living humans there. He
speaks of 'Dead Men', who appear to be some sort of computer program like
myself, although it is not clear whether they may not in fact be quite
different in origin. He also mentions living creatures he calls 'the Old
Ones' or 'the frog-jaws'. He has little contact with them, in fact avoids
it, and it is not clear where they come from."
I took a deep breath. "Heechee?"
"I don't know, Robin. I cannot even guess. By Occam's Razor one would
conjecture that living non-humans occupying a Heechee artifact might well
be Heechee-but there is no direct evidence. We have no idea what Heechee
look like, you know."
I did know. It was a sobering thought that we might soon find out.
"Anything else? Can you tell me what's happening with the tests to
bring the factory back?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, striking a match to the pipe. "But I'm
afraid there's no good news. The object appears to be course-programmed
and under full control. Whatever we do to it it counteracts."
It had been a close decision whether to leave the Food Factory out in
the Oort cloud and somehow try to ship food back to Earth, or bring the
thing itself in. Now it looked as though we had no choice. "Is there-do
you think it's under Heechee control?"
"There is no way to be sure as yet. Narrowly, I would conjecture not.
It appears to be an automatic response. However," he said, puffing on his
pipe, "there is something encouraging. May I show you some visuals from
the factory?"
"Please do," I said, but actually he hadn't waited; Albert is a
courteous program, but also a smart one. He disappeared and I was looking
at a scene of the boy, Wan, showing Peter Herter how to open what seemed
to be a hatch in the wall of a passage. Out of it he was pulling floppy
soft packages of something in bright red wrappings.
"Our assumption as to the nature of the artifact seems to be validated,
Robin. Those are edible and, according to Wan, they are continually
replenished. He has been living on them for most of his life and, as you
see, appears to be in excellent health, basically-I am afraid he is
catching a cold just now."
I looked at the clock over his shoulder-he always keeps it at the right
time for my sake. "That's all for now, then. Keep me posted if anything
that affects your conclusions turns up."
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, disappearing.
I started to get up. Talking of food reminded me that lunch should be
about ready, and I was not only hungry, I had plans for an afterlunch
break. I tied the robe around me-and then remembered the message about the
lawsuit. Lawsuits are nothing special in any rich man's life, but if
Morton wanted to talk to me I probably ought to listen.
He responded at once, sitting at his desk, leaning forward earnestly.
"We're being sued, Robin," he said. "The Food Factory Exploitation Corp.,
the Gateway Corp., plus Paul Hall, Dorema Herter-Hall and Peter Herter,
both in propria persona and as guardian for codefendant Janine Herter.
Plus the Foundation and you personally."
"I seem to have a lot of company, at least. Do I have to worry?" Pause.
Thoughtfully, "I think you might, a little. The suit is from Hanson Bover.
Trish's husband, or widower, depending on how you look at it." Morton was
shimmering a little. It's a defect in his program, and Essie keeps wanting
to fix it-but it doesn't affect his legal ability and I kind of like it.
"He has got himself declared conservator of Trish Bover's assets, and on
the basis of her first landing on the Food Factory he wants a full mission
completed share of whatever comes out of it."
That wasn't too funny. Even if we couldn't move the damn thing, with
the new developments that bonus might be quite a lot. "How can he do that?
She signed the standard contract, didn't she? So all we have to do is
produce the contract. She didn't come back, therefore she doesn't get a
share."
"That's the way to go if we wind up in court, yes, Robin. But there are
one or two rather ambiguous precedents. Maybe not even ambiguous-her
lawyer thinks they're good, even if they are a little old. The most
important one was a guy who signed a fifty-thousand-dollar contract to do
a tightrope walk over Niagara Falls. no performance, no pay. He fell off
halfway. The courts held that he had given the performance, so they had to
pay up."
"That's crazy, Morton!"
"That's the case law, Robin. But I only said you might have to worry a
little. I think probably we're all right, I'm just not sure we're all
right. We have to file an appearance within two days. Then we'll see how
it goes."
"All right. Shimmer away, Morton," I said, and got up, because by now I
was absolutely sure it was time for lunch. In fact, Essie was just coming
through the door, and, to my disappointment, she was fully dressed.
Essie is a beautiful woman, and one of the joys of being married to her
for five years is that every year she looks better to me than the year
before. She put her arm around my neck as we walked toward the dining
porch and turned her head to look at me. "What's matter, Robin?" she
asked.
"Nothing's the matter, dear S. Ya.," I said. "Only I was planning to
invite you to shower with me after lunch."
"You are randy old goat, old man," she said severely. "What is wrong
with showering after dark, when we will then naturally and inevitably go
to bed?"
"By dark I have to be in Washington. And tomorrow you're off to Tucson
for your conference, and this weekend I have to go for my medical. It
doesn't matter, though."
She sat down at the table. "You are also pitifully bad liar," she
observed. "Eat quickly, old man. One cannot take too many showers, after
all."
I said, "Do you know, Essie, that you are a thoroughly sensual
creature? It's one of your finest traits."
The quarterly statement on my food mines holdings was on my desk file
in my Washington suite before breakfast. It was even worse than I had
expected; at least two million dollars had burned up under the Wyoming
hills, and another fifty thousand or so more was smoldering away every day
until they got the fire all out. If they ever did. It did not mean I was
in trouble, but it might mean that a certain amount of easy credit would
no longer be easy. And not only did I know it, but by the time I got to
the Senate hearing room it appeared that all of Washington knew it too. I
testified quickly, along the same lines I had testified before, and when I
was through Senator Praggler recessed the hearing and took me out to
brunch. "I can't figure you out, Robin," he said. "Didn't your fire change
your mind about anything?"
"No, why should it? I'm talking about the long pull."
He shook his head. "Here's somebody with a sizeable position in food
mine stocks-you-begging for higher taxes on the mines! Doesn't make
sense."
I explained it to him all over again. Taken as a whole, the food mines
could easily afford to allocate, say, ten percent of their gross to
restoring the Rockies after scooping out the shale. But no company could
afford to do it on its own. If we did it, we'd just lose any competitive
position, we'd be undersold by everybody else. "So if you put through the
amendment, Tim," I said, "we'll all be forced to do it. Food prices will
go up, yes-but not a lot. My accountants say no more than eight or nine
dollars a year, per person. And we'll have an almost unspoiled countryside
again."
He laughed. "You're a weird one. With all your do-gooding, and with
your money, not to mention those things..." he nodded at the Out bangles I
still wore on my arm, three of them, signifying three missions that had
each scared the hell out of me when I earned them as a Gateway prospector,
"why don't you run for the Senate?"
"Don't want to, Tim. Besides, if I ran from New York I'd be running
against you or Sheila, and I don't want to do that. I don't spend enough
time in Hawaii to make a dent. And I'm not going to move back to Wyoming."
He patted me on the shoulder. "Just this once," he said, "I'm going to
use a little old-fashioned political muscle. I'll try to get your
amendment through for you, Robin, though God knows what your competitors
are going to do to try to stop it."
After I left him I dawdled back to the hotel. There was no particular
reason to hurry back to New York, with Essie in Tucson, so I decided to
spend the rest of the day in my hotel suite in Washington-a bad decision,
as it turned out, but I didn't know that then. I was thinking about
whether I minded being called a "do-gooder" or not. My old psychoanalyst
had helped me along to a point where I didn't mind taking credit for
things I thought deserved credit, but most of what I did I did for me. The
revegetation amendment wouldn't cost me a dime; we'd make it up in raising
prices, as I had explained. The money I put into space might pay off in
dollar profits-probably would, I figured-but anyway it was going there
because space was where my money had come from. And besides, I had some
unfinished business out there. Somewhere. I sat by my window on the
penthouse floor of the hotel, forty-five stories up, looking toward the
Capitol and the Washington Monument, and wondered if my unfinished
business was still alive. I hoped so. Even if she was hating me still.
Thinking about my unfinished business made me think of Essie, by now
arriving in Tucson, and that gave me a twinge of worry. We were about due
for another attack of the 130-day fever. I hadn't thought about that early
enough. I didn't like the idea of her being three thousand kilometers
away, in case it was a bad one. And, although I am not a jealous person,
even if it was a mild, but lecherous and orgiastic one, as they seemed to
be becoming more and more frequently, I really preferred that she be
lecherous and orgiastic with me.
Why not? I called Harriet and had her make me reservations on an
afternoon flight to Tucson. I could conduct my business as well from there
as anywhere else, if not quite as comfortably. And then I started
conducting some of it. Albert first. There was nothing significantly new,
he said, except that the boy seemed to be developing a bad cold. "We've
instructed the Herten-Hall party to administer standard antibiotics and
symptom-suppressants," he told me, "but they will not receive the message
for some weeks, of course."
