sound and image, and transmit the whole thing to Earth. Perhaps they could
wrench a reading machine loose and bring it back with them.... And back
they would go, Lurvy was suddenly sure. If they could not find a way to
move the Food Factory, they would abandon it. no one could fault them.
They had done enough. If there was a need for more, other parties could
follow them, but meanwhile... Meanwhile they would have brought back
richer gifts than any other human beings since the discovery of the
Gateway asteroid itself! They would be rewarded accordingly, there was no
question of that-she even had Robinette Broadhead's word. For the first
time since they had left the Moon on the searing chemical flame of their
takeoff rockets, Lurvy let herself think of herself not as someone who was
striving for a prize, but as someone who had won. And how happy her father
would be...
"That's enough," she said, helping Janine grip the spilling sack of
prayer fans. "Let's take them right to the ship."
Janine hugged the clumsy bundle to her small breasts and picked up a
few more with a free hand. "You sound as if we're going home," she said.
"Maybe so," Lurvy grinned. "Of course, we'll have to have a conference
and decide. Wan? What's the matter?"
He was at the door, his shirtful of fans under an arm. And he looked
stricken. "We waited too long," he whispered, peering down the corridor.
"There are Old Ones by the berryfruit."
"Oh, no." But it was true. Lurvy peered cautiously out into the
corridor and there they were, staring up at the camera Paul had fixed to
the wall. One reached up and effortlessly pulled it loose while she
watched. "Wan? Is there another way home?"
"Yes, through the gold, but..." His nose was working. "I think there
are some there, too. I can smell them and, yes, I can hear them!" And that
was true, too; Lurvy could hear a faint sound of mellow, chirrupy grunts,
from where the corridor bent.
"We don't have a choice," she said. "There are only two of them back
the way we came. We'll take them by surprise and just push our way
through. Come on!" Still carrying the tapes, she hustled the others ahead
of her. The Heechee might be strong, but Wan had said they were slow. With
any luck at all. They had no luck at all. As they reached the opening she
saw that there were more than two, half a dozen more, standing around and
looking toward them in the entrances to the other corridors. "Paul!" she
shouted at the camera. "We're caught! Get in the ship, and if we don't get
away..." And she could say no more, because they were upon her; and, yes,
they were strong!
They were hustled up through half a dozen levels, their captors one to
each arm, stolidly chirping at each other, ignoring their struggles and
their words. Wan did not speak. He let them pull him as they would, all
the way up to a great open spindleshaped volume, where another dozen Old
Ones waited and a huge blue-lit machine sat silent behind them. Did the
Heechee believe in sacrifice? Or perform experiments on captives? Would
they wind up as Dead Men themselves, rambling and obsessed, ready for the
next batch of visitors? Lurvy looked upon all of these as interesting
questions, and had no answers for any of them. She was not yet afraid. Her
feelings had not caught up with the facts; it was too recently that she
had allowed herself to feel triumph. The realization of defeat would have
to wait.
The Old Ones chirruped to each other, gesticulating toward the
prisoners, the corridors, the great silent machine, like a battle tank
without guns. Like a nightmare. Lurvy could not understand any of it, even
though the situation was clear enough. After minutes of jabber they were
pushed into a cubicle, and found in it-astonishingly! -quite familiar
objects. Behind the closed door Lurvy shuffled through them-clothing; a
chess set; long desiccated rations. In the toe of one shoe was a thick
roll of Brazilian currency, more than a quarter of a million dollars of
it, she guessed. They had not been the first captives here! But in none of
the rubble was anything like a weapon. She turned to Wan, who was pale and
shaking. "What will happen?" she demanded.
He waggled his head like an Old One. It was the only answer he could
give. "My father..." he began, and had to swallow before he could go on.
"They captured my father once and, yes, truly, they let him go again. But
I do not think that is a rule, since my father told me I must never let
myself be caught."
Janine said, "At least Paul got away. Maybe-maybe he can bring
help...." But she stopped there, and did not expect an answer. Any hopeful
answer would have been fantasy, defined by the four years it would take
another vessel like theirs to reach the Food Factory. If help came, it
would not be soon. She began to sort through the old clothing. "At least
we can get something on," she said. "Come on, Wan. Get yourself dressed."
Lurvy followed her example, and then stopped at a strange sound from
her sister. It was almost a laugh! "What's so funny?" she snapped.
Janine pulled a sweater over her head before she answered. It was too
big, but it was warm. "I was just thinking about the orders we got," she
said. "To get Heechee tissue samples, you know? Well, the way it worked
out-they got ours instead. All of them."
When the shipboard computer's mail bell rang, Payter woke quickly and
completely. It was an advantage of age that one slept shallowly and woke
at once. There were not many advantages. He got up, rinsed his mouth,
urinated into the sanitary, washed his hands, and took two food packets
with him to the terminal. "Display the mail now," he ordered, munching on
something that tasted like sour rye bread but was meant to be a sweet
roll.
When he saw what the mail was, his good mood passed. Most of it was
interminable mission orders. Six letters for Janine, one each for Paul and
Dorema, and for himself only a petition addressed to Schwarze Peter and
signed by eight hundred and thirty school-children of Dortmund, begging
him to return and become their Burgermeister. "Dumb head!" he scolded the
computer. "Why do you wake me for this trash?" Vera did not answer,
because he did not give her time to identify him and rummage through her
slow magnetic bubbles to locate his name.
Long before then, he was complaining, "Also this food is not fit for
pigs! Attend to it at once!"
Poor Vera erased the attempt to interpret his first question and
patiently attended to the second. "The recycling system is below optimal
mass levels," she said,"... Mr. Herter. In addition, my processing
routines have been subject to overload for some time. Many programs have
been deferred."
"Do not defer the food question any more," he snarled, "or you will
kill me, and there's an end to it." He gloomily commanded display of the
mission orders while he forced himself to chew the remainder of his
breakfast. The orders rolled for ten solid minutes. What marvelous ideas
they had for him, back on Earth! And if only there were a hundred of him,
perhaps they could do one one-hundredth of the tasks proposed. He allowed
the end of it to run unwatched, while he carefully shaved his pink old
face and brushed his sparse hair. And why was the recycling system
depleted, so that it could not function properly? Because his daughters
and their consorts had removed themselves and thus their useful
by-products, as well as all the water Wan had stolen from the system.
Stolen! Yes, there was no other word for it. Also they had taken the
mobile bio-assay unit, so that there was only the sampler in the sanitary
to monitor his health, and what could that tell of fever or arrhythmic
heart, if he should have either? Also they had taken all but one of the
cameras, so that he must carry that one with him wherever he went. Also
they had taken. They had taken themselves, and Schwarze Peter, for the
first time in his life, was wholly alone.
He was not only alone, he was powerless to change it. Family came back,
they would do so in their own good time and not before. Until then he was
a reserve unit, a pillbox soldier, a standby program. He was given
excessive tasks to do, but the real center of action was somewhere else.
In his long life Payter had taught himself to be patient, but he had
never taught himself to enjoy it. It was maddening to be forced to wait!
To wait fifty days for an answer from Earth to his perfectly reasonable
proposals and questions. To wait almost as long for his family and that
hooligan boy to get to where they were going (if they ever did) and report
to him (if they should happen to choose to). Waiting was not so bad if one
had enough of a life left to wait in. But how much, realistically, had he?
Suppose he had a stroke. Suppose he developed a cancer. Suppose any part
of the complicated interactions that kept, his heart beating and his blood
flowing and his bowels moving and his brain thinking broke down in any
place. What then?
And some day they surely would, because Payter was old. He had lied
about his age so many times that he was no longer sure of what it was. Not
even his children knew; the stories he told about his grandfather's youth
were really about his own. Age in itself did not matter. Full Medical
could deal with anything, repair or replace, as long as it was not the
brain itself that was damaged-and Payter's brain was in the best of shape,
because had it not schemed and contrived to get him here?
But "here" there was no Full Medical, and age began to matter a great
deal.
He was no longer a boy! But once he had been, and even then he had
known that somehow, some day, he would possess exactly what he owned now:
the key to heart's desire. Burgermeister of Dortmund? That was nothing!
Skinny young Peter, shortest and youngest in his unit of the Hitler Youth
but their leader all the same, had promised himself he would have much
more. He had even known that it would turn out to be something like this,
some grand futuristic pattern would emerge, and he alone would be able to
find the handle to wield it, like a weapon, like an axe, like a scythe, to
punish or reap or remake the world. Well, here it was! And what was he
doing with it? He was waiting. It had not been like that, in the boyhood
stories by Juve and Gail and Dominik and the Frenchman, Verne. The people
in them did not waste themselves so spinelessly.
But what, after all, was one to do?
So while he waited for that question to answer itself, he kept up his
daily rounds. He ate four light meals a day, every other one of CHON-food,
methodically dictating to Vera his impressions of taste and consistency.
He ordered Vera to design a new mobile bio-assay out of what odds and ends
of sensor instrumentation could be spared, and worked at building it as
she found time to complete parts of the design. He worked out ten minutes
each morning with the weights, half an hour every afternoon with bending
and stretching. He methodically walked every pathway in the Food Factory,
with his hand-held camera pointed into every cranny. He composed long
letters of complaint to his masters on Earth, cagily arguing the merits of
aborting the mission and returning to Earth as soon as he could summon the
family back, and actually transmitted one or two of them. He wrote fierce
and peremptory directives to his lawyer in Stuttgart, in code, arguing his
position, demanding a revision to the contract. And most of all, he
schemed. And about the Traumeplatz most of all.
