She stopped in the middle of the pa.s.sage to study him. "You sure have your ups and downs, Audee," she said. "But why not?"

The S. Ya. was double-hulled. The s.p.a.ce between the hulls was narrow and dark, but it could be entered. So Yee-xing led Walthers through narrow pa.s.sages close to the skin of the great s.p.a.cecraft, through a maze of empty colonists' bunks, past the crude, huge kitchen that fed them, into a s.p.a.ce that smelled of stale garbage and ancient rot-into a vast, ill-lit chamber. "Here they are," she said. Her voice was lowered, although she had promised him they were too far from the guards to be overheard. "Put your head close to that sort of silvery basket-you see where I'm pointing?-but you don't touch it. That's important!"

"Why is it important?" Walthers stared around at what looked like the Heechee equivalent of an attic. There were at least forty devices in the chamber, large and small, all of them firmly linked to the structure of the ship itself. There were big ones and little ones, spherical ones with splayed mountings joining the deck, squarish ones that glowed in the blue

The Heechee charting and navigation systems were not easy to decipher. For navigation, the system looks up two points, the start and finish of the trip. It then looks up all intervening obstacles such as dust or gas clouds, perturbing radiation, gravitational fields, and so on, and selects points of safe pa.s.sage around or between them, after which it constructs a spline to fit the points and directs the vessel along it.

Many objects and points on the charts were tagged with attention marks-flickering auras, check marks, and so on. We realized early that these were often warnings. The difficulty was that we didn't know which signs were warnings, or what they warned against.

and green colors of the metal. Of the woven metal shroud Janie Yee-xing was indicating, there were three, all exactly alike.

"It's important because I don't want my a.s.s kicked off this ship, Audee. So pay attention!"

"I am paying attention. Why are there three of them?"

"Why did the Heechee do anything? Maybe all these things were spares. Now here's the part you have to listen to. Put your head close to the metal part, but not too close. As soon as you start feeling things that don't come out of you, that's close enough. You'll know when. But don't get any closer, and above all don't touch, because this is a two-way thing. As long as you're just satisfied with sort of general feelings, n.o.body will notice. Probably. But if they do notice, the captain will have us both walking the plank, you understand?"

"Of course I understand," Walthers said, a little annoyed, and moved his head within a dozen centimeters of the silvery mesh. He twisted around to look at Yee-xing. "Nothing," he said.

"Try a little closer."

It was not very easy to move your head a centimeter at a time when it was bent at a strange angle and you didn't have anything to hold on to, but Walthers tried to do as instructed- "That's it!" Yee-xing cried, watching his face. "No closer, now!" He didn't answer. His mind was filled with the barest suspicion of sensations-a confused mumble of sensations. There were dreams and daydreams, and someone's desperate shortness of breath; there was someone's laughter, and someone, or actually what seemed to be three couples of someones, engaged in s.e.xual activity. He twisted to grin at Janie, started to speak- And then, suddenly, there was something else there. Walthers froze. From Yee-xing's description he had expected a sort of sense of company. The presence of other people. Their fears and joys and hungers and pleasures-but the "they" was always human.

This new thing was not.

Walthers moved convulsively. His head touched the mesh. All the sensations became a thousandfold clearer, like the focusing of a lens, and he felt the new and distant presence-or presences?-in a different and immediate way. It was a distant, slippery, chilling sensation, and it did not emanate from anything human. If the sources had depressions or fantasies Walthers could not comprehend them. All he could feel was that they were there. They existed. They did not respond They did not change.

If you could get inside the mind of a corpse, he thought in panic and revulsion, this was how it might feel- All this in a moment, and then he was aware that Yee-xing was tugging at his arm, shouting in his ear: "Oh, d.a.m.n you, Walthers! I felt that! So did the captain and everybody on this G.o.d-d.a.m.ned ship. Now we're in trouble!"