"Serious?"
He frowned, puffing at his pipe. "Wan has never been exposed to most
viruses and bacteria," he said, "so I can't make any definite statement.
But, no, I would hope not. In any case, the expedition has medical
supplies and equipment capable of dealing with most pathologies."
"Do you know anything more about him?"
"A great deal, but not anything that changes my previous estimates,
Robin." Puff, puff. "His mother was Hispanic and his father
American-Anglo, and they were both Gateway prospectors. Or so it would
seem. So, apparently, in some way, were the personalities he refers to as
the 'Dead Men,' although it is still unclear just what those are."
"Albert," I said, "look up some old Gateway missions, at least ten
years back. See if you can find one that had an American and a Hispanic
woman on it-and didn't come back."
"Sure thing, Bob." Some day I must tell him to change to a snappier
vocabulary, but actually he works very well as he is. He said almost at
once, "There is no such mission. However, there was a launch which
contained a pregnant Hispanic woman, still unreported. Shall I display the
specs?"
"Sure thing, Albert," I said, but he is not programmed to pick up that
sort of nuance. The specs didn't tell much. I hadn't known the woman; she
was before my time. But she had taken a One out after surviving a mission
in which her husband and the other three crew members had been killed in a
Five. And had never been heard of again. The mission was a simple
go-out-and-see-what-you-get. What she had got had been a baby, in some
strange place.
"That doesn't account for Wan's father, does it?"
"No, Robin, but perhaps he was on another mission. If we assume that
the Dead Men are in some way related to unreturned missions, there must
have been several."
I said, "Are you suggesting that the Dead Men are actual prospectors?"
"Sure thing, Robin."
"But how? You mean their brains might have been preserved?"
"Doubt it, Robin," he said, rekindling his pipe thoughtfully. "There's
insufficient data, but I'd say whole-brain storage is no more than a
point-one probability."
"Then what are the other points?"
"Perhaps a readout of the chemical storage of memory-not a high
probability, perhaps put it at point-three. Which is still the highest
probability we've got. Voluntary interface on the part of the subjects-for
instance, if they talked all their memories onto tape somehow-really low.
Point-zero zero one, tops. Direct mental link-what you might call
telepathy of some sort-about the same. Means unknown, point-five plus. Of
course, Robin," he added hurriedly, "you realize that all of these
estimates are based on insufficient data and on inadequate hypotheses."
"I suppose you'd do better if you could talk to the Dead Men direct"
"Sure thing, Bob. and I am about to request such a hookup through the
Herter-Hall shipboard computer, but it needs careful programming
beforehand. It is not a very good computer, Robin." He hesitated. "Uh,
Robin? There is one other interesting thing."
"What's that?"
"As you know, several large ships were docked at the Food Factory when
it was discovered. It has been under frequent observation since, and the
number of ships remained the same-not counting the Herter-Hall ship and
the one in which Wan arrived two days ago, of course. But it is not
certain they are the same ships."
"What?"
"It isn't certain, Robin," he emphasized. "One Heechee ship looks very
much like another. But careful scan of the approach photos seems to show a
different orientation on the part of at least one of the large ones.
Possibly all three. As though the ships that were there had left, and new
ones had docked."
A cold feeling went up and down my spine. "Albert," I said, finding it
hard to get the words out, "do you know what that suggests to me?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said solemnly, "it suggests that the Food
Factory is still in operation. That it is converting the cometary gases to
CHON-food. And sending them somewhere."
I swallowed hard, but Albert was still talking. "Also," he said, "there
is quite a lot of ionizing radiation in the environment I have to admit I
don't know where it comes from."
"Is that dangerous to the Herter-Halls?"
"No, Robin, I would say not. no more than, say, piezovision broadcasts
are to you. It is not the risk, it is that I am puzzled about the source."
"Can't you ask the Herter-Halls to check?"
"Sure thing, Robin. I already have. But it'll take fifty days to get
the answer."
I dismissed him and leaned back in my chair to think about the Heechee
and their queer ways..
And then it hit.
My desk chairs are all built to maximum comfort and stability, but this
time I almost tipped it over. In a split second, I was in pain. Not just
in pain; I was dizzy, disoriented, even hallucinating. My head felt as
though it were about to burst, and my lungs seared like flame. I had never
felt so sick, in both mind and body, and at the same time I found myself
fantasizing incredible feats of sexual athletics.
I tried to get up, and couldn't. I flopped back in the chair,
absolutely helpless. "Harriet!" I croaked. "Get a doctor!"
It took her a full three seconds to respond, and then her image wavered
worse than Morton. "Mr. Broadhead," she said, looking queerly worried, "I
cannot account for it, but the circuits are all busy. I... I... I..." It
was not just her voice repeating, her head and body looked like a short
loop of video tape, over and over shaping the same beginning of a word and
snapping back to begin it again.
I fell off the chair onto the floor, and my last coherent thought was:
The fever.
It was back. Worse than I had ever felt it before. Worse, perhaps, than
I could live through, and so bad, so painful, so terrifyingly,
psychotically strange that I was not sure I wanted to.
The difference between the ages of ten and fourteen is immense. After
three and a half years in a photon-powered spaceship en route to the Oort
cloud, Janine was no longer the child who had left. She had not stopped
being a child. She had just reached that early maturation plateau wherein
the individual recognizes that it still has a great deal of growing to do.
Janine was not in a hurry to become an adult. She was simply working at
getting the job done. Every day. All the time. With whatever tools came to
hand.
When she left the others, on the day when she met Wan, she was not
particularly searching for anything. She simply wanted to be alone. Not
for any really private purpose. Not even because, or not only because, she
was tired of her family. What she wanted was something of her own, an
experience not shared, an evaluation not helped by always-present
grownups; she wanted the look and touch and smell of the strangeness of
the Food Factory, and she wanted it to be hers.
So she pushed herself at random along the passages, sucking from time
to time at a squeeze bottle of coffee. Or what seemed to be "coffee" to
her. It was a habit Janine had learned from her father, although, if you
had asked her, she would have denied that she had learned any.
All of her senses thirsted for inputs. The Food Factory was the most
fabulously exciting, delightfully scary thing that had ever happened to
her. More than the launch from Earth when she was a mere child. More than
the stained shorts that had announced she had become a woman. More than
anything. Even the bare walls of the passages were exciting, because they
were Heechee metal, a zillion years old, and still glowing with the gentle
blue light their makers had built into them. (What sort of eyes had seen
by that light when it was new?) She patted herself gently from chamber to
chamber, only the balls of her feet ever touching the floor. In this room
were walls of rubbery shelves (what had they held?), in that squatted a
huge truncated sphere, top and bottom sliced off, mirror chrome in
appearance, queerly powdery to the touch-what was it for? Some of the
things she could guess at. The thing that looked like a table certainly
was a table. (The lip around it was no doubt there to keep things from
skittering off it in the Food Factory's gentle gravity.) Some of the
objects had been identified for them by Vera, accessing the information
stores of Heechee artifacts cataloged by the big data sources back on
Earth. The cubicles with cobwebby green tracings on the walls were thought
to have been for sleeping accommodations; but who was to know if dumb Vera
was right? no matter. The objects themselves were thrilling. So was the
presence of space to move around in. Even to get lost in. For until they
reached the Food Factory, Janine had never, ever, not once in her life,
had the chance to get lost. The idea made her itch with scary pleasure.
Especially as the quite adult part of her fourteen-year-old brain was
always aware that, no matter how lost she got, the Food Factory simply was
not large enough for her to stay lost.
So it was a safe thrill. Or seemed so.
Until she found herself trapped by the farside docks, as
something-Heechee? Space monster? Crazed old castaway with a knife? came
shambling out of the hidden passages toward her.
And then it was none of those things, it was Wan.
Of course, she didn't know his name. "Don't you come any closer!" she
whimpered, heart in mouth, radio in hand, forearms hugged across her new
breasts. He didn't. He stopped. He stared at her, eyes popping, mouth
open, tongue almost hanging out. He was tall, skinny. His face was
triangular, with a long, beaked nose. He was wearing what looked like a
skirt and what looked like a tank-top, both dirty. He smelled male. He was
shaking as he sniffed the air, and he was young. Surely he was not much
older than Janine herself and the only person less than triple her age she
had seen in years; and when he let himself drop gently to his knees and
began to do what Janine had never seen any other person do she moaned
while she giggled-amusement, relief, shock, hysteria. The shock was not at
what he was doing. The shock came from meeting a boy. In her sleep Janine
had dreamed wildly, but never of this.
For the next few days Janine could not bear to let Wan out of her
sight. She felt herself to be his mother, his playmate, his teacher, his
wife. "No, Wan! Sip it slowly, it's hot!"