It was seldom out of his thoughts, this dreaming place with its
startling potential. When he was depressed and fretful, he thought how
rightly it would serve Earth if he were to repair it and call Wan back to
give them their fevers once again. When he was charged with force and
determination he went to look at it, lid hanging from an ornamental
projection on one wall, the joints and fasteners always with him in his
coverall pouch. How easy it would be to bring in a cutting torch and lop
it free, cram the ship full of that, and the communications system for the
Dead Men, and whatever other goods and treasures he could find; and then
cast loose in the rocket for Earth, start the long, slow downward spiral
that would bring him-what would it bring him? God in heaven, what would it
not! Fame! Power! Prosperity! All the things that were his due-yes, and
his rightful property, too, if he only got back in time to enjoy them.
It made him ill to think about it. All the time the clock was ticking,
ticking. Every minute he was one minute closer to the end of his life.
Every second spent waiting was a second stolen from the happy time of
greatness and luxury that he had earned. He forced himself to eat, sitting
on the edge of his private and looking longingly at the ship's controls.
"The food has not improved, Vera!" he called accusingly.
The confounded thing did not answer. "Vera! You must do something about
the food!" It still did not answer, not for several seconds.
And then only, "One moment, please... Mr. Herter." It was enough to
make one sick. In fact, he did feel somewhat sick, he realized. He gazed
with hostility at the dish he had been doggedly forcing down, supposed to
be a sort of schnitzel, or as close to it as Vera's limited recombinant
capacities would allow, but tasting of whisky or sauerkraut, or both at
once. He set it on the floor.
"I do not feel well," he announced.
Pause. Then, "One moment, please... Mr. Hester." Poor stupid Vera had
just so much capacity. She was processing a burst of messages from Earth,
endeavoring to carry on a conversation with the Dead Men by means of the
faster-than-light radio, encoding and transmitting all of her own
telemetry-all at once. She simply did not have time for his queasiness.
But his accelerating unease would not be denied: a sudden rush of saliva
under the tongue, a quick shuddering of the diaphragm. He barely made it
to the sanitary, giving back, there, all he had taken. For the last time,
he swore. He did not want to live so long as to see those God-bedamned
organic compounds reworked for one more passage through his gut. When he
was sure he had stopped vomiting he marched over to the console and pushed
the override buttons. "All functions in standby except this," he ordered.
"Monitor my bio-assay at once."
"Very well," she said at once,"... Mr. Hester." Silence for a moment,
while the unit in the sanitary made what it could of what Peter had just
deposited. "You are suffering from food poisoning," she reported,"... Mr.
Hester."
"So! This I already know. What is to be done about it?"
Pause, while her tiny brain revolved the problem. "If you could add
water to the system, the fermentation and recycling would be under better
control," she said, "... Mr. Hester. At least one hundred liters. There
has been considerable loss due to evaporation in the much larger volume of
space now available, as well as the stocks withdrawn for the remainder of
your party. My recommendation is that you replenish the system with
available water as soon as possible."
"But that is not fit to drink for pigs even!"
"The solutes present problems," she acknowledged. "Therefore I
recommend that at least half of any added water be distilled first. The
system should be able to cope with the remainder of the solutes... Mr.
Hester."
"God in Heaven! Am I to build a still out of nothing, and become a
water-carrier too? And what of the bio-assay mobile unit, so that this
will not happen again?"
Vera sorted through the questions for a moment. "Yes, I think that
would be appropriate," she agreed. "If you wish, I will provide
construction plans. Also... Mr. Hester, you may wish to consider relying
more heavily on CHON-food for your diet, since you do not appear to have
severe adverse reactions to it."
"Apart of course from the fact that it tastes like dog-biscuit," he
sneered. "Very well. Complete the construction plans at once. Hard copy,
making use of available materials, do you understand?"
"Yes... Mr. Hester." The computer was silent for a time, inventorying
redundant parts and materials, devising linkages that would do the job. It
was a formidable task for Vera's limited intelligence. Peter drew a cup of
water and rinsed out his mouth, then grimly unwrapped one of the least
unattractive CHON tablets and nibbled off a tentative corner. While he
waited to see if he would throw up again he faced the possibility that he
might in fact die here, and alone. He did not even have the option he had
thought was his, of casting everything adrift and returning to Earth by
himself-not, at least, unless he first added water as ordered, and did his
best to insure that nothing else would go wrong.
And yet it was every day so increasingly tempting..
To be sure, that would mean casting his daughters and his son-in-law
adrift.
But would they ever return? Suppose they did not. Suppose that rude boy
turned the wrong switch, or ran out of fuel. Or anything. Suppose, in
short, they died. Must he then wither on the vine until he also was dead?
And what benefit would that be to humanity, if he perished here, and the
whole thing to do over again with a new crew... and himself, Schwarze
Peter, done out of reward, done out of fame and power, done out of life
itself?
Or-an idea struck him-was there another option? This bedamned Food
Factory itself, so set on continuing its course. What if he could find the
controls that directed it so? What if he could learn to change those
directions, so that it could bring him back to Earth not in three years
and more, but at once, in days? To be sure, that would doom his family,
would it not? But perhaps not! Perhaps they would return, if they returned
at all, to the Food Factory itself, wherever it might be. Even in close
orbit around Earth! And how marvelously that would solve everyone's
problems at once. He threw the remainder of the packet into the sanitary,
to add to the store of organics. "Du bist verruckt, Peter!" he snarled to
himself. The flaw in that dream could not be ignored: he had sought with
all his might, and the controls to the Food Factory were not to be found.
The frying-bacon sound of the hard-copy printer rescued him from his
thoughts. He pulled the sheets out of the machine and frowned over them
for a moment. So much work! Twenty hours, at least! And not merely time,
but so much of it was hard physical labor! He would have to go out into
space to reclaim piping from the struts that were meant to hold the
auxiliary transmitters in place, cut them loose, bring them inside; and
only then begin to weld them together and form them into a spiral. Simply
for the condensation section of the still! He saw that he was beginning to
shake. He barely made it to the sanitary in time. "Vera!" he croaked.
"I must have medication for this!"
"At once... Mr. Hester. Yes. In the medical kit you will find tablets
marked..."
"Dumbhead! The medical kit is gone to Cuckooland!"
"Oh, yes... Mr. Hester. One moment. Yes. I have programmed appropriate
pharmaceuticals for you. It will take about twenty minutes for them to be
prepared."
"In twenty minutes I could be dead," be snarled. But there was no help
for it, and so he sat and stewed for twenty minutes, the pressures
mounting. Illness, hunger, loneliness, overwork, resentment, fear. Anger!
That was what, in the end, they all fused into. Anger. Many vectors. One
vector sum. By the time Vera's dispensary popped out his pills, it had
submerged all the others. He swallowed them greedily and retired to his
private to see what would happen.
Actually they did appear to work. He lay back while the fires in his
belly damped themselves, and fell imperceptibly asleep.
When he woke he felt at least physically better. He washed himself,
brushed his teeth, brushed his thinning yellow hair, and only then noticed
the Christmas tree of attention-demanding lights around Vera's console. On
the screen in bright red letters were the words:
He chuckled to himself. He had forgotten to cancel the override. When
he ordered the computer to get back to business there was an instant
explosion of bells and signal lights, a cascade of hard copy out of the
printer and a voice. His elder daughter's voice, out of Vera's taped
storage: "Hello, Pop. Sorry we couldn't reach you to tell you we arrived
safely. We're going to explore now. Talk to you later."
Because Peter Hester loved his family, the joy of their safe arrival
flooded his heart and sustained him-for hours. For almost two days. But
joy does not flourish in an existence of irritations and worries. He spoke
to Lurvy-twice; for no more than thirty seconds each time. Vera simply
could not handle more. Vera was harder pressed than Peter himself,
stripped and rearranged as she was, handling two-way traffic between
Heechee Heaven and the Earth, deferring top priority action commands when
even higher priorities demanded attention. The one voice link with the
Heechee place could not handle the volume it was given to carry, and mere
chitchat between father and daughter could not be allowed.
That was not unjust, Peter conceded. Such marvels they were finding!
What was unjust was that he himself was out of it. What was unjust was
that among the urgent and meaningful traffic, Vera found time to pass on
to him a hodgepodge of commands meant for himself. None reasonable. Some
impossible to carry out. Redeploy the thrusters. Inventory CHON-food.
Submit by return message complete analysis a cm by 3 cm by 12. 5 cm
packets in red and lavender wrappers. Do not submit unnecessary analyses!