As soon as his head came away from the silvery mesh the sensation was gone. The gleaming walls and shadowy machines were real again, with Janie Yee-xing's furious face thrust into his. In trouble? Walthers found himself laughing. After the chill, slow h.e.l.l he had just glimpsed, nothing human could seem like trouble. Even when the four-power guard came boiling in, weapons drawn, shouting at them in four languages, Walthers almost welcomed them.

For they were human, and alive.

The question that was digging at his mind was the one that anybody would have asked himself Had he tuned in somehow on the cryptic, hidden Heechee?

If so, he told himself, shuddering, heaven help the human race.

5 A Day in a Tyc.o.o.n's Life

Dreading the Heechee was a popular sport in more places than the S. Ya.

I even did a fair amount of it myself. Everybody did. We did it a lot when I was a kid, though then the Heechee were nothing more than strange vanished creatures that had amused themselves digging tunnels on the planet Venus hundreds of thousands of years before. We did it when I was a Gateway prospector-oh, yes, my G.o.d how we did it then! Trusting ourselves to old Heechee ships and scooting around the universe to places no human had ever seen, and always wondering if the owners of the ships would turn up at the end of a trip-and what they would do about it! And we brooded about them even more when we untangled enough of their old sky atlases to discover where they had gone to hide, deep in the core of our own Galaxy.

It did not occur to us, then, to wonder what they were hiding from.

That certainly was not all I did, to be sure. I had plenty of other things to fill my days. There was my steadfast preoccupation with my crotchety health, which forced itself upon my attention whenever it wanted to, and wanted to more often all the time. But that was only the beginning. I was about as busy, with about as many myriad diverse things, as it was possible for a human being to be.

If you looked at any average day in the life of Robin Broadhead, aging tyc.o.o.n, visiting him at his luxurious country home looking over the broad Tappan Sea just north of New York City, you would find him doing such things as strolling along the riverfront with his lovely wife, Essie ... venturing culinary experiments in the cuisines of Malaya, Iceland, and Ghana in his lavishly equipped kitchen... chatting with his wise data-retrieval system, Albert Einstein... hitting his mail: "To that youth center in Grenada, let's see, yeah. Here is the check for three hundred thousand dollars as promised, but please don't name the center after me. Name it after my wife if you want to, and we will both certainly try to get down there for the opening.

"To Pedro Lammartine, Secretary General, United Nations. Dear Pete. I'm working on the Americans to share data with the Brazilians on finding that terrorist ship, but somebody has to get after the Brazilians. Will you use your influence, please? It's in everybody's interest. If the terrorists are not stopped, G.o.d knows where we'll all wind up.

"To Ray McLean, wherever he's living now. Dear Ray. By all means use our docking facilities in the search for your wife. I wish you all the luck from the heart, etc., etc.

"To Gorman and Ketchin, General Contractors. Dear Sirs. I won't accept your new completion date of October 1st for my ship. It's completely unreasonable. You've had one extension already, and that's all you get. I remind you of the heavy penalty charges in the contract if there is any further delay. for my ship. It's completely unreasonable. You've had one extension already, and that's all you get. I remind you of the heavy penalty charges in the contract if there is any further delay.

"To the President of the United States. Dear Ben. If the terrorist ship is not located and neutralized at once, the peace of the whole Earth is threatened. Not to mention property damage, loss of lives, and everything else that's at risk. It is an open secret that the Brazilians have developed a direction-finder for signals from a ship in FTL flight and that our own military people have a procedure for FTL navigating that will let them approach it. Can't they get together? As Commander in Chief, all you have to do is order the High Pentagon to cooperate. There's lots of pressure on the Brazilians to do their share, but they're waiting for a sign from us.

"To what's-his-name, Luqman. Dear Luqman. Thanks for the good news. I think we should move to develop that oil field immediately, so when you come to see me, bring along your plan for production and shipment with cost estimates and a cash-flow capital plan. Every time the S. Ya. comes back empty we're losing money ..."