"Wan, do you mean to say you've been all alone since you were three?"
"You have really beautiful eyes, Wan." She didn't mind that he was not
sophisticated enough to respond by telling her that she had beautiful
eyes, too, because she could definitely tell that she fascinated him in
all her parts.
The others could tell that, too, of course. Janine did not mind. Wan
had plenty of senses-sharp, eyes-bright, obsessed adoration to share
around. He slept even less than she. She appreciated that, at first,
because it meant there was more of Wan to share, but then she could see
that he was becoming exhausted. Even ill. When he began to sweat and
tremble, in the room with the glittering silver-blue cocoon, she was the
one who cried, "Lurvy! I think he's going to be sick!" When he lurched
toward the couch she flew to his side, fingers stretched to test his dry
and burning forehead. The closing cover of the cocoon almost trapped her
arm, gouging a long, deep slash from wrist to knuckles on her hand.
"Paul," she shouted, drawing back, "we've got to..."
And then the 130-day madness hit them all. Worst of any time. Different
from any time. Between one heartbeat and the next Janine was sick.
Janine had never been sick. Now and then a bruise, a cramp, a sniffle.
Nothing more. For most of her life she had been under Full Medical and
sickness simply did not occur. She did not comprehend what was happening
to her. Her body raged with fever and pain. She hallucinated monstrous
strange figures, in some of whom she recognized her caricatured family;
others were simply terrifying and strange. She even saw herself-hugely
bosomed and grossly hipped, but herself-and in her belly rumbled a frenzy
to thrust and thrust into all the seen and imagined cavities of that
fantasy something that, even in fantasy, she did not have. None of this
was clear. Nothing was clear. The agonies and the insanities came in
waves. Between them, for a second or two now and then, she caught glimpses
of reality. The steely blue glow from the walls. Lurvy, crouched and
whimpering beside her. Her father, vomiting in the passage. The chrome and
blue cocoon, with Wan writhing and babbling inside the mesh. It was not
reason or will that made her claw at the lid and, on the hundredth, or
thousandth, try to get it open; but she did it, at last, and dragged him
whimpering and shaking out.
The hallucinations stopped at once.
Not quite as quickly, the pain, the nausea and the terror. But they
stopped. They were all shuddering and reeling still, all but the boy, who
was unconscious and breathing in a way that terrified Janine, great,
hoarse, snoring gasps. "Help, Lurvy!" she screamed. "He's dying!" Her
sister was already beside her, thumb on the boy's pulse, shaking her head
to clear it as she peered dizzily at his eyes.
"Dehydrated. Fever. Come on," she cried, struggling with Wan's arms.
"Help me get him back to the ship. He needs saline, antibiotics, a
febrifuge, maybe some gamma globulin..."
It took them nearly twenty minutes to tow Wan to the ship, and Janine
was in terror that he would die at every bounding, slow-motion step. Lurvy
raced ahead the last hundred meters, and by the time Paul and Janine had
struggled him through the airlock she had already unsealed the medic kit
and was shouting orders. "Put him down. Make him swallow this. Take a
blood sample and check virus and antibody titers. Send a priority to base,
tell them we need medical instructions-if he lives long enough to get
them!"
Paul helped them get Wan's clothes off and the boy wrapped in one of
the Payter's blankets. Then he sent the message. But he knew, they all
knew, that the problem of whether Wan lived or died would not be solved
from Earth. Not with a round-trip time of seven weeks before they could
get an answer. Payter was swearing over the bio-assay mobile unit. Lurvy
and Janine were working on the boy. Paul, without saying a word to anyone,
struggled into his EVA suit and exited into - space, where he spent an
exhausting hour and a half redirecting the transmitter dishes-the main one
to the bright double star that was the planet Neptune and its moon, the
other to the point in space occupied by the Garfeld mission. Then,
clinging to the hull, he radio-commanded Vera to repeat the SOS to each of
them at max power. They might be monitoring. They might not When Vera
signaled that the messages were sent he reoriented the big dish to Earth.
It took them three hours, first to last, and whether either of them would
receive his message was doubtful. It was no less doubtful that either
would have much help to offer. The Garfeld ship was smaller and less well
equipped than their own, and the people at the Triton base were
short-timers. But if either did they could hope for a message of aid-or at
least sympathy, a lot faster than from Earth.
In an hour Wan's fever began to recede. In twelve the twitchings and
babblings diminished and he slept normally. But he was still very sick.
Mother and playmate, teacher and at-least-fantasy wife, now Janine
became Wan's nurse as well. After the first round of medication, she would
not even let Lurvy give him his shots. She went without sleep to sponge
his brow. When he soiled himself in his coma she cleaned him fastidiously.
She had no concentration left for anything else. The amused or concerned
looks and words from her family left her untouched, until she brushed
Wan's unkempt hair off his face, and Paul made a patronizing comment.
Janine heard the jealousy in the tone and flared, "Paul, you're sickening!
Wan needs me to take care of him!"
"And you do enjoy it, don't you?" he snapped. He was really angry. Of
course, that sparked more anger in Janine; but her father put in, gently
enough, "Let the girl be a girl, Paul. Were you not yourself once young?
Come, let us examine this Trdumeplatz again..."
Janine surprised herself by letting the peacemaker succeed; it had been
a marvelous chance of a furious spat, but that was not where her interests
lay. She took time for a tight, small grin about Paul's jealousy, because
that was a new service stripe to sew on her sleeve, and then back to Wan.
As he mended he became even more interesting. From time to time he
woke, and spoke to her. When he was asleep she studied him. Face so dark,
body olive; but from waist to thigh he bad the palest skin, the color of
bread dough, taut over his sharp bones. Scant body hair. None on his face
except a soft, almost invisible strand or two-more lip-lashes than
mustache.
Janine knew that Lurvy and her father made a joke of her, and that Paul
was actually jealous of the attentions he had avoided so long. It made a
nice change. She had status. For the first time in her life, what she was
doing was the most significant activity of the group. The others came to
her to sue for permission to question Wan, and when she thought he was
tiring they accepted her command to stop.
Besides, Wan fascinated her. She mapped him against all her previous
experience of Men, to his advantage. Even against her pen-pals, Wan was
better looking than the ice-skater, smarter than the actors, almost as
tall as the basketball player. And against all of them, especially against
the only two males she had been within tens of millions of kilometers of
in years, Wan was so marvelously young. And Paul and her father, not. The
backs of old Peter's hands bore irregular blotches of caramel-colored
pigment, which was gross. But at least the old man kept himself neat. Even
dainty, in the continental way-even clipped the hairs that grew inside his
ears with tiny silver scissors, because Janine had caught him at it. While
Paul-In one of her skirmishes with Lurvy, Janine had snarled, "That's what
you go to bed With? An ape with hairy ears? I'd puke."
So she fed Wan, and read to him, and drowsed over him while he slept.
She shampooed his hair, and trimmed it to a soup-bowl mop, allowing Lurvy
to help her get it even, and blow-dried it smooth. She washed his clothes
and, spurning Lurvy for this, patched them and even cut down some of
Paul's to fit him. He accepted it all, every bit, and enjoyed it as much
as she.
As he grew stronger, he no longer needed her as much, and she was less
able to protect him from the questions of the others. But they were
protective, too. Even old Peter. The computer, Vera, burrowed into its
medical programs and prepared a long list of tests to be performed on the
boy. "Assassin!" raged Peter. "Has it no understanding of a young man who
has been so close to death that it wishes to finish it?" It was not
entirely consideration. Peter had questions of his own, and he had been
asking them when Janine would allow it, sulking and fidgeting when she
would not. "That bed of yours, Wan, tell me again what you feel when you
are in it? As though you are somehow a part of millions of people? And
also they of you, isn't that so?" But when Janine accused him of
interfering with Wan's recovery, the old man desisted. Though never for
long.
Then Wan was well enough for Janine to allow herself a full night's
sleep in her own private, and when she woke her sister was at Vera's
console. Wan was holding to the back of her chair, grinning and frowning
at the unfamiliar machine, and Lurvy was reading off to him his medical
report. "Your vital signs are normal, your weight is picking up, your
antibody levels are in the normal range-I think you're going to be all
right now, Wan."
"So now," cried her father, "at last we can talk? About this
faster-than-light radio, the machines, the place he comes from, the
dreaming room?" Janine hurled herself into the group.
"Leave him alone!" she snarled. But Wan shook his head.
"Let them ask what they like, Janine," he said in his shrill, breathy
voice.
"Now?"
"Yes, now!" stormed her father. "Now, this minute! Paul, come you here
and tell this boy what we must know."