Submit metallurgical analysis "dreaming couch". Do not attempt physical
study "dreaming couch". Query Dead Men re Heechee Drive. Query Dead Men re
control panels. Query Dead Men. How easy that was to command! How hard to
carry out, when they maundered and scolded and rambled and complained when
he could hear them at all, and when most often he was forbidden to take
time on the FTL voice circuit anyway. Some of the orders from Earth
contradicted others, and most of them came out of order, with obsolete
priority designations. And some did not come at all. Poor Vera's storage
circuits were soon approaching overload, and she tried to rid herself of
unnecessary data by hard-printing it for him to, somehow, attend to; but
that made problems of its own,, because the recycling system that fed the
printer rolls was the same one that fed him, and the organics were already
depleted. So Peter had to open and dump CHON-food into the sanitary and
then get busy on the still.
Even if Vera had had time for him, he had not much time for Vera.
Struggle into EVA equipment. Cycle himself out on the hull of the Food
Factory. Cut away tubing and bind it together. Sweat it back to the ship,
always fighting the infuriating, dogged thrust of the Food Factory itself
as it plunged toward somewhere or other. He could spare time only for an
occasional glance at the pictures coming back from Heechee Heaven. Vera
displayed them as they came in, one frame at a time; but then each one was
whisked away to make storage space for the next one, and if Peter was not
there to see they would go unseen. Even so, good heavens! The Dead Men, so
featureless to look at. The corridors of Heechee Heaven. The Old
Ones-Peter's heart almost stopped as he looked at the great broad face of
an Old One on the screen. But he had time only for a look, and then the
still was done and he must go on with the next task. Build himself a yoke
for his shoulders. Seam together plastic sheeting (another drain on the
recycler!) to make buckets. Squat impatiently by the one
functioning-barely functioning-water source, holding the flexible disk
around the spout and catching the foulsmelling dribble in the bags. Tote
the water back, half into the still, the other half into the recycling
tanks. Sleep when he could. Eat when he could force himself. Attend to his
own personal priority messages when they trickled through, and when he was
too exhausted for anything physical. Another message from Dortmund, three
hundred municipal workers this time-stupid Vera, for letting such trash
through! A coded communication from his lawyer, meaning half an hour to
translate it. And then all it said was, "Am attempting secure more
favorable terms. Can promise nothing. Meanwhile advise full compliance all
directives." What a pig! Peter, swearing, sat before the console, slammed
down the override key and dictated his reply:
"Full compliance with all stupid directives will kill me, and then
what?" And he sent it in the clear; let Broadhead and the Gateway Corp
make what they would of it!
And perhaps the message was no lie. In all his stress and bustle, Peter
had no time for aches and pains. He ate the CHON-food and, when new
regular rations began to come out of the recycler, them, too. Even when
they tasted foul-sometimes turpentine, sometimes mold-he was not sick.
This was not ideal. Peter knew that he was operating on stress and
adrenaline, and sometime there would be a price to pay. But he could see
no way to avoid paying it when due.
And when at last he had the food processor working reasonably well once
more, and had managed to catch up with what appeared the most peremptory
of his own orders, he sat before Vera's console half-dozing, and then saw
the greatest marvel of all. He scowled uncomprehendingly. What was that
idiot boy doing with a prayer fan? Why in the next frame was he poking it
into those foolish things that looked like flowerholders? And then the
next frame began to build on the screen, and Peter gave a great shout.
Suddenly a picture had appeared, some sort of book-Japanese or Chinese, by
the look of it.
He was out of the ship and halfway to the Traumeplatz before his
conscious mind quite articulated what some part of him had understood at
once. The prayer fans! They contained information! He did not stop to
wonder why the information had been in a Terrestrial language, or at least
what looked like one. He had grasped the essential fact. He was determined
to see for himself. Panting, he thrust himself into the room and scrabbled
feverishly among the "fans". How was it done? Why in the name of God had
he not waited to see more, to be sure of what he was doing? But there were
the candleholders, or flowerpots, or whatever he had thought they were; he
jammed the first prayer fan to hand into the nearest one. Nothing
happened.
He tried six of them, narrow end first, wide end first, every way he
could think of, before it occurred to him that perhaps not all of the
reading machines were still working. And the second one he tried pulled
the fan out of his hand and immediately sprang into light. He was looking
at six dancers in black masks and bodystockings, and he was hearing a song
he had not heard for many years.
It was a taped PV show! No. Not even that. It was older than that.
Years older, not much more recent than the first years of the discovery of
the Gateway asteroid; his second wife was still alive, and Janine not born
yet, when that song was new. It had been simple old television, before the
Heechee piezoelectric circuits had been incorporated into communications
systems for human beings. It had perhaps been part of the library of some
Gateway prospector, no doubt One of the Dead Men, and somehow it had been
transcribed to a prayer fan.
What a cheat!
But then he realized that there were thousands of prayer fans, on
Earth, in the tunnels of Venus, still on Gateway itself; wherever the
Heechee had been they had left them. Whatever the source of this one, most
of the others must have been left by the Heechee themselves! And that
alone-dear God, that alone was worth more even than the Food Factory, for
it was the key to all of the Heechee's knowledge! What a bonus there would
be!
Exulting, Peter tried another fan (old movie), and another (slim volume
of poetry, this time in English, by someone named Eliot), and another. How
disgusting! If this was what Wan had got his notions of love from, some
lascivious Gateway prospector carrying pornography with him to pass the
time, no wonder his behavior was so foul! But he could not remain angry
long, for he had too much to be glad about. He snatched it out of the
reader, and then, in the quiet, heard the distant tiny sound of Vera's
urgent-attention bell.
It had a frightening sound, even before he got back to the ship, even
before he demanded the message and heard his son-in-law's voice, rasped
with fear:
"Urgent override priority! For Peter Hester and immediate relay to
Earth! Lurvy, Janine and Wan have been captured by the Heechee, and I
think they are coming after me!"
The advantage of his new situation, and the only one, was that now that
there were no more messages coming from Heechee Heaven Vera was better
able to cope with her overload. Patiently Peter teased out of her all the
pictures that had been transmitted before Paul's message had been taped,
and saw the knot of Heechee at the end of the corridor, the blurred
struggle, half a dozen quick glimpses of the ceiling of the corridor,
something that might have been the back of Wan's head-then nothing. Or
nothing that meant anything. Peter could not know that the camera had been
jammed into the blouse of one of the Old Ones, but he could see that there
was nothing to be seen: obscure shadowy shapes, perhaps a hint of texture.
Peter's mind was clear. But it was also empty. He did not allow himself
to feel how empty his life had at once become. He carefully programmed
Vera to go back over the voice messages and select the significant ones,
and listened to what all of them had said. There was no hope in any of it.
Not even when at last a new picture suddenly began to build on the screen,
then another, then another. For half a dozen frames there was nothing that
made sense, perhaps a fist over the lens, maybe a shot of a bare floor.
Then, in one corner of the last frame, something that looked like-what?
Like a Sturmkampfwagen from his earliest boyhood? But then it was gone,
and the camera had once again been put where it showed nothing at all, and
stayed that way through fifty frames.
What it noticeably did not show was any sign of either of his
daughters, or of Wan. And as to Paul, the old man did not have a clue;
after his last frantic message he was gone.
In some unwanted corner of his mind he found the realization that now
he might be, probably was, the sole survivor of the mission, and so
whatever bonus might come to all was now his alone.
He held the thought where he could look at it. But it meant nothing. He
was now hopelessly alone, more alone than ever, as alone as Trish Bover
frozen into her eternal ragged orbit that would go nowhere. Perhaps he
could get back to Earth to claim his reward. Perhaps he could keep from
dying. But how was he to keep from going insane?
It took Peter a long time to fall asleep. He was not afraid of
sleeping. What he dreaded was waking up afterward, and when it came it was
as bad as he had feared. In the first moment it was a day like any other
day, and it was only after a peaceable moment of stretching and yawning
that he remembered what had happened. "Peter Hester," he said to himself
out loud, "you are alone in this very damned place, and you will die here,
still alone." He noted that he was talking to himself. Already.
Through the habits of all those years he washed himself, cleaned his
mouth, brushed his hair and then took time to snip off the loose ends
around his ears and at the nape of his neck. It did not matter what he
did, in any case. Having left his private, he opened two packets of
CHON-food and ate them methodically before asking Vera if there were any
messages from Heechee Heaven. "No," she said, "... Mr. Hester, but there
are a number of downlink action relays."
"Later," he said. They did not matter. They would tell him to do things
he had already done, perhaps. Or they would tell him to do things he had
no intention of doing, perhaps to force himself outside, to rerig the
thrusters, to try again. But the Food Factory would of course counter
every thrust with an equal and opposite thrust of its own and continue its
slow acceleration toward God, He knew what, for God, He knew why. In any
event, nothing that came from Earth for the next fifty days would be
relevant to the new realities.
And in less than fifty days. In less than fifty days, what? "You talk
as though you had a choice of options, Peter Hester!" he scolded himself.
Well, perhaps he had, he thought, if only he could perceive what they
were. Meanwhile the best thing for him to do was to do what he had always
done. To keep himself fastidiously neat. To do such tasks as were
reasonable for him to do. To maintain his well established habits. He had
learned through all those decades of life that the best time for him to
move his bowels was some forty-five minutes after eating breakfast; it was
now about that time; it was appropriate to do that. While he was squatting
on the sanitary he felt a tiny, almost imperceptible lurch once more and
scowled. It was an annoyance to have things happen when he did not know
their cause, and it was an interruption in what he was doing, with his
customary efficiency. Of course, one could not claim much personal credit
for the functioning of sphincters that had been bought and transplanted
from some hapless (or hungry) donor, or for a stomach inserted intact from
another. Nevertheless, it pleased Peter that he functioned so well.