And on and on-I kept busy! Had a lot to keep busy with, and that's not even counting keeping track of my investments and riding herd on my managers. Not that I spent a lot of time on business. I always say that after he's made his first hundred million or so, anybody who does anything just for the money is insane. You need money, because if you don't have money you don't have freedom to do the things that are worth doing. But after you have that freedom, what's the use of more money? So I left most of the business to my financial programs and the people I hired-except for the ones that I was in not so much for the money as because they were doing something I wanted done.

And yet, if the name Heechee does not appear anywhere in the list of my daily concerns, it was always there. It all came back to the Heechee in the long run. My ship building out in the construction orbits was human-designed and human-built, but most of the construction, and all of the drive and communications systems, were adapted from Heechee designs. The S. Ya., which I was planning to fill with oil on the nearly empty return trips from Peggy's Planet, was a Heechee artifact; for that matter, Peggy's was a gift from the Heechee, since they had provided the navigation to find it and the ships to get there in. Essie's fast-food chain came from the Heechee machines to manufacture CHON-food out of the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in the frozen gases of comets. We'd built some of the food factories on Earth-there was one right now off the sh.o.r.e of Sri Lanka, getting its nitrogen and oxygen from the air, its hydrogen from water out of the Indian Ocean, and its carbon from whatever unfortunate plants, animals, or carbonates slipped through its intake valves. And, now that the Gateway Corporation had so much money to invest that it didn't know what to do with it all, it was able to invest some wisely-in chartering systematic exploration trips-and as a big shareholder in Gateway, I encouraged them to keep on doing that. Even the terrorists were using a stolen Heechee ship and a stolen Heechee telempathic psychokinetic transceiver to inflict their worst wounds on the world-all Heechee!

It was no wonder that there were fringe religious cults all over the Earth, worshipping the Heechee, for they surely met all the objective tests of divinity. They were capricious, powerful-and invisible. There were times when I myself felt very nearly tempted, in those long nights when my gut was hurting and things didn't seem to be going right, to sneak a little prayer to Our Father Who Wert in the Core. It couldn't hurt anything, could it?

Well, yes, it could. It could hurt my self-respect. And for all of us human beings, in this tantalizing, abundant Galaxy the Heechee had given us-but only a dab at a time-self-respect was getting harder and harder to keep.

Of course, I had not then actually met a real, live Heechee.

I had not yet met any, but one who was going to be a big part of my later life (I won't quibble over the terminology anymore!), namely Captain, was halfway to the breakout point where normal s.p.a.ce began and meanwhile, on the Ya., Audee Walthers was getting his a.s.s royally reamed and beginning to think that he should not plan for much of a future working on that ship; and meanwhile- Well, as always, there were a lot of meanwhiles, but the one that would have interested Audee the most was that meanwhile, his errant wife was beginning to wish she hadn't erred.

6 Out Where the Black Holes Spin

Eloping with a lunatic was not, on balance, very much better than being bored out of her mind in Port Hegramet. It was different, oh, heavens, yes, it was different! But parts of it were equally boring, and parts of it simply scared her to death. Since the ship was a Five there was room for the two of them-or should have been. Since Wan was young, and rich, and almost, in a way, handsome-if you looked at him the right way- the trip should have been lively enough. Neither of those was true.

And besides, there were the scary parts.

If there was one thing every human being knew about s.p.a.ce, it was that black holes were meant to be stayed away from. Not by Wan. He sought them out. And then he did worse than that.

What the gidgets and gadgets were that Wan played with Dolly did not know. When she asked, he wouldn't answer. When, wheedling, she put one of her puppets on her hand and asked through its mouth, he scowled and frowned and said, "If you are going to do your act do something funny and dirty, not ask questions that are none of your business." When she tried to find out why they were none of her business, she was more successful. She didn't get a straight answer. But from the bl.u.s.ter and confusion with which Wan responded it was easy to figure out they were stolen.