They had planned this, Janine realized, the three of them; but Wan did
not object, and she could not pretend he was unfit for questioning any
longer. She marched over and sat beside him. If she could not prevent this
interrogation, at least she would be there to protect him. She gave formal
permission, coldly: "Go ahead, Paul. Say what you want to say, but don't
tire him out."
Paul looked at her ironically, but spoke to Wan. "For more than a dozen
years," he said, "every hundred and thirty days or so, the whole Earth has
gone crazy. It looks like it's your fault,
The boy frowned, but said nothing. His public defender spoke for him.
"Why are you picking on him?" she demanded.
"No one is 'picking', Janine. But what we experienced was the fever. It
can't be a coincidence. When Wan gets into that contraption he broadcasts
to the world." Paul shook his head. "Dear lad, do you have any idea of how
much trouble you've caused? Ever since you began coming here, your dreams
have been shared by millions of people. Billions! Sometimes you were
peaceful, and your dreams were peaceful, and that wasn't so bad. Sometimes
you weren't. I don't want you to blame yourself," he added kindly,
forestalling Janine, "but thousands and thousands of people have died. And
the property damage-Wan, you just can't imagine."
Wan shrilled defensively, "I have never harmed anyone!" he was unable
to take in just what he was accused of, but there was no doubt in his mind
that Paul was accusing. Lurvy put her hand on his arm.
"I wish it were so, Wan," she said. "The important thing is, you
mustn't do that again."
"No more dreaming in the couch?"
"No, Wan." He looked to Janine for guidance, then shrugged. "But that
is not all," Paul put in. "You have to help us. Tell us everything you
know. About the couch. About the Dead Men. About the faster-than-light
radio, the food..."
"Why should I?" Wan demanded.
Patiently, Paul coaxed: "Because in that way you can make up for the
fever. I don't think you understand how important you are, Wan. The
knowledge in your head might mean saving people from starvation. Millions
of lives, Wan."
Wan frowned over that concept for a moment, but "millions" was
meaningless to him as applying to human beings-he had not yet adjusted to
"five". "You make me angry," he scolded.
"I don't mean to, Wan."
"It is not what you mean to, it is what you do. You have just told me
that," the boy grumbled spitefully. "All right. What do you want?"
"We want you to tell us everything you know," Paul said promptly. "Oh,
not all at once. But as you remember. And we want you to go through this
whole Food Factory with us and explain everything in it-as far as you can,
I mean."
"This place? There is nothing here but the dreaming room, and you won't
let me use that!"
"It is all new to us, Wan."
"It is nothing! The water does not run, there is no library, the Dead
Men are hard to talk to, nothing grows! At home I have everything, and
much of it is working, so you can see for yourself."
"You make it sound like heaven, Wan."
"See for yourself! If I can't dream, there is no reason to stay here!"
Paul looked at the others, perplexed. "Could we do that?"
"Of course! My ship will take us there-not all of you, no," Wan
corrected himself. "But some. We can leave the old man here. There is no
woman for him, anyway, so there is no pairing to destroy. Or even," he
added cunningly, "only Janine and I can go. Then there will be more room
in the ship. We can bring you back machines, books, treasures..."
"Forget that, Wan," Janine said wisely. "They'll never let us do that."
"Not so fast, my girl," her father said. "That is not for you to
decide. What the boy is saying is interesting. If he can open the gates of
heaven for us, who are we to stand outside in the cold?"
Janine studied her father, but his expression was bland. "You don't
mean you'd let Wan and me go there alone?"
"That," he said, "is not the question. The question is, how can we most
rapidly complete this God-bedamned mission and return to our reward. There
is no other."
"Well," said Lurvy after a moment, "we don't have to decide that right
now. Heaven will wait for us, for all our lives."
Her father said, "That is true, yes. But, expressed concretely, some of
us have less lives to wait than others."
Every day new messages came in from Earth. Infuriatingly, these related
only to a remote past, before Wan, irrelevant to everything they were
doing or planning now: Submit chemical analyses of this. X-ray that.
Measure these other things. By now the slow packets of photons that
transmitted the word of their reaching the Food Factory had arrived at
Downlink-Vera on Earth, and perhaps replies were already on their way. But
they would not arrive for weeks. The base at Triton had a smarter computer
than Vera, and Paul and Lurvy argued for transmitting all their data there
for interpretation and advice. Old Peter rejected the idea with fury.
"Those wanderers, gypsies? Why should we give them what costs us so much
to get!"
"But nobody's questioning us, Pa," Lurvy coaxed. "It's all ours. The
contracts spell it all out."
"No!"
So they fed all that Wan told them into Shipboard-Vera, and Vera's
small, slow intelligence painfully sorted the bits into patterns. Even
into graphics. The external appearance of the place Wan had come from-it
was probably not a very good likeness, because it was apparent that Wan
had not had the curiosity to study it very closely. The corridors. The
machines. The Heechee themselves; and each time Wan offered corrections:
"Ah, no. They both have beards, males and females. Even when they are
quite young. And the breasts on the females are:" He held his hands just
below his rib cage, to show how low they swung. "And you do not give them
the right smell."
"Holos don't smell at all, Wan," said Paul.
"Yes, exactly! But they do, you see. In rut, they smell very much."
And Vera mumbled and whined over the new data, and shakily drew in the
new revisions. After hours of this, what had been a game for Wan turned
into drudgery. When he began saying, "Yes, it is perfect, that is exactly
how the Dead Men's room looks," they all understood that he was merely
agreeing with anything that would stop the boredom for a while, and gave
him a rest. Then Janine would take him for a wander through the corridors,
sound and vision pickups strapped to her shoulder, in case he said
something of value or pointed out a treasure, and they spoke of other
"No, why should I?"
"Harriet? What's that about behaving improperly?" I asked. Harriet's
voice came hesitantly. "He, uh, he brought himself to orgasm, Mr.
Broadhead. Right in front of Janine Herter."
I couldn't help it, I broke out laughing. "Essie," I said to my wife,
"I think you made her a little too ladylike." But that wasn't what I was
laughing at. It was the plain incongruity of the thing. I had
guessed-anything. Anything but this: a Heechee, a space pirate,
Martians-God knows what, but not a horny teen-aged boy.
There was a scrabble of steel claws from behind and something jumped on
my shoulder. "Down, Squiffy," I snapped.
Essie said, "Just let him nuzzle neck for a minute. He'll go away."
"He isn't dainty in his personal habits," I snarled. "Can't we get rid
of him?"
"Na, na, galubka," she said soothingly, patting the top of my head as
she got up. "Want Full Medical, don't you? Squiffy comes along." She
kissed me and wandered out of the room, leaving me to think about the
thing that, to my somewhat surprise, was making all sorts of tiny but
discomforting stirrings inside me. To see a Heechee! Well, we hadn't-but
what if we did?
When the first Venus explorers discovered the traces the Heechee had
left, glowing blue-lined empty tunnels, spindle-shaped caves, it was a
shock. A few artifacts, another shock-what were they? There were the
scrolls of metal somebody named "prayer fans" (but did the Heechee pray,
and if so to whom?) There were the glowing little beads called "fire
pearls", but they weren't pearls, and they weren't burning. Then someone
found the Gateway asteroid, and the biggest shock of all, because on it
were a couple of hundred working spaceships. Only you couldn't direct
them. You could get in and go, and that was it... and what you found when
you got there was shock, shock, shock, shock.
I knew. I had had the shocks, on my three silly missions-No. Two silly
missions. And then one terribly unsilly one. It had made me rich and
deprived me of somebody I loved, and what is silly about either of those
things?
And ever since then the Heechee, dead half a million years, not even a
written word left to tell what they were up to, had permeated every part
of our world. It was all questions, and not very many answers. We didn't
even know what they called themselves, certainly not "Heechee", because
that was just a name the explorers made up for them. We had no idea what
these remote and godlike creatures called themselves. But we didn't know
what God called Himself, either. Jehovah, Jupiter, Baal, Allah-those were
names people made up. Who knew by what name He was known to His buddies?
I was trying to let myself feel what I might have felt if the stranger
in the Food Factory had actually been Heechee when the toilet flushed,
Essie came out and Squiffy made a dash for the bowl. There are indignities
to having Full Medical coverage, and a mobile bio-assay unit is one of
them.
"You are wasting my program time!" Essie scolded, and I realized that
Harriet had been sitting patiently in the tank, waiting to be told to get
on with her information about the other claims on my attention. The report
from the Food Factory was all being taped and stored in any case, so Essie
went to her own office to deal with her own priorities, I told Harriet to
start the cook on lunch, and then I let her do her secretarial duties.
"You have an appointment to testify before the Senate Ways and Means
Committee tomorrow morning, Mr. Broadhead."