You are morbidly interested in your bowel movements, he told himself,
but silently.
Also silently-it did not seem so bad to talk to oneself, as long as it
was not aloud-he defended himself. It was not unjustified, he thought. It
was only because the example of the bio-assay unit in the toilet was
always before him. For three and a half years it had been monitoring every
waste product of their bodies. Of course, so it must! How else to keep
tabs on their health? And if it was proper for a machine to weigh and
evaluate one's excrement, why not for the excrement's author?
He said aloud, grinning, "Du bist verruckt, Peter Hester!"
He nodded in agreement with himself as he cleaned himself and fastened
his coverall, because he had summed it all up. Yes. He was crazy.
By the standards of ordinary men.
But what ordinary man had ever been in the present position of Peter
Hester?
So when one had said that he was crazy, after all, one had said nothing
that was relevant. What did the standards of ordinary men signify as to
Schwarze Peter? It was only against extraordinary men that he could be
judged-and what a motley crew they were! Drug addicts and drunkards.
Adulterers and traitors. Tycho Brahe had a gutta-percha nose, and no one
thought him the less. The Reichsfuhrer ate no meat. Great Frederick
himself spent many hours that could have been devoted to the management of
an empire in composing music for tinkle-tanide chamber groups. He strolled
across to the computer and called, "Vera, what was that little thump a few
minutes ago?"
The computer paused to match the description against her telemetry. "I
cannot be sure... Mr. Hester. But the moment of inertia is consistent with
either the launching or docking of one of the cargo ships that have been
observed."
He stood for a moment gripping the edge of the console seat. "Fool!" he
shouted. "Why was I not told that that was possible?"
"I'm sorry... Mr. Hester," she apologized. "The analysis suggesting
this possibility has been read out for you as hard copy. Perhaps you
overlooked it."
"Fool," he said again, but this time he was not sure who he was talking
to. The ships, of course! It had been implicit all along that the
production of the Food Factory had to go somewhere. And it had also been
implicit that the ships had to return empty to be reloaded. For what?
Where?
That did not matter. What mattered was the perception that perhaps they
would not always come empty.
And, following on that, the perception that one ship at least, known to
come to the Food Factory, was now in Heechee Heaven. If it should come
back, who or what might be in it?
Peter rubbed his arm, which had begun to ache. Pains or none, he could
perhaps do something about that! He had some weeks before that ship could
possibly return. He could-what? Yes! He could barricade that corridor. He
could somehow move machines, stores-anything that had mass-to block it, so
that when it did return, if it did, whoever was in it would be stopped, or
at least delayed. And the time to begin that was now.
He delayed no further, but set off to find materials for a barricade.
It was not hard to move even quite massive objects, in the low thrust
of the Food Factory. But it was tiring. And his arms continued to ache.
And in a little while, as he was shoving a blue metal object like a short,
fat canoe down toward the dock, he became aware of a strange sensation
that seemed to come from the roots of his teeth, almost like the beginning
of a toothache; and saliva began to flow from under his tongue.
Peter stopped and breathed deeply, forcing himself to relax. It did no
good. He had known it would do no good. In a few moments the pain in the
chest began, first tentative, as though someone were pressing against him
with a sled runner along his breastbone, then painful, a hard, bruising
thrust, as though the runner were on top of him and a hundred-kilo man
standing on it.
He was too far from Vera to get medicine. He would have to wait it out.
If it was false angina, he would live. If it was cardiac arrest, he would
not. He sat patient and still, waiting to see which it would be, while
anger built up and built up inside him. How unfair it was!
How unfair it all was! Five thousand astronomical units away, serenely
and untroubled, the people of the world went about their business, neither
knowing nor caring that the person who could bring them so much-who
already had! -might be dying, alone and in pain.
Could they be grateful? Could they show respect, appreciation, even
common decency?
Perhaps he would give them a chance. If they responded with these
things, yes, he would bring them such gifts as they had never known. But
if they were wicked and disobedient. Then Schwarze Peter would bring them
such terrible gifts that all the world would shudder and quake with fear!
In either case, they would never forget him... if only he survived what
was happening to him now.
The main thing was Essie. I sat by her bed every time she came out of
surgery-fourteen times in six weeks-and every time her voice was a little
weaker and she looked a little more gaunt. Everybody was after me all the
time, the suit against me in Brasilia was going badly, reports poured in
from the Food Factory, the fire in the food mines still would not go out.
But Essie was up front. Harriet had her orders. Wherever I was, asleep or
awake, if Essie asked for me she was put through at once. "Oh, yes, Mrs.
Broadhead, Robin will be with you right away. No, you won't be disturbing
him. He just woke up from a nap." Or he's just between appointments, or
he's just coming up the lawn from the Tappan Sea, or anything that would
not deter Essie from speaking to me right away. And then I would go into
the darkened room, all sun-tanned and grinning and relaxed, and tell her
how well she was looking. They had taken my billiard room and moved a
whole operating theater into it, and cleared the books out of the library
next door to make it a bedroom for her. She was pretty comfortable there.
Or said she was.
And actually, she didn't look bad at all. They had done the splints and
the bone grafts, and plugged in two or three kilos of spare parts and
tissues. They had even put the skin back, or I guess transplanted new skin
from somebody else. Her face looked fine, except for a light bandage on
one side, and she brushed her streaky blonde hair down over that. "So,
stud," she would greet me. "How you hanging?"
"Just fine, just fine. A little horny," I would say, nuzzling her neck
with my nose. "And you?"
"Just fine." So we reassured each other; and we weren't lying, you
know. She was getting better every day, the doctors told me that. And I
was getting-I don't know what I was getting. But I was all atremble with
eagerness for every morning. Operating on five hours sleep a night. Never
tired. Never felt better in my life.
But still she kept getting skinnier every time. The doctors told me
what I must do, and I told Harriet and Harriet reprogrammed the cook So we
stopped having salads and bare broiled steaks. no coffee and juice
breakfasts, but tvoroznyikyi, cream-cheese pancakes, and mugs of steaming
cocoa. Caucasian lamb pilaff for lunch. Roast grouse in sour-cream sauce
for dinner. "You're spoiling me, dear Robin," she accused, and I said:
"Only fattening you up. I can't stand skinny women."
"Yes, very well. But there is such a thing as being too ethnic. Is
there nothing fattening that is not Russian?"
"Wait for dessert," I grinned. "Strawberry shortcake." And whipped with
double Devonshire cream. As a matter of psychology, the nurse had
persuaded me to start with small portions on large plates. Essie doggedly
ate them all the way through, and as we gradually increased the size of
the portions she gradually ate more each day. She didn't stop losing
weight. But she slowed it down a lot, and by the end of six weeks the
doctors opined that her condition, cautiously, might be regarded as
stable. Nearly.
When I told her the good news she was actually standing up tethered to
the plumbing under her bed, but able to walk about the room. "About time,"
she said, reaching out to kiss me. "Now. You have been spending too much
time at home."
"It's a pleasure," I said.
"It is a kindness," she said soberly. "Is very dear to me that you have
always been here, Robin. But now that I am almost well you must have
affairs to attend to."
"Not really. I get along fine with the comm facilities in the brain
room. Of course, it would be nice for the two of us to go somewhere. I
don't think you've ever seen Brasilia. Maybe in a few weeks..."
"No. Not in few weeks. Not with me. If you have need to go, please do
it, Robin."
I hesitated. "Well, Morton thinks it might be useful."
She nodded briskly and called, "Harriet? Mr. Broadhead will be leaving
for Brasilia tomorrow morning. Make reservations et cetera."
"Certainly, Mrs. Broadhead," Harriet said from the console at the head
of Essie's bed. Her image sputtered into blackness as quickly as it had
appeared, and Essie put her arms around me.
"I will see that you have complete communications in Brasilia," she
promised, "and Harriet will be instructed to keep you posted on my
condition at all times. Square count, Robin. If I need you, you will know
at once."
I said into her ear, "Well..."
She said into my shoulder, "Is no 'well'. Is settled, and, Robin? I
love you very much."
Albert tells me that every radio message I send is actually a long,
skinny string of photons, like a spear thrown into space. A thirty-second
burst communication is a column nine million kilometers long, each photon
zipping along at the speed of light, in perfect step all the way. But even
that long, fast, skinny spear takes forever to go 5,000 A. U. The fever
that had wounded my wife had taken twenty-five days to get here. The
orders to stop fooling with the couch had gone only a fraction of the way
before they passed the second fever, the one the girl Janine had laid on
us. Lightly, to be sure. Our message congratulating the Herter-Halls on
arriving at the Food Factory, out somewhere past Pluto's orbit, had passed
the one to tell us that most of them had gone skylarking off to Heechee
Heaven. By now they were there; and our message telling them what to do
about it was long since at the Food Factory for relay-for once two events
had occurred at times close enough to have some meaning for each other.