And they had something to do with black holes. And, although Dolly was almost positive that she had heard, once, that there was no way in or out of a black hole, she was also almost positive that what Wan was trying to do was to find some certain black hole and then to go into it. That was the scary part.

And when she wasn't scared half out of her young mind, she was bone-crackingly lonesome, for Captain Juan Henriquette Santos-Schmitz, the dashing and eccentric young multimillionaire whose exploits still t.i.tillated the readers of gossip services, was rotten company. After three weeks in his presence, Dolly could hardly stand the sight of him.

Although she admitted to herself, trembling, that the sight of him was a lot less worrisome than the sight she was actually looking at.

What Dolly was looking at was a black hole. Or not really at the hole itself, for you could look at that all day and not see anything; black holes were black because they could not be seen at all. She was actually seeing a spiraling aurora of bluish, violetish light, unpleasant for the eyes even through the viewing plate over the control panel. It would have been far more unpleasant to be exposed to. That light was only the iceberg tip of a flood of lethal radiation. Their ship was armored against such things, and so far the armor had easily held. But Wan was not within the armor. He was down in the lander, where he had tools and technologies that she did not understand, and that he refused to explain. And she knew that at some time, in some such situation, she would be sitting in the main ship and would feel the little lurch that meant the lander had disengaged. And then he would be venturing even closer to one of these terrible objects! And what would happen to him then? Or to her? Not that she would go with him, certainly! But if he died, and left her alone, a hundred lightyears from anything she knew-what then?

She heard an angry mumble and knew that at least that time was not now. The hatch opened and Wan crawled out of the lander, wrathful. "Another empty one!" he snarled at her, as though he were holding her accountable for it.

And, of course, he was. She tried to look sympathetic rather than scared. "Aw, honey, what a pity. That makes three of them."

"Three! Huh! Three with you along, you mean. More than that in all, indeed!" His tone was scornful, but she didn't mind the scorn. It was drowned in the relief when he slipped past her. Dolly moved inconspicuously as far away from the control board as she could-not far, in a Heechee ship that would have fit readily into a good-sized living room. As he sat down and consulted his electronic oracles she kept silent.

When Wan talked to his Dead Men he did not invite Dolly to take part. If he conducted his end of the conversation in words she could at least hear that half of it. If he tapped out instructions on his keyboard she did not have even that much. But this time she could figure it out easily enough. He punched out his questions, scowled at what one of the Dead Men said in his earphones, punched out a correction, and then set up a course on the Heechee board. Then he took the headphones off, scowled, stretched, and turned to Dolly. "All right," he said, "come, you can pay another installment on your pa.s.sage."

"Why, sure, honey," she said obligingly, though it would have been so very much nicer if he didn't always have to put it like that. But her spirits were a little higher. She felt the tiny suggestion of a lurch that meant that the s.p.a.cecraft was starting off on another trip, and indeed, the great blue and violet horror on the screen was already dwindling away. That made up for a lot!

Of course, it only meant they were on their way to the next one.

"Do the Heechee," commanded Wan, "and, let me see, yes. With Robinette Broadhead."

"Sure, Wan," said Dolly, retrieving her puppets from where Wan had kicked them and slipping them over her hands. The Heechee did not, of course, look like a real Heechee; and as a matter of fact the Robinette Broadhead was pretty libelous, too. But they amused Wan. That was what mattered to Dolly, since he was paying the bills. The first day out of Port Hegramet he had boastfully shown Dolly his bankbook. Six million dollars automatically socked into it every month! The numbers staggered Dolly. They made up for a lot. Out of all that cataract of cash there had to be a way, sooner or later, of squeezing a few drops for herself. To Dolly there was nothing immoral in such thoughts. Perhaps in an earlier day Americans would have called her a golddigger. But most of the human race, through most of its history, would only have called her poor.

So she fed him and bedded him. When he was in a bad mood she tried to look invisible, and when he wanted entertainment she tried to entertain: "Halo thar, Mr. Heechee," said the Broadhead hand, Dolly's fingers twisting to give it a simpering grin, Dolly's voice thick and corn-pone-b.u.mpkin (part of the libel!). "I'm moughty pleased to make your acquaintance."