"I know. I'll be there."
"You're due for your next checkup this weekend. Shall I confirm the
appointment?"
That's one of the penalties of Full Medical, and besides Essie
insists-she's twenty years younger than I, and reminds me of it. "All
right, let's get it over with."
"You are being sued by one Hanson Bover, and Morton wants to talk to
you about it. Your consolidated statement for the quarter came in and is
on your desk file-except for the food mine holdings, which will not be
complete until tomorrow. And there are a number of minor messages-most of
which I have already dealt with-for your review at your convenience."
"Thank you. That's all for now." The tank went transparent and I leaned
back in my chair to think.
I didn't need to see the consolidated statement-I already pretty well
knew what it would say. The real estate investments were performing
nicely; the little bit I had left in sea farming was moving toward a
record profit year. Everything was solid, except for the food mines. The
last 130-day fever had cost us. I couldn't blame the guys in Cody, they
weren't any more responsible than I was when the fever bit. But they had
somehow let the thermal drilling get out of control, and five thousand
acres of our shale were burning away underground. It had taken three
months to get the mine back in operation at all, and we still didn't know
what it was going to cost. no wonder their quarterly statement was late.
But that was only an annoyance, not a disaster. I was too well
diversified to be killed by any one sector going bad. I wouldn't have been
in the food mines except for Morton's advice; the extraction allowance
made it a really good thing, tax-wise. (But I'd sold most of my
sea-farming holdings to buy in.) Then Morton figured out that I still
needed a tax shelter, so we started The Broadhead Institute for
Extra-Solar Research. The Institute owns all my stock, but I vote it, and
I vote it for what I want to do. I got us into the coownership with the
Gateway Corporation that financed probes to four detected but unvisited
Heechee-metal sources in or near the solar system, and one of them had
been the Food Factory. As soon as they made contact we spun off a separate
exploitation company to deal with it-and now it was looking really
interesting.
"Harriet? Let me have the direct from the Food Factory again," I said.
The holo sprang up, the boy still talking excitedly in his shrill, squeaky
voice. I tried to catch the thread of what he was saying-something about a
Dead Man (only it wasn't a man, because its name was Henrietta) speaking
to him (so it wasn't dead?) about a Gateway mission she had been on (when?
why hadn't I heard of her?). It was all perplexing, so I had a better
idea. "Albert Einstein, please," I said, and the holo swirled to show the
sweet old lined face peering at me.
"Yes, Robin?" said my science program, reaching for his pipe and
tobacco as he almost always does when we talk.
"I'd like some best-guess estimates from you on the Food Factory and
the boy that turned up there."
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, tamping the tobacco with his thumb. "The
boy's name is Wan. He appears to be between fourteen and nineteen years of
age, probably toward the young end of the spread, and I would guess that
he is fully genetically human."
"Where does he come from?"
"Ah, that is conjectural, Robin. He speaks of a 'main station',
presumably another Heechee artifact in some ways resembling Gateway,
Gateway Two and the Food Factory itself, but without any self-evident
function. There do not appear to be any other living humans there. He
speaks of 'Dead Men', who appear to be some sort of computer program like
myself, although it is not clear whether they may not in fact be quite
different in origin. He also mentions living creatures he calls 'the Old
Ones' or 'the frog-jaws'. He has little contact with them, in fact avoids
it, and it is not clear where they come from."
I took a deep breath. "Heechee?"
"I don't know, Robin. I cannot even guess. By Occam's Razor one would
conjecture that living non-humans occupying a Heechee artifact might well
be Heechee-but there is no direct evidence. We have no idea what Heechee
look like, you know."
I did know. It was a sobering thought that we might soon find out.
"Anything else? Can you tell me what's happening with the tests to
bring the factory back?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, striking a match to the pipe. "But I'm
afraid there's no good news. The object appears to be course-programmed
and under full control. Whatever we do to it it counteracts."
It had been a close decision whether to leave the Food Factory out in
the Oort cloud and somehow try to ship food back to Earth, or bring the
thing itself in. Now it looked as though we had no choice. "Is there-do
you think it's under Heechee control?"
"There is no way to be sure as yet. Narrowly, I would conjecture not.
It appears to be an automatic response. However," he said, puffing on his
pipe, "there is something encouraging. May I show you some visuals from
the factory?"
"Please do," I said, but actually he hadn't waited; Albert is a
courteous program, but also a smart one. He disappeared and I was looking
at a scene of the boy, Wan, showing Peter Herter how to open what seemed
to be a hatch in the wall of a passage. Out of it he was pulling floppy
soft packages of something in bright red wrappings.
"Our assumption as to the nature of the artifact seems to be validated,
Robin. Those are edible and, according to Wan, they are continually
replenished. He has been living on them for most of his life and, as you
see, appears to be in excellent health, basically-I am afraid he is
catching a cold just now."
I looked at the clock over his shoulder-he always keeps it at the right
time for my sake. "That's all for now, then. Keep me posted if anything
that affects your conclusions turns up."
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, disappearing.
I started to get up. Talking of food reminded me that lunch should be
about ready, and I was not only hungry, I had plans for an afterlunch
break. I tied the robe around me-and then remembered the message about the
lawsuit. Lawsuits are nothing special in any rich man's life, but if
Morton wanted to talk to me I probably ought to listen.
He responded at once, sitting at his desk, leaning forward earnestly.
"We're being sued, Robin," he said. "The Food Factory Exploitation Corp.,
the Gateway Corp., plus Paul Hall, Dorema Herter-Hall and Peter Herter,
both in propria persona and as guardian for codefendant Janine Herter.
Plus the Foundation and you personally."
"I seem to have a lot of company, at least. Do I have to worry?" Pause.
Thoughtfully, "I think you might, a little. The suit is from Hanson Bover.
Trish's husband, or widower, depending on how you look at it." Morton was
shimmering a little. It's a defect in his program, and Essie keeps wanting
to fix it-but it doesn't affect his legal ability and I kind of like it.
"He has got himself declared conservator of Trish Bover's assets, and on
the basis of her first landing on the Food Factory he wants a full mission
completed share of whatever comes out of it."
That wasn't too funny. Even if we couldn't move the damn thing, with
the new developments that bonus might be quite a lot. "How can he do that?
She signed the standard contract, didn't she? So all we have to do is
produce the contract. She didn't come back, therefore she doesn't get a
share."
"That's the way to go if we wind up in court, yes, Robin. But there are
one or two rather ambiguous precedents. Maybe not even ambiguous-her
lawyer thinks they're good, even if they are a little old. The most
important one was a guy who signed a fifty-thousand-dollar contract to do
a tightrope walk over Niagara Falls. no performance, no pay. He fell off
halfway. The courts held that he had given the performance, so they had to
pay up."
"That's crazy, Morton!"
"That's the case law, Robin. But I only said you might have to worry a
little. I think probably we're all right, I'm just not sure we're all
right. We have to file an appearance within two days. Then we'll see how
it goes."
"All right. Shimmer away, Morton," I said, and got up, because by now I
was absolutely sure it was time for lunch. In fact, Essie was just coming
through the door, and, to my disappointment, she was fully dressed.
Essie is a beautiful woman, and one of the joys of being married to her
for five years is that every year she looks better to me than the year
before. She put her arm around my neck as we walked toward the dining
porch and turned her head to look at me. "What's matter, Robin?" she
asked.
"Nothing's the matter, dear S. Ya.," I said. "Only I was planning to
invite you to shower with me after lunch."
"You are randy old goat, old man," she said severely. "What is wrong
with showering after dark, when we will then naturally and inevitably go
to bed?"
"By dark I have to be in Washington. And tomorrow you're off to Tucson
for your conference, and this weekend I have to go for my medical. It
doesn't matter, though."
She sat down at the table. "You are also pitifully bad liar," she
observed. "Eat quickly, old man. One cannot take too many showers, after
all."
I said, "Do you know, Essie, that you are a thoroughly sensual
creature? It's one of your finest traits."
The quarterly statement on my food mines holdings was on my desk file
in my Washington suite before breakfast. It was even worse than I had
expected; at least two million dollars had burned up under the Wyoming
hills, and another fifty thousand or so more was smoldering away every day
until they got the fire all out. If they ever did. It did not mean I was
in trouble, but it might mean that a certain amount of easy credit would
no longer be easy. And not only did I know it, but by the time I got to
the Senate hearing room it appeared that all of Washington knew it too. I
testified quickly, along the same lines I had testified before, and when I
was through Senator Praggler recessed the hearing and took me out to
brunch. "I can't figure you out, Robin," he said. "Didn't your fire change
your mind about anything?"
"No, why should it? I'm talking about the long pull."