But by the time we knew what meaning they had had, the event would
again be twenty-five days in the past. What an annoyance! I wanted many
things on the Food Factory, but what I wanted most of all at that moment
was that faster-than-light radio. Astonishing that such a thing should be!
wrench a reading machine loose and bring it back with them.... And back
they would go, Lurvy was suddenly sure. If they could not find a way to
move the Food Factory, they would abandon it. no one could fault them.
They had done enough. If there was a need for more, other parties could
follow them, but meanwhile... Meanwhile they would have brought back
richer gifts than any other human beings since the discovery of the
Gateway asteroid itself! They would be rewarded accordingly, there was no
question of that-she even had Robinette Broadhead's word. For the first
time since they had left the Moon on the searing chemical flame of their
takeoff rockets, Lurvy let herself think of herself not as someone who was
striving for a prize, but as someone who had won. And how happy her father
would be...
"That's enough," she said, helping Janine grip the spilling sack of
prayer fans. "Let's take them right to the ship."
Janine hugged the clumsy bundle to her small breasts and picked up a
few more with a free hand. "You sound as if we're going home," she said.
"Maybe so," Lurvy grinned. "Of course, we'll have to have a conference
and decide. Wan? What's the matter?"
He was at the door, his shirtful of fans under an arm. And he looked
stricken. "We waited too long," he whispered, peering down the corridor.
"There are Old Ones by the berryfruit."
"Oh, no." But it was true. Lurvy peered cautiously out into the
corridor and there they were, staring up at the camera Paul had fixed to
the wall. One reached up and effortlessly pulled it loose while she
watched. "Wan? Is there another way home?"
"Yes, through the gold, but..." His nose was working. "I think there
are some there, too. I can smell them and, yes, I can hear them!" And that
was true, too; Lurvy could hear a faint sound of mellow, chirrupy grunts,
from where the corridor bent.
"We don't have a choice," she said. "There are only two of them back
the way we came. We'll take them by surprise and just push our way
through. Come on!" Still carrying the tapes, she hustled the others ahead
of her. The Heechee might be strong, but Wan had said they were slow. With
any luck at all. They had no luck at all. As they reached the opening she
saw that there were more than two, half a dozen more, standing around and
looking toward them in the entrances to the other corridors. "Paul!" she
shouted at the camera. "We're caught! Get in the ship, and if we don't get
away..." And she could say no more, because they were upon her; and, yes,
they were strong!
They were hustled up through half a dozen levels, their captors one to
each arm, stolidly chirping at each other, ignoring their struggles and
their words. Wan did not speak. He let them pull him as they would, all
the way up to a great open spindleshaped volume, where another dozen Old
Ones waited and a huge blue-lit machine sat silent behind them. Did the
Heechee believe in sacrifice? Or perform experiments on captives? Would
they wind up as Dead Men themselves, rambling and obsessed, ready for the
next batch of visitors? Lurvy looked upon all of these as interesting
questions, and had no answers for any of them. She was not yet afraid. Her
feelings had not caught up with the facts; it was too recently that she
had allowed herself to feel triumph. The realization of defeat would have
to wait.
The Old Ones chirruped to each other, gesticulating toward the
prisoners, the corridors, the great silent machine, like a battle tank
without guns. Like a nightmare. Lurvy could not understand any of it, even
though the situation was clear enough. After minutes of jabber they were
pushed into a cubicle, and found in it-astonishingly! -quite familiar
objects. Behind the closed door Lurvy shuffled through them-clothing; a
chess set; long desiccated rations. In the toe of one shoe was a thick
roll of Brazilian currency, more than a quarter of a million dollars of
it, she guessed. They had not been the first captives here! But in none of
the rubble was anything like a weapon. She turned to Wan, who was pale and
shaking. "What will happen?" she demanded.
He waggled his head like an Old One. It was the only answer he could
give. "My father..." he began, and had to swallow before he could go on.
"They captured my father once and, yes, truly, they let him go again. But
I do not think that is a rule, since my father told me I must never let
myself be caught."
Janine said, "At least Paul got away. Maybe-maybe he can bring
help...." But she stopped there, and did not expect an answer. Any hopeful
answer would have been fantasy, defined by the four years it would take
another vessel like theirs to reach the Food Factory. If help came, it
would not be soon. She began to sort through the old clothing. "At least
we can get something on," she said. "Come on, Wan. Get yourself dressed."
Lurvy followed her example, and then stopped at a strange sound from
her sister. It was almost a laugh! "What's so funny?" she snapped.
Janine pulled a sweater over her head before she answered. It was too
big, but it was warm. "I was just thinking about the orders we got," she
said. "To get Heechee tissue samples, you know? Well, the way it worked
out-they got ours instead. All of them."
When the shipboard computer's mail bell rang, Payter woke quickly and
completely. It was an advantage of age that one slept shallowly and woke
at once. There were not many advantages. He got up, rinsed his mouth,
urinated into the sanitary, washed his hands, and took two food packets
with him to the terminal. "Display the mail now," he ordered, munching on
something that tasted like sour rye bread but was meant to be a sweet
roll.
When he saw what the mail was, his good mood passed. Most of it was
interminable mission orders. Six letters for Janine, one each for Paul and
Dorema, and for himself only a petition addressed to Schwarze Peter and
signed by eight hundred and thirty school-children of Dortmund, begging
him to return and become their Burgermeister. "Dumb head!" he scolded the
computer. "Why do you wake me for this trash?" Vera did not answer,
because he did not give her time to identify him and rummage through her
slow magnetic bubbles to locate his name.
Long before then, he was complaining, "Also this food is not fit for
pigs! Attend to it at once!"
Poor Vera erased the attempt to interpret his first question and
patiently attended to the second. "The recycling system is below optimal
mass levels," she said,"... Mr. Herter. In addition, my processing
routines have been subject to overload for some time. Many programs have
been deferred."
"Do not defer the food question any more," he snarled, "or you will
kill me, and there's an end to it." He gloomily commanded display of the
mission orders while he forced himself to chew the remainder of his
breakfast. The orders rolled for ten solid minutes. What marvelous ideas
they had for him, back on Earth! And if only there were a hundred of him,
perhaps they could do one one-hundredth of the tasks proposed. He allowed
the end of it to run unwatched, while he carefully shaved his pink old
face and brushed his sparse hair. And why was the recycling system
depleted, so that it could not function properly? Because his daughters
and their consorts had removed themselves and thus their useful
by-products, as well as all the water Wan had stolen from the system.
Stolen! Yes, there was no other word for it. Also they had taken the
mobile bio-assay unit, so that there was only the sampler in the sanitary
to monitor his health, and what could that tell of fever or arrhythmic
heart, if he should have either? Also they had taken all but one of the
cameras, so that he must carry that one with him wherever he went. Also
they had taken. They had taken themselves, and Schwarze Peter, for the
first time in his life, was wholly alone.
He was not only alone, he was powerless to change it. Family came back,
they would do so in their own good time and not before. Until then he was
a reserve unit, a pillbox soldier, a standby program. He was given
excessive tasks to do, but the real center of action was somewhere else.
In his long life Payter had taught himself to be patient, but he had
never taught himself to enjoy it. It was maddening to be forced to wait!
To wait fifty days for an answer from Earth to his perfectly reasonable
proposals and questions. To wait almost as long for his family and that
hooligan boy to get to where they were going (if they ever did) and report
to him (if they should happen to choose to). Waiting was not so bad if one
had enough of a life left to wait in. But how much, realistically, had he?
Suppose he had a stroke. Suppose he developed a cancer. Suppose any part
of the complicated interactions that kept, his heart beating and his blood
flowing and his bowels moving and his brain thinking broke down in any
place. What then?
And some day they surely would, because Payter was old. He had lied
about his age so many times that he was no longer sure of what it was. Not
even his children knew; the stories he told about his grandfather's youth
were really about his own. Age in itself did not matter. Full Medical
could deal with anything, repair or replace, as long as it was not the
brain itself that was damaged-and Payter's brain was in the best of shape,
because had it not schemed and contrived to get him here?
But "here" there was no Full Medical, and age began to matter a great
deal.
He was no longer a boy! But once he had been, and even then he had
known that somehow, some day, he would possess exactly what he owned now:
the key to heart's desire. Burgermeister of Dortmund? That was nothing!
Skinny young Peter, shortest and youngest in his unit of the Hitler Youth
but their leader all the same, had promised himself he would have much
more. He had even known that it would turn out to be something like this,
some grand futuristic pattern would emerge, and he alone would be able to
find the handle to wield it, like a weapon, like an axe, like a scythe, to
punish or reap or remake the world. Well, here it was! And what was he
doing with it? He was waiting. It had not been like that, in the boyhood
stories by Juve and Gail and Dominik and the Frenchman, Verne. The people
in them did not waste themselves so spinelessly.
But what, after all, was one to do?
So while he waited for that question to answer itself, he kept up his
daily rounds. He ate four light meals a day, every other one of CHON-food,
methodically dictating to Vera his impressions of taste and consistency.
He ordered Vera to design a new mobile bio-assay out of what odds and ends
of sensor instrumentation could be spared, and worked at building it as
she found time to complete parts of the design. He worked out ten minutes
each morning with the weights, half an hour every afternoon with bending
and stretching. He methodically walked every pathway in the Food Factory,
with his hand-held camera pointed into every cranny. He composed long
letters of complaint to his masters on Earth, cagily arguing the merits of
aborting the mission and returning to Earth as soon as he could summon the
family back, and actually transmitted one or two of them. He wrote fierce
and peremptory directives to his lawyer in Stuttgart, in code, arguing his
position, demanding a revision to the contract. And most of all, he
schemed. And about the Traumeplatz most of all.