He shook his head. "Here's somebody with a sizeable position in food
mine stocks-you-begging for higher taxes on the mines! Doesn't make
sense."
I explained it to him all over again. Taken as a whole, the food mines
could easily afford to allocate, say, ten percent of their gross to
restoring the Rockies after scooping out the shale. But no company could
afford to do it on its own. If we did it, we'd just lose any competitive
position, we'd be undersold by everybody else. "So if you put through the
amendment, Tim," I said, "we'll all be forced to do it. Food prices will
go up, yes-but not a lot. My accountants say no more than eight or nine
dollars a year, per person. And we'll have an almost unspoiled countryside
again."
He laughed. "You're a weird one. With all your do-gooding, and with
your money, not to mention those things..." he nodded at the Out bangles I
still wore on my arm, three of them, signifying three missions that had
each scared the hell out of me when I earned them as a Gateway prospector,
"why don't you run for the Senate?"
"Don't want to, Tim. Besides, if I ran from New York I'd be running
against you or Sheila, and I don't want to do that. I don't spend enough
time in Hawaii to make a dent. And I'm not going to move back to Wyoming."
He patted me on the shoulder. "Just this once," he said, "I'm going to
use a little old-fashioned political muscle. I'll try to get your
amendment through for you, Robin, though God knows what your competitors
are going to do to try to stop it."
After I left him I dawdled back to the hotel. There was no particular
reason to hurry back to New York, with Essie in Tucson, so I decided to
spend the rest of the day in my hotel suite in Washington-a bad decision,
as it turned out, but I didn't know that then. I was thinking about
whether I minded being called a "do-gooder" or not. My old psychoanalyst
had helped me along to a point where I didn't mind taking credit for
things I thought deserved credit, but most of what I did I did for me. The
revegetation amendment wouldn't cost me a dime; we'd make it up in raising
prices, as I had explained. The money I put into space might pay off in
dollar profits-probably would, I figured-but anyway it was going there
because space was where my money had come from. And besides, I had some
unfinished business out there. Somewhere. I sat by my window on the
penthouse floor of the hotel, forty-five stories up, looking toward the
Capitol and the Washington Monument, and wondered if my unfinished
business was still alive. I hoped so. Even if she was hating me still.
Thinking about my unfinished business made me think of Essie, by now
arriving in Tucson, and that gave me a twinge of worry. We were about due
for another attack of the 130-day fever. I hadn't thought about that early
enough. I didn't like the idea of her being three thousand kilometers
away, in case it was a bad one. And, although I am not a jealous person,
even if it was a mild, but lecherous and orgiastic one, as they seemed to
be becoming more and more frequently, I really preferred that she be
lecherous and orgiastic with me.
Why not? I called Harriet and had her make me reservations on an
afternoon flight to Tucson. I could conduct my business as well from there
as anywhere else, if not quite as comfortably. And then I started
conducting some of it. Albert first. There was nothing significantly new,
he said, except that the boy seemed to be developing a bad cold. "We've
instructed the Herten-Hall party to administer standard antibiotics and
symptom-suppressants," he told me, "but they will not receive the message
for some weeks, of course."
"Serious?"
He frowned, puffing at his pipe. "Wan has never been exposed to most
viruses and bacteria," he said, "so I can't make any definite statement.
But, no, I would hope not. In any case, the expedition has medical
supplies and equipment capable of dealing with most pathologies."
"Do you know anything more about him?"
"A great deal, but not anything that changes my previous estimates,
Robin." Puff, puff. "His mother was Hispanic and his father
American-Anglo, and they were both Gateway prospectors. Or so it would
seem. So, apparently, in some way, were the personalities he refers to as
the 'Dead Men,' although it is still unclear just what those are."
"Albert," I said, "look up some old Gateway missions, at least ten
years back. See if you can find one that had an American and a Hispanic
woman on it-and didn't come back."
"Sure thing, Bob." Some day I must tell him to change to a snappier
vocabulary, but actually he works very well as he is. He said almost at
once, "There is no such mission. However, there was a launch which
contained a pregnant Hispanic woman, still unreported. Shall I display the
specs?"
"Sure thing, Albert," I said, but he is not programmed to pick up that
sort of nuance. The specs didn't tell much. I hadn't known the woman; she
was before my time. But she had taken a One out after surviving a mission
in which her husband and the other three crew members had been killed in a
Five. And had never been heard of again. The mission was a simple
go-out-and-see-what-you-get. What she had got had been a baby, in some
strange place.
"That doesn't account for Wan's father, does it?"
"No, Robin, but perhaps he was on another mission. If we assume that
the Dead Men are in some way related to unreturned missions, there must
have been several."
I said, "Are you suggesting that the Dead Men are actual prospectors?"
"Sure thing, Robin."
"But how? You mean their brains might have been preserved?"
"Doubt it, Robin," he said, rekindling his pipe thoughtfully. "There's
insufficient data, but I'd say whole-brain storage is no more than a
point-one probability."
"Then what are the other points?"
"Perhaps a readout of the chemical storage of memory-not a high
probability, perhaps put it at point-three. Which is still the highest
probability we've got. Voluntary interface on the part of the subjects-for
instance, if they talked all their memories onto tape somehow-really low.
Point-zero zero one, tops. Direct mental link-what you might call
telepathy of some sort-about the same. Means unknown, point-five plus. Of
course, Robin," he added hurriedly, "you realize that all of these
estimates are based on insufficient data and on inadequate hypotheses."
"I suppose you'd do better if you could talk to the Dead Men direct"
"Sure thing, Bob. and I am about to request such a hookup through the
Herter-Hall shipboard computer, but it needs careful programming
beforehand. It is not a very good computer, Robin." He hesitated. "Uh,
Robin? There is one other interesting thing."
"What's that?"
"As you know, several large ships were docked at the Food Factory when
it was discovered. It has been under frequent observation since, and the
number of ships remained the same-not counting the Herter-Hall ship and
the one in which Wan arrived two days ago, of course. But it is not
certain they are the same ships."
"What?"
"It isn't certain, Robin," he emphasized. "One Heechee ship looks very
much like another. But careful scan of the approach photos seems to show a
different orientation on the part of at least one of the large ones.
Possibly all three. As though the ships that were there had left, and new
ones had docked."
A cold feeling went up and down my spine. "Albert," I said, finding it
hard to get the words out, "do you know what that suggests to me?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said solemnly, "it suggests that the Food
Factory is still in operation. That it is converting the cometary gases to
CHON-food. And sending them somewhere."
I swallowed hard, but Albert was still talking. "Also," he said, "there
is quite a lot of ionizing radiation in the environment I have to admit I
don't know where it comes from."
"Is that dangerous to the Herter-Halls?"
"No, Robin, I would say not. no more than, say, piezovision broadcasts
are to you. It is not the risk, it is that I am puzzled about the source."
"Can't you ask the Herter-Halls to check?"
"Sure thing, Robin. I already have. But it'll take fifty days to get
the answer."
I dismissed him and leaned back in my chair to think about the Heechee
and their queer ways..
And then it hit.
My desk chairs are all built to maximum comfort and stability, but this
time I almost tipped it over. In a split second, I was in pain. Not just
in pain; I was dizzy, disoriented, even hallucinating. My head felt as
though it were about to burst, and my lungs seared like flame. I had never
felt so sick, in both mind and body, and at the same time I found myself
fantasizing incredible feats of sexual athletics.
I tried to get up, and couldn't. I flopped back in the chair,
absolutely helpless. "Harriet!" I croaked. "Get a doctor!"
It took her a full three seconds to respond, and then her image wavered
worse than Morton. "Mr. Broadhead," she said, looking queerly worried, "I
cannot account for it, but the circuits are all busy. I... I... I..." It
was not just her voice repeating, her head and body looked like a short
loop of video tape, over and over shaping the same beginning of a word and
snapping back to begin it again.
I fell off the chair onto the floor, and my last coherent thought was:
The fever.
It was back. Worse than I had ever felt it before. Worse, perhaps, than
I could live through, and so bad, so painful, so terrifyingly,
psychotically strange that I was not sure I wanted to.
The difference between the ages of ten and fourteen is immense. After
three and a half years in a photon-powered spaceship en route to the Oort
cloud, Janine was no longer the child who had left. She had not stopped
being a child. She had just reached that early maturation plateau wherein
the individual recognizes that it still has a great deal of growing to do.
Janine was not in a hurry to become an adult. She was simply working at
getting the job done. Every day. All the time. With whatever tools came to
hand.
When she left the others, on the day when she met Wan, she was not
particularly searching for anything. She simply wanted to be alone. Not
for any really private purpose. Not even because, or not only because, she
was tired of her family. What she wanted was something of her own, an
experience not shared, an evaluation not helped by always-present
grownups; she wanted the look and touch and smell of the strangeness of
the Food Factory, and she wanted it to be hers.
So she pushed herself at random along the passages, sucking from time
to time at a squeeze bottle of coffee. Or what seemed to be "coffee" to
her. It was a habit Janine had learned from her father, although, if you
had asked her, she would have denied that she had learned any.
All of her senses thirsted for inputs. The Food Factory was the most
fabulously exciting, delightfully scary thing that had ever happened to
her. More than the launch from Earth when she was a mere child. More than
the stained shorts that had announced she had become a woman. More than
anything. Even the bare walls of the passages were exciting, because they
were Heechee metal, a zillion years old, and still glowing with the gentle
blue light their makers had built into them. (What sort of eyes had seen
by that light when it was new?) She patted herself gently from chamber to
chamber, only the balls of her feet ever touching the floor. In this room
were walls of rubbery shelves (what had they held?), in that squatted a
huge truncated sphere, top and bottom sliced off, mirror chrome in
appearance, queerly powdery to the touch-what was it for? Some of the
things she could guess at. The thing that looked like a table certainly
was a table. (The lip around it was no doubt there to keep things from
skittering off it in the Food Factory's gentle gravity.) Some of the
objects had been identified for them by Vera, accessing the information
stores of Heechee artifacts cataloged by the big data sources back on
Earth. The cubicles with cobwebby green tracings on the walls were thought
to have been for sleeping accommodations; but who was to know if dumb Vera
was right? no matter. The objects themselves were thrilling. So was the
presence of space to move around in. Even to get lost in. For until they
reached the Food Factory, Janine had never, ever, not once in her life,
had the chance to get lost. The idea made her itch with scary pleasure.
Especially as the quite adult part of her fourteen-year-old brain was
always aware that, no matter how lost she got, the Food Factory simply was
not large enough for her to stay lost.
So it was a safe thrill. Or seemed so.
Until she found herself trapped by the farside docks, as
something-Heechee? Space monster? Crazed old castaway with a knife? came
shambling out of the hidden passages toward her.
And then it was none of those things, it was Wan.
Of course, she didn't know his name. "Don't you come any closer!" she
whimpered, heart in mouth, radio in hand, forearms hugged across her new
breasts. He didn't. He stopped. He stared at her, eyes popping, mouth
open, tongue almost hanging out. He was tall, skinny. His face was
triangular, with a long, beaked nose. He was wearing what looked like a
skirt and what looked like a tank-top, both dirty. He smelled male. He was
shaking as he sniffed the air, and he was young. Surely he was not much
older than Janine herself and the only person less than triple her age she
had seen in years; and when he let himself drop gently to his knees and
began to do what Janine had never seen any other person do she moaned
while she giggled-amusement, relief, shock, hysteria. The shock was not at
what he was doing. The shock came from meeting a boy. In her sleep Janine
had dreamed wildly, but never of this.
For the next few days Janine could not bear to let Wan out of her
sight. She felt herself to be his mother, his playmate, his teacher, his
wife. "No, Wan! Sip it slowly, it's hot!"
"Wan, do you mean to say you've been all alone since you were three?"
"You have really beautiful eyes, Wan." She didn't mind that he was not
sophisticated enough to respond by telling her that she had beautiful
eyes, too, because she could definitely tell that she fascinated him in
all her parts.
The others could tell that, too, of course. Janine did not mind. Wan
had plenty of senses-sharp, eyes-bright, obsessed adoration to share
around. He slept even less than she. She appreciated that, at first,
because it meant there was more of Wan to share, but then she could see
that he was becoming exhausted. Even ill. When he began to sweat and
tremble, in the room with the glittering silver-blue cocoon, she was the
one who cried, "Lurvy! I think he's going to be sick!" When he lurched
toward the couch she flew to his side, fingers stretched to test his dry
and burning forehead. The closing cover of the cocoon almost trapped her
arm, gouging a long, deep slash from wrist to knuckles on her hand.
"Paul," she shouted, drawing back, "we've got to..."
And then the 130-day madness hit them all. Worst of any time. Different
from any time. Between one heartbeat and the next Janine was sick.
Janine had never been sick. Now and then a bruise, a cramp, a sniffle.
Nothing more. For most of her life she had been under Full Medical and
sickness simply did not occur. She did not comprehend what was happening
to her. Her body raged with fever and pain. She hallucinated monstrous
strange figures, in some of whom she recognized her caricatured family;
others were simply terrifying and strange. She even saw herself-hugely
bosomed and grossly hipped, but herself-and in her belly rumbled a frenzy
to thrust and thrust into all the seen and imagined cavities of that
fantasy something that, even in fantasy, she did not have. None of this
was clear. Nothing was clear. The agonies and the insanities came in
waves. Between them, for a second or two now and then, she caught glimpses
of reality. The steely blue glow from the walls. Lurvy, crouched and
whimpering beside her. Her father, vomiting in the passage. The chrome and
blue cocoon, with Wan writhing and babbling inside the mesh. It was not
reason or will that made her claw at the lid and, on the hundredth, or
thousandth, try to get it open; but she did it, at last, and dragged him
whimpering and shaking out.
The hallucinations stopped at once.
Not quite as quickly, the pain, the nausea and the terror. But they
stopped. They were all shuddering and reeling still, all but the boy, who
was unconscious and breathing in a way that terrified Janine, great,
hoarse, snoring gasps. "Help, Lurvy!" she screamed. "He's dying!" Her
sister was already beside her, thumb on the boy's pulse, shaking her head
to clear it as she peered dizzily at his eyes.
"Dehydrated. Fever. Come on," she cried, struggling with Wan's arms.
"Help me get him back to the ship. He needs saline, antibiotics, a
febrifuge, maybe some gamma globulin..."
It took them nearly twenty minutes to tow Wan to the ship, and Janine
was in terror that he would die at every bounding, slow-motion step. Lurvy
raced ahead the last hundred meters, and by the time Paul and Janine had
struggled him through the airlock she had already unsealed the medic kit
and was shouting orders. "Put him down. Make him swallow this. Take a
blood sample and check virus and antibody titers. Send a priority to base,
tell them we need medical instructions-if he lives long enough to get
them!"
Paul helped them get Wan's clothes off and the boy wrapped in one of
the Payter's blankets. Then he sent the message. But he knew, they all
knew, that the problem of whether Wan lived or died would not be solved
from Earth. Not with a round-trip time of seven weeks before they could
get an answer. Payter was swearing over the bio-assay mobile unit. Lurvy
and Janine were working on the boy. Paul, without saying a word to anyone,
struggled into his EVA suit and exited into - space, where he spent an
exhausting hour and a half redirecting the transmitter dishes-the main one
to the bright double star that was the planet Neptune and its moon, the
other to the point in space occupied by the Garfeld mission. Then,
clinging to the hull, he radio-commanded Vera to repeat the SOS to each of
them at max power. They might be monitoring. They might not When Vera
signaled that the messages were sent he reoriented the big dish to Earth.
It took them three hours, first to last, and whether either of them would
receive his message was doubtful. It was no less doubtful that either
would have much help to offer. The Garfeld ship was smaller and less well
equipped than their own, and the people at the Triton base were
short-timers. But if either did they could hope for a message of aid-or at
least sympathy, a lot faster than from Earth.
In an hour Wan's fever began to recede. In twelve the twitchings and
babblings diminished and he slept normally. But he was still very sick.
Mother and playmate, teacher and at-least-fantasy wife, now Janine
became Wan's nurse as well. After the first round of medication, she would
not even let Lurvy give him his shots. She went without sleep to sponge
his brow. When he soiled himself in his coma she cleaned him fastidiously.
She had no concentration left for anything else. The amused or concerned
looks and words from her family left her untouched, until she brushed
Wan's unkempt hair off his face, and Paul made a patronizing comment.
Janine heard the jealousy in the tone and flared, "Paul, you're sickening!
Wan needs me to take care of him!"
"And you do enjoy it, don't you?" he snapped. He was really angry. Of
course, that sparked more anger in Janine; but her father put in, gently
enough, "Let the girl be a girl, Paul. Were you not yourself once young?
Come, let us examine this Trdumeplatz again..."
Janine surprised herself by letting the peacemaker succeed; it had been
a marvelous chance of a furious spat, but that was not where her interests
lay. She took time for a tight, small grin about Paul's jealousy, because
that was a new service stripe to sew on her sleeve, and then back to Wan.
As he mended he became even more interesting. From time to time he
woke, and spoke to her. When he was asleep she studied him. Face so dark,
body olive; but from waist to thigh he bad the palest skin, the color of
bread dough, taut over his sharp bones. Scant body hair. None on his face
except a soft, almost invisible strand or two-more lip-lashes than
mustache.