It was seldom out of his thoughts, this dreaming place with its
startling potential. When he was depressed and fretful, he thought how
rightly it would serve Earth if he were to repair it and call Wan back to
give them their fevers once again. When he was charged with force and
determination he went to look at it, lid hanging from an ornamental
projection on one wall, the joints and fasteners always with him in his
coverall pouch. How easy it would be to bring in a cutting torch and lop
it free, cram the ship full of that, and the communications system for the
Dead Men, and whatever other goods and treasures he could find; and then
cast loose in the rocket for Earth, start the long, slow downward spiral
that would bring him-what would it bring him? God in heaven, what would it
not! Fame! Power! Prosperity! All the things that were his due-yes, and
his rightful property, too, if he only got back in time to enjoy them.
It made him ill to think about it. All the time the clock was ticking,
ticking. Every minute he was one minute closer to the end of his life.
Every second spent waiting was a second stolen from the happy time of
greatness and luxury that he had earned. He forced himself to eat, sitting
on the edge of his private and looking longingly at the ship's controls.
"The food has not improved, Vera!" he called accusingly.
The confounded thing did not answer. "Vera! You must do something about
the food!" It still did not answer, not for several seconds.
And then only, "One moment, please... Mr. Herter." It was enough to
make one sick. In fact, he did feel somewhat sick, he realized. He gazed
with hostility at the dish he had been doggedly forcing down, supposed to
be a sort of schnitzel, or as close to it as Vera's limited recombinant
capacities would allow, but tasting of whisky or sauerkraut, or both at
once. He set it on the floor.
"I do not feel well," he announced.
Pause. Then, "One moment, please... Mr. Hester." Poor stupid Vera had
just so much capacity. She was processing a burst of messages from Earth,
endeavoring to carry on a conversation with the Dead Men by means of the
faster-than-light radio, encoding and transmitting all of her own
telemetry-all at once. She simply did not have time for his queasiness.
But his accelerating unease would not be denied: a sudden rush of saliva
under the tongue, a quick shuddering of the diaphragm. He barely made it
to the sanitary, giving back, there, all he had taken. For the last time,
he swore. He did not want to live so long as to see those God-bedamned
organic compounds reworked for one more passage through his gut. When he
was sure he had stopped vomiting he marched over to the console and pushed
the override buttons. "All functions in standby except this," he ordered.
"Monitor my bio-assay at once."
"Very well," she said at once,"... Mr. Hester." Silence for a moment,
while the unit in the sanitary made what it could of what Peter had just
deposited. "You are suffering from food poisoning," she reported,"... Mr.
Hester."
"So! This I already know. What is to be done about it?"
Pause, while her tiny brain revolved the problem. "If you could add
water to the system, the fermentation and recycling would be under better
control," she said, "... Mr. Hester. At least one hundred liters. There
has been considerable loss due to evaporation in the much larger volume of
space now available, as well as the stocks withdrawn for the remainder of
your party. My recommendation is that you replenish the system with
available water as soon as possible."
"But that is not fit to drink for pigs even!"
"The solutes present problems," she acknowledged. "Therefore I
recommend that at least half of any added water be distilled first. The
system should be able to cope with the remainder of the solutes... Mr.
Hester."
"God in Heaven! Am I to build a still out of nothing, and become a
water-carrier too? And what of the bio-assay mobile unit, so that this
will not happen again?"
Vera sorted through the questions for a moment. "Yes, I think that
would be appropriate," she agreed. "If you wish, I will provide
construction plans. Also... Mr. Hester, you may wish to consider relying
more heavily on CHON-food for your diet, since you do not appear to have
severe adverse reactions to it."
"Apart of course from the fact that it tastes like dog-biscuit," he
sneered. "Very well. Complete the construction plans at once. Hard copy,
making use of available materials, do you understand?"
"Yes... Mr. Hester." The computer was silent for a time, inventorying
redundant parts and materials, devising linkages that would do the job. It
was a formidable task for Vera's limited intelligence. Peter drew a cup of
water and rinsed out his mouth, then grimly unwrapped one of the least
unattractive CHON tablets and nibbled off a tentative corner. While he
waited to see if he would throw up again he faced the possibility that he
might in fact die here, and alone. He did not even have the option he had
thought was his, of casting everything adrift and returning to Earth by
himself-not, at least, unless he first added water as ordered, and did his
best to insure that nothing else would go wrong.
And yet it was every day so increasingly tempting..
To be sure, that would mean casting his daughters and his son-in-law
adrift.
But would they ever return? Suppose they did not. Suppose that rude boy
turned the wrong switch, or ran out of fuel. Or anything. Suppose, in
short, they died. Must he then wither on the vine until he also was dead?
And what benefit would that be to humanity, if he perished here, and the
whole thing to do over again with a new crew... and himself, Schwarze
Peter, done out of reward, done out of fame and power, done out of life
itself?
Or-an idea struck him-was there another option? This bedamned Food
Factory itself, so set on continuing its course. What if he could find the
controls that directed it so? What if he could learn to change those
directions, so that it could bring him back to Earth not in three years
and more, but at once, in days? To be sure, that would doom his family,
would it not? But perhaps not! Perhaps they would return, if they returned
at all, to the Food Factory itself, wherever it might be. Even in close
orbit around Earth! And how marvelously that would solve everyone's
problems at once. He threw the remainder of the packet into the sanitary,
to add to the store of organics. "Du bist verruckt, Peter!" he snarled to
himself. The flaw in that dream could not be ignored: he had sought with
all his might, and the controls to the Food Factory were not to be found.
The frying-bacon sound of the hard-copy printer rescued him from his
thoughts. He pulled the sheets out of the machine and frowned over them
for a moment. So much work! Twenty hours, at least! And not merely time,
but so much of it was hard physical labor! He would have to go out into
space to reclaim piping from the struts that were meant to hold the
auxiliary transmitters in place, cut them loose, bring them inside; and
only then begin to weld them together and form them into a spiral. Simply
for the condensation section of the still! He saw that he was beginning to
shake. He barely made it to the sanitary in time. "Vera!" he croaked.
"I must have medication for this!"
"At once... Mr. Hester. Yes. In the medical kit you will find tablets
marked..."
"Dumbhead! The medical kit is gone to Cuckooland!"
"Oh, yes... Mr. Hester. One moment. Yes. I have programmed appropriate
pharmaceuticals for you. It will take about twenty minutes for them to be
prepared."
"In twenty minutes I could be dead," be snarled. But there was no help
for it, and so he sat and stewed for twenty minutes, the pressures
mounting. Illness, hunger, loneliness, overwork, resentment, fear. Anger!
That was what, in the end, they all fused into. Anger. Many vectors. One
vector sum. By the time Vera's dispensary popped out his pills, it had
submerged all the others. He swallowed them greedily and retired to his
private to see what would happen.
Actually they did appear to work. He lay back while the fires in his
belly damped themselves, and fell imperceptibly asleep.
When he woke he felt at least physically better. He washed himself,
brushed his teeth, brushed his thinning yellow hair, and only then noticed
the Christmas tree of attention-demanding lights around Vera's console. On
the screen in bright red letters were the words:
He chuckled to himself. He had forgotten to cancel the override. When
he ordered the computer to get back to business there was an instant
explosion of bells and signal lights, a cascade of hard copy out of the
printer and a voice. His elder daughter's voice, out of Vera's taped
storage: "Hello, Pop. Sorry we couldn't reach you to tell you we arrived
safely. We're going to explore now. Talk to you later."
Because Peter Hester loved his family, the joy of their safe arrival
flooded his heart and sustained him-for hours. For almost two days. But
joy does not flourish in an existence of irritations and worries. He spoke
to Lurvy-twice; for no more than thirty seconds each time. Vera simply
could not handle more. Vera was harder pressed than Peter himself,
stripped and rearranged as she was, handling two-way traffic between
Heechee Heaven and the Earth, deferring top priority action commands when
even higher priorities demanded attention. The one voice link with the
Heechee place could not handle the volume it was given to carry, and mere
chitchat between father and daughter could not be allowed.
That was not unjust, Peter conceded. Such marvels they were finding!
What was unjust was that he himself was out of it. What was unjust was
that among the urgent and meaningful traffic, Vera found time to pass on
to him a hodgepodge of commands meant for himself. None reasonable. Some
impossible to carry out. Redeploy the thrusters. Inventory CHON-food.
Submit by return message complete analysis a cm by 3 cm by 12. 5 cm
packets in red and lavender wrappers. Do not submit unnecessary analyses!
Submit metallurgical analysis "dreaming couch". Do not attempt physical
study "dreaming couch". Query Dead Men re Heechee Drive. Query Dead Men re
control panels. Query Dead Men. How easy that was to command! How hard to
carry out, when they maundered and scolded and rambled and complained when
he could hear them at all, and when most often he was forbidden to take
time on the FTL voice circuit anyway. Some of the orders from Earth
contradicted others, and most of them came out of order, with obsolete
priority designations. And some did not come at all. Poor Vera's storage
circuits were soon approaching overload, and she tried to rid herself of
unnecessary data by hard-printing it for him to, somehow, attend to; but
that made problems of its own,, because the recycling system that fed the
printer rolls was the same one that fed him, and the organics were already
depleted. So Peter had to open and dump CHON-food into the sanitary and
then get busy on the still.
Even if Vera had had time for him, he had not much time for Vera.
Struggle into EVA equipment. Cycle himself out on the hull of the Food
Factory. Cut away tubing and bind it together. Sweat it back to the ship,
always fighting the infuriating, dogged thrust of the Food Factory itself
as it plunged toward somewhere or other. He could spare time only for an
occasional glance at the pictures coming back from Heechee Heaven. Vera
displayed them as they came in, one frame at a time; but then each one was
whisked away to make storage space for the next one, and if Peter was not
there to see they would go unseen. Even so, good heavens! The Dead Men, so
featureless to look at. The corridors of Heechee Heaven. The Old
Ones-Peter's heart almost stopped as he looked at the great broad face of
an Old One on the screen. But he had time only for a look, and then the
still was done and he must go on with the next task. Build himself a yoke
for his shoulders. Seam together plastic sheeting (another drain on the
recycler!) to make buckets. Squat impatiently by the one
functioning-barely functioning-water source, holding the flexible disk
around the spout and catching the foulsmelling dribble in the bags. Tote
the water back, half into the still, the other half into the recycling
tanks. Sleep when he could. Eat when he could force himself. Attend to his
own personal priority messages when they trickled through, and when he was
too exhausted for anything physical. Another message from Dortmund, three
hundred municipal workers this time-stupid Vera, for letting such trash
through! A coded communication from his lawyer, meaning half an hour to
translate it. And then all it said was, "Am attempting secure more
favorable terms. Can promise nothing. Meanwhile advise full compliance all
directives." What a pig! Peter, swearing, sat before the console, slammed
down the override key and dictated his reply:
"Full compliance with all stupid directives will kill me, and then
what?" And he sent it in the clear; let Broadhead and the Gateway Corp
make what they would of it!
And perhaps the message was no lie. In all his stress and bustle, Peter
had no time for aches and pains. He ate the CHON-food and, when new
regular rations began to come out of the recycler, them, too. Even when
they tasted foul-sometimes turpentine, sometimes mold-he was not sick.
This was not ideal. Peter knew that he was operating on stress and
adrenaline, and sometime there would be a price to pay. But he could see
no way to avoid paying it when due.
And when at last he had the food processor working reasonably well once
more, and had managed to catch up with what appeared the most peremptory
of his own orders, he sat before Vera's console half-dozing, and then saw
the greatest marvel of all. He scowled uncomprehendingly. What was that
idiot boy doing with a prayer fan? Why in the next frame was he poking it
into those foolish things that looked like flowerholders? And then the
next frame began to build on the screen, and Peter gave a great shout.
Suddenly a picture had appeared, some sort of book-Japanese or Chinese, by
the look of it.
He was out of the ship and halfway to the Traumeplatz before his
conscious mind quite articulated what some part of him had understood at
once. The prayer fans! They contained information! He did not stop to
wonder why the information had been in a Terrestrial language, or at least
what looked like one. He had grasped the essential fact. He was determined
to see for himself. Panting, he thrust himself into the room and scrabbled
feverishly among the "fans". How was it done? Why in the name of God had
he not waited to see more, to be sure of what he was doing? But there were
the candleholders, or flowerpots, or whatever he had thought they were; he
jammed the first prayer fan to hand into the nearest one. Nothing
happened.
He tried six of them, narrow end first, wide end first, every way he
could think of, before it occurred to him that perhaps not all of the
reading machines were still working. And the second one he tried pulled
the fan out of his hand and immediately sprang into light. He was looking
at six dancers in black masks and bodystockings, and he was hearing a song
he had not heard for many years.
It was a taped PV show! No. Not even that. It was older than that.
Years older, not much more recent than the first years of the discovery of
the Gateway asteroid; his second wife was still alive, and Janine not born
yet, when that song was new. It had been simple old television, before the
Heechee piezoelectric circuits had been incorporated into communications
systems for human beings. It had perhaps been part of the library of some
Gateway prospector, no doubt One of the Dead Men, and somehow it had been
transcribed to a prayer fan.
What a cheat!
But then he realized that there were thousands of prayer fans, on
Earth, in the tunnels of Venus, still on Gateway itself; wherever the
Heechee had been they had left them. Whatever the source of this one, most
of the others must have been left by the Heechee themselves! And that
alone-dear God, that alone was worth more even than the Food Factory, for
it was the key to all of the Heechee's knowledge! What a bonus there would
be!
Exulting, Peter tried another fan (old movie), and another (slim volume
of poetry, this time in English, by someone named Eliot), and another. How
disgusting! If this was what Wan had got his notions of love from, some
lascivious Gateway prospector carrying pornography with him to pass the
time, no wonder his behavior was so foul! But he could not remain angry
long, for he had too much to be glad about. He snatched it out of the
reader, and then, in the quiet, heard the distant tiny sound of Vera's
urgent-attention bell.
It had a frightening sound, even before he got back to the ship, even
before he demanded the message and heard his son-in-law's voice, rasped
with fear:
"Urgent override priority! For Peter Hester and immediate relay to
Earth! Lurvy, Janine and Wan have been captured by the Heechee, and I
think they are coming after me!"
The advantage of his new situation, and the only one, was that now that
there were no more messages coming from Heechee Heaven Vera was better
able to cope with her overload. Patiently Peter teased out of her all the
pictures that had been transmitted before Paul's message had been taped,
and saw the knot of Heechee at the end of the corridor, the blurred
struggle, half a dozen quick glimpses of the ceiling of the corridor,
something that might have been the back of Wan's head-then nothing. Or
nothing that meant anything. Peter could not know that the camera had been
jammed into the blouse of one of the Old Ones, but he could see that there
was nothing to be seen: obscure shadowy shapes, perhaps a hint of texture.
Peter's mind was clear. But it was also empty. He did not allow himself
to feel how empty his life had at once become. He carefully programmed
Vera to go back over the voice messages and select the significant ones,
and listened to what all of them had said. There was no hope in any of it.
Not even when at last a new picture suddenly began to build on the screen,
then another, then another. For half a dozen frames there was nothing that
made sense, perhaps a fist over the lens, maybe a shot of a bare floor.
Then, in one corner of the last frame, something that looked like-what?
Like a Sturmkampfwagen from his earliest boyhood? But then it was gone,
and the camera had once again been put where it showed nothing at all, and
stayed that way through fifty frames.
What it noticeably did not show was any sign of either of his
daughters, or of Wan. And as to Paul, the old man did not have a clue;
after his last frantic message he was gone.
In some unwanted corner of his mind he found the realization that now
he might be, probably was, the sole survivor of the mission, and so
whatever bonus might come to all was now his alone.
He held the thought where he could look at it. But it meant nothing. He
was now hopelessly alone, more alone than ever, as alone as Trish Bover
frozen into her eternal ragged orbit that would go nowhere. Perhaps he
could get back to Earth to claim his reward. Perhaps he could keep from
dying. But how was he to keep from going insane?
It took Peter a long time to fall asleep. He was not afraid of
sleeping. What he dreaded was waking up afterward, and when it came it was
as bad as he had feared. In the first moment it was a day like any other
day, and it was only after a peaceable moment of stretching and yawning
that he remembered what had happened. "Peter Hester," he said to himself
out loud, "you are alone in this very damned place, and you will die here,
still alone." He noted that he was talking to himself. Already.
Through the habits of all those years he washed himself, cleaned his
mouth, brushed his hair and then took time to snip off the loose ends
around his ears and at the nape of his neck. It did not matter what he
did, in any case. Having left his private, he opened two packets of
CHON-food and ate them methodically before asking Vera if there were any
messages from Heechee Heaven. "No," she said, "... Mr. Hester, but there
are a number of downlink action relays."
"Later," he said. They did not matter. They would tell him to do things
he had already done, perhaps. Or they would tell him to do things he had
no intention of doing, perhaps to force himself outside, to rerig the
thrusters, to try again. But the Food Factory would of course counter
every thrust with an equal and opposite thrust of its own and continue its
slow acceleration toward God, He knew what, for God, He knew why. In any
event, nothing that came from Earth for the next fifty days would be
relevant to the new realities.
And in less than fifty days. In less than fifty days, what? "You talk
as though you had a choice of options, Peter Hester!" he scolded himself.
Well, perhaps he had, he thought, if only he could perceive what they
were. Meanwhile the best thing for him to do was to do what he had always
done. To keep himself fastidiously neat. To do such tasks as were
reasonable for him to do. To maintain his well established habits. He had
learned through all those decades of life that the best time for him to
move his bowels was some forty-five minutes after eating breakfast; it was
now about that time; it was appropriate to do that. While he was squatting
on the sanitary he felt a tiny, almost imperceptible lurch once more and
scowled. It was an annoyance to have things happen when he did not know
their cause, and it was an interruption in what he was doing, with his
customary efficiency. Of course, one could not claim much personal credit
for the functioning of sphincters that had been bought and transplanted
from some hapless (or hungry) donor, or for a stomach inserted intact from
another. Nevertheless, it pleased Peter that he functioned so well.