Janine knew that Lurvy and her father made a joke of her, and that Paul
was actually jealous of the attentions he had avoided so long. It made a
nice change. She had status. For the first time in her life, what she was
doing was the most significant activity of the group. The others came to
her to sue for permission to question Wan, and when she thought he was
tiring they accepted her command to stop.
Besides, Wan fascinated her. She mapped him against all her previous
experience of Men, to his advantage. Even against her pen-pals, Wan was
better looking than the ice-skater, smarter than the actors, almost as
tall as the basketball player. And against all of them, especially against
the only two males she had been within tens of millions of kilometers of
in years, Wan was so marvelously young. And Paul and her father, not. The
backs of old Peter's hands bore irregular blotches of caramel-colored
pigment, which was gross. But at least the old man kept himself neat. Even
dainty, in the continental way-even clipped the hairs that grew inside his
ears with tiny silver scissors, because Janine had caught him at it. While
Paul-In one of her skirmishes with Lurvy, Janine had snarled, "That's what
you go to bed With? An ape with hairy ears? I'd puke."
So she fed Wan, and read to him, and drowsed over him while he slept.
She shampooed his hair, and trimmed it to a soup-bowl mop, allowing Lurvy
to help her get it even, and blow-dried it smooth. She washed his clothes
and, spurning Lurvy for this, patched them and even cut down some of
Paul's to fit him. He accepted it all, every bit, and enjoyed it as much
as she.
As he grew stronger, he no longer needed her as much, and she was less
able to protect him from the questions of the others. But they were
protective, too. Even old Peter. The computer, Vera, burrowed into its
medical programs and prepared a long list of tests to be performed on the
boy. "Assassin!" raged Peter. "Has it no understanding of a young man who
has been so close to death that it wishes to finish it?" It was not
entirely consideration. Peter had questions of his own, and he had been
asking them when Janine would allow it, sulking and fidgeting when she
would not. "That bed of yours, Wan, tell me again what you feel when you
are in it? As though you are somehow a part of millions of people? And
also they of you, isn't that so?" But when Janine accused him of
interfering with Wan's recovery, the old man desisted. Though never for
long.
Then Wan was well enough for Janine to allow herself a full night's
sleep in her own private, and when she woke her sister was at Vera's
console. Wan was holding to the back of her chair, grinning and frowning
at the unfamiliar machine, and Lurvy was reading off to him his medical
report. "Your vital signs are normal, your weight is picking up, your
antibody levels are in the normal range-I think you're going to be all
right now, Wan."
"So now," cried her father, "at last we can talk? About this
faster-than-light radio, the machines, the place he comes from, the
dreaming room?" Janine hurled herself into the group.
"Leave him alone!" she snarled. But Wan shook his head.
"Let them ask what they like, Janine," he said in his shrill, breathy
voice.
"Now?"
"Yes, now!" stormed her father. "Now, this minute! Paul, come you here
and tell this boy what we must know."
They had planned this, Janine realized, the three of them; but Wan did
not object, and she could not pretend he was unfit for questioning any
longer. She marched over and sat beside him. If she could not prevent this
interrogation, at least she would be there to protect him. She gave formal
permission, coldly: "Go ahead, Paul. Say what you want to say, but don't
tire him out."
Paul looked at her ironically, but spoke to Wan. "For more than a dozen
years," he said, "every hundred and thirty days or so, the whole Earth has
gone crazy. It looks like it's your fault,
The boy frowned, but said nothing. His public defender spoke for him.
"Why are you picking on him?" she demanded.
"No one is 'picking', Janine. But what we experienced was the fever. It
can't be a coincidence. When Wan gets into that contraption he broadcasts
to the world." Paul shook his head. "Dear lad, do you have any idea of how
much trouble you've caused? Ever since you began coming here, your dreams
have been shared by millions of people. Billions! Sometimes you were
peaceful, and your dreams were peaceful, and that wasn't so bad. Sometimes
you weren't. I don't want you to blame yourself," he added kindly,
forestalling Janine, "but thousands and thousands of people have died. And
the property damage-Wan, you just can't imagine."
Wan shrilled defensively, "I have never harmed anyone!" he was unable
to take in just what he was accused of, but there was no doubt in his mind
that Paul was accusing. Lurvy put her hand on his arm.
"I wish it were so, Wan," she said. "The important thing is, you
mustn't do that again."
"No more dreaming in the couch?"
"No, Wan." He looked to Janine for guidance, then shrugged. "But that
is not all," Paul put in. "You have to help us. Tell us everything you
know. About the couch. About the Dead Men. About the faster-than-light
radio, the food..."
"Why should I?" Wan demanded.
Patiently, Paul coaxed: "Because in that way you can make up for the
fever. I don't think you understand how important you are, Wan. The
knowledge in your head might mean saving people from starvation. Millions
of lives, Wan."
Wan frowned over that concept for a moment, but "millions" was
meaningless to him as applying to human beings-he had not yet adjusted to
"five". "You make me angry," he scolded.
"I don't mean to, Wan."
"It is not what you mean to, it is what you do. You have just told me
that," the boy grumbled spitefully. "All right. What do you want?"
"We want you to tell us everything you know," Paul said promptly. "Oh,
not all at once. But as you remember. And we want you to go through this
whole Food Factory with us and explain everything in it-as far as you can,
I mean."
"This place? There is nothing here but the dreaming room, and you won't
let me use that!"
"It is all new to us, Wan."
"It is nothing! The water does not run, there is no library, the Dead
Men are hard to talk to, nothing grows! At home I have everything, and
much of it is working, so you can see for yourself."
"You make it sound like heaven, Wan."
"See for yourself! If I can't dream, there is no reason to stay here!"
Paul looked at the others, perplexed. "Could we do that?"
"Of course! My ship will take us there-not all of you, no," Wan
corrected himself. "But some. We can leave the old man here. There is no
woman for him, anyway, so there is no pairing to destroy. Or even," he
added cunningly, "only Janine and I can go. Then there will be more room
in the ship. We can bring you back machines, books, treasures..."
"Forget that, Wan," Janine said wisely. "They'll never let us do that."
"Not so fast, my girl," her father said. "That is not for you to
decide. What the boy is saying is interesting. If he can open the gates of
heaven for us, who are we to stand outside in the cold?"
Janine studied her father, but his expression was bland. "You don't
mean you'd let Wan and me go there alone?"
"That," he said, "is not the question. The question is, how can we most
rapidly complete this God-bedamned mission and return to our reward. There
is no other."
"Well," said Lurvy after a moment, "we don't have to decide that right
now. Heaven will wait for us, for all our lives."
Her father said, "That is true, yes. But, expressed concretely, some of
us have less lives to wait than others."
Every day new messages came in from Earth. Infuriatingly, these related
only to a remote past, before Wan, irrelevant to everything they were
doing or planning now: Submit chemical analyses of this. X-ray that.
Measure these other things. By now the slow packets of photons that
transmitted the word of their reaching the Food Factory had arrived at
Downlink-Vera on Earth, and perhaps replies were already on their way. But
they would not arrive for weeks. The base at Triton had a smarter computer
than Vera, and Paul and Lurvy argued for transmitting all their data there
for interpretation and advice. Old Peter rejected the idea with fury.
"Those wanderers, gypsies? Why should we give them what costs us so much
to get!"
"But nobody's questioning us, Pa," Lurvy coaxed. "It's all ours. The
contracts spell it all out."
"No!"
So they fed all that Wan told them into Shipboard-Vera, and Vera's
small, slow intelligence painfully sorted the bits into patterns. Even
into graphics. The external appearance of the place Wan had come from-it
was probably not a very good likeness, because it was apparent that Wan
had not had the curiosity to study it very closely. The corridors. The
machines. The Heechee themselves; and each time Wan offered corrections:
"Ah, no. They both have beards, males and females. Even when they are
quite young. And the breasts on the females are:" He held his hands just
below his rib cage, to show how low they swung. "And you do not give them
the right smell."
"Holos don't smell at all, Wan," said Paul.
"Yes, exactly! But they do, you see. In rut, they smell very much."
And Vera mumbled and whined over the new data, and shakily drew in the
new revisions. After hours of this, what had been a game for Wan turned
into drudgery. When he began saying, "Yes, it is perfect, that is exactly
how the Dead Men's room looks," they all understood that he was merely
agreeing with anything that would stop the boredom for a while, and gave
him a rest. Then Janine would take him for a wander through the corridors,
sound and vision pickups strapped to her shoulder, in case he said
something of value or pointed out a treasure, and they spoke of other