You are morbidly interested in your bowel movements, he told himself,
but silently.
Also silently-it did not seem so bad to talk to oneself, as long as it
was not aloud-he defended himself. It was not unjustified, he thought. It
was only because the example of the bio-assay unit in the toilet was
always before him. For three and a half years it had been monitoring every
waste product of their bodies. Of course, so it must! How else to keep
tabs on their health? And if it was proper for a machine to weigh and
evaluate one's excrement, why not for the excrement's author?
He said aloud, grinning, "Du bist verruckt, Peter Hester!"
He nodded in agreement with himself as he cleaned himself and fastened
his coverall, because he had summed it all up. Yes. He was crazy.
By the standards of ordinary men.
But what ordinary man had ever been in the present position of Peter
Hester?
So when one had said that he was crazy, after all, one had said nothing
that was relevant. What did the standards of ordinary men signify as to
Schwarze Peter? It was only against extraordinary men that he could be
judged-and what a motley crew they were! Drug addicts and drunkards.
Adulterers and traitors. Tycho Brahe had a gutta-percha nose, and no one
thought him the less. The Reichsfuhrer ate no meat. Great Frederick
himself spent many hours that could have been devoted to the management of
an empire in composing music for tinkle-tanide chamber groups. He strolled
across to the computer and called, "Vera, what was that little thump a few
minutes ago?"
The computer paused to match the description against her telemetry. "I
cannot be sure... Mr. Hester. But the moment of inertia is consistent with
either the launching or docking of one of the cargo ships that have been
observed."
He stood for a moment gripping the edge of the console seat. "Fool!" he
shouted. "Why was I not told that that was possible?"
"I'm sorry... Mr. Hester," she apologized. "The analysis suggesting
this possibility has been read out for you as hard copy. Perhaps you
overlooked it."
"Fool," he said again, but this time he was not sure who he was talking
to. The ships, of course! It had been implicit all along that the
production of the Food Factory had to go somewhere. And it had also been
implicit that the ships had to return empty to be reloaded. For what?
Where?
That did not matter. What mattered was the perception that perhaps they
would not always come empty.
And, following on that, the perception that one ship at least, known to
come to the Food Factory, was now in Heechee Heaven. If it should come
back, who or what might be in it?
Peter rubbed his arm, which had begun to ache. Pains or none, he could
perhaps do something about that! He had some weeks before that ship could
possibly return. He could-what? Yes! He could barricade that corridor. He
could somehow move machines, stores-anything that had mass-to block it, so
that when it did return, if it did, whoever was in it would be stopped, or
at least delayed. And the time to begin that was now.
He delayed no further, but set off to find materials for a barricade.
It was not hard to move even quite massive objects, in the low thrust
of the Food Factory. But it was tiring. And his arms continued to ache.
And in a little while, as he was shoving a blue metal object like a short,
fat canoe down toward the dock, he became aware of a strange sensation
that seemed to come from the roots of his teeth, almost like the beginning
of a toothache; and saliva began to flow from under his tongue.
Peter stopped and breathed deeply, forcing himself to relax. It did no
good. He had known it would do no good. In a few moments the pain in the
chest began, first tentative, as though someone were pressing against him
with a sled runner along his breastbone, then painful, a hard, bruising
thrust, as though the runner were on top of him and a hundred-kilo man
standing on it.
He was too far from Vera to get medicine. He would have to wait it out.
If it was false angina, he would live. If it was cardiac arrest, he would
not. He sat patient and still, waiting to see which it would be, while
anger built up and built up inside him. How unfair it was!
How unfair it all was! Five thousand astronomical units away, serenely
and untroubled, the people of the world went about their business, neither
knowing nor caring that the person who could bring them so much-who
already had! -might be dying, alone and in pain.
Could they be grateful? Could they show respect, appreciation, even
common decency?
Perhaps he would give them a chance. If they responded with these
things, yes, he would bring them such gifts as they had never known. But
if they were wicked and disobedient. Then Schwarze Peter would bring them
such terrible gifts that all the world would shudder and quake with fear!
In either case, they would never forget him... if only he survived what
was happening to him now.
The main thing was Essie. I sat by her bed every time she came out of
surgery-fourteen times in six weeks-and every time her voice was a little
weaker and she looked a little more gaunt. Everybody was after me all the
time, the suit against me in Brasilia was going badly, reports poured in
from the Food Factory, the fire in the food mines still would not go out.
But Essie was up front. Harriet had her orders. Wherever I was, asleep or
awake, if Essie asked for me she was put through at once. "Oh, yes, Mrs.
Broadhead, Robin will be with you right away. No, you won't be disturbing
him. He just woke up from a nap." Or he's just between appointments, or
he's just coming up the lawn from the Tappan Sea, or anything that would
not deter Essie from speaking to me right away. And then I would go into
the darkened room, all sun-tanned and grinning and relaxed, and tell her
how well she was looking. They had taken my billiard room and moved a
whole operating theater into it, and cleared the books out of the library
next door to make it a bedroom for her. She was pretty comfortable there.
Or said she was.
And actually, she didn't look bad at all. They had done the splints and
the bone grafts, and plugged in two or three kilos of spare parts and
tissues. They had even put the skin back, or I guess transplanted new skin
from somebody else. Her face looked fine, except for a light bandage on
one side, and she brushed her streaky blonde hair down over that. "So,
stud," she would greet me. "How you hanging?"
"Just fine, just fine. A little horny," I would say, nuzzling her neck
with my nose. "And you?"
"Just fine." So we reassured each other; and we weren't lying, you
know. She was getting better every day, the doctors told me that. And I
was getting-I don't know what I was getting. But I was all atremble with
eagerness for every morning. Operating on five hours sleep a night. Never
tired. Never felt better in my life.
But still she kept getting skinnier every time. The doctors told me
what I must do, and I told Harriet and Harriet reprogrammed the cook So we
stopped having salads and bare broiled steaks. no coffee and juice
breakfasts, but tvoroznyikyi, cream-cheese pancakes, and mugs of steaming
cocoa. Caucasian lamb pilaff for lunch. Roast grouse in sour-cream sauce
for dinner. "You're spoiling me, dear Robin," she accused, and I said:
"Only fattening you up. I can't stand skinny women."
"Yes, very well. But there is such a thing as being too ethnic. Is
there nothing fattening that is not Russian?"
"Wait for dessert," I grinned. "Strawberry shortcake." And whipped with
double Devonshire cream. As a matter of psychology, the nurse had
persuaded me to start with small portions on large plates. Essie doggedly
ate them all the way through, and as we gradually increased the size of
the portions she gradually ate more each day. She didn't stop losing
weight. But she slowed it down a lot, and by the end of six weeks the
doctors opined that her condition, cautiously, might be regarded as
stable. Nearly.
When I told her the good news she was actually standing up tethered to
the plumbing under her bed, but able to walk about the room. "About time,"
she said, reaching out to kiss me. "Now. You have been spending too much
time at home."
"It's a pleasure," I said.
"It is a kindness," she said soberly. "Is very dear to me that you have
always been here, Robin. But now that I am almost well you must have
affairs to attend to."
"Not really. I get along fine with the comm facilities in the brain
room. Of course, it would be nice for the two of us to go somewhere. I
don't think you've ever seen Brasilia. Maybe in a few weeks..."
"No. Not in few weeks. Not with me. If you have need to go, please do
it, Robin."
I hesitated. "Well, Morton thinks it might be useful."
She nodded briskly and called, "Harriet? Mr. Broadhead will be leaving
for Brasilia tomorrow morning. Make reservations et cetera."
"Certainly, Mrs. Broadhead," Harriet said from the console at the head
of Essie's bed. Her image sputtered into blackness as quickly as it had
appeared, and Essie put her arms around me.
"I will see that you have complete communications in Brasilia," she
promised, "and Harriet will be instructed to keep you posted on my
condition at all times. Square count, Robin. If I need you, you will know
at once."
I said into her ear, "Well..."
She said into my shoulder, "Is no 'well'. Is settled, and, Robin? I
love you very much."
Albert tells me that every radio message I send is actually a long,
skinny string of photons, like a spear thrown into space. A thirty-second
burst communication is a column nine million kilometers long, each photon
zipping along at the speed of light, in perfect step all the way. But even
that long, fast, skinny spear takes forever to go 5,000 A. U. The fever
that had wounded my wife had taken twenty-five days to get here. The
orders to stop fooling with the couch had gone only a fraction of the way
before they passed the second fever, the one the girl Janine had laid on
us. Lightly, to be sure. Our message congratulating the Herter-Halls on
arriving at the Food Factory, out somewhere past Pluto's orbit, had passed
the one to tell us that most of them had gone skylarking off to Heechee
Heaven. By now they were there; and our message telling them what to do
about it was long since at the Food Factory for relay-for once two events
had occurred at times close enough to have some meaning for each other.
But by the time we knew what meaning they had had, the event would
again be twenty-five days in the past. What an annoyance! I wanted many
things on the Food Factory, but what I wanted most of all at that moment
was that faster-than-light radio. Astonishing that such a thing should be!