The Heechee hand, Dolly's voice a serpentine whine: "Greetings, rash Earthman. You are just in time for dinner."

"Aw, gosh," cried the Broadhead hand, grin widening, "I'm hungry, too. What's fer dinner?"

"Aargh!" shrieked the Heechee hand, fingers a claw, mouth open. "You are!" And the right-hand fingers closed on the left-hand puppet.

"Ho! Ho! Ho!" laughed Wan. "That is very good! Though that is not what a Heechee looks like. You do not know what a Heechee is."

"Do you?" asked Dolly in her own voice.

"Nearly! More nearly than you!"

And Dolly, grinning, raised the Heechee hand. "Oh, but you're wrong, Mr. Wan," came the silky, snaky Heechee voice. "This is what I look like, and I'm waiting to meet you in the next black hole!"

Crash went the chair Wan was sitting on as he sprang up. "That is not funny!" he shouted, and Dolly was astonished to see he was trembling. "Make me food!" he demanded, and stomped off to his private lander, muttering.

It was not wise to joke with him. So Dolly made him his dinner and served him with a smile she did not feel. She gained nothing from the smile. His mood was fouler than ever. He screeched: "Stupid woman! Have you eaten all the good food when I was not looking? Is there nothing left fit to be eaten?"

Dolly was near tears. "But you like steak," she protested.

"Steak! Of course I like steak, but look at what you serve for dessert!" He pushed the steak and broccoli out of the way to seize the plate of chocolate-chip cookies and shake it under her nose. Cookies sailed away in all directions, and Dolly tried to retrieve them. "I know it's not what you'd like, honey, but there isn't any more ice cream."

He glared at her. "Huh! No more ice cream! Oh, very well, then. A chocolate souffle-or a flan-"

"Wan, they're almost all gone, too. You ate them."

"Stupid woman! That is not possible!"

"Well, they're gone. Anyway, all that sweet stuff isn't good for you."

"You have not been appointed my nurse! If I rot my teeth I will buy new ones." He struck at the dish in her hand, and the cookies went flying indeed. "Jettison this trash. I do not wish to eat at all now," he snapped.

It was just another typical meal on the frontiers of the Galaxy. It finished typically, too, with Dolly clearing away the mess and weeping. He was such a terrible person! And he didn't even seem to know it.

But as a matter of fact, Wan did know that he was mean, antisocial, exploitive-a whole long list of things that had been explained to him by the psychoa.n.a.lysis programs. More than three hundred sessions of them. Six days a week, for almost a year. And at the end he had terminated the a.n.a.lysis with a joke. "I have a question," he told the holographic a.n.a.lyst, displayed for him as a good-looking woman, old enough to be his mother, young enough to be attractive, "and the question is this: How many psychoa.n.a.lysts does it take to change a light bulb?"

The a.n.a.lyst said, sighing, "Oh, Wan, you're resisting again. All right. How many?"

"Only one," he told her, laughing, "but the light bulb has to really want to change. Haw-haw! -And you see, I don't."

She looked directly at him for a silent moment. The way she was displayed, she was sitting on a sort of beanbag chair, with her legs tucked under her, a note pad in her hand, a pencil in the other. She used it to push up the gla.s.ses that were sliding down her nose as she looked at him. As with everything else in her programming, the gesture was meant to have a purpose, the rea.s.suring indication that she was, after all, only another human being like himself, not an austere G.o.ddess. Of course, human she was not. But she sounded human enough as she said, "That's really a very old joke, Wan. What's a light bulb?"

He shrugged irritably. "It is a round thing that gives off light," he guessed, "but you are missing the point. I do not wish to be changed anymore. It is not fun for me. It was not my desire to begin this in the first place, and now I have decided to end it."

The computer program said peacefully, "That's your right, of course, Wan. What will you do?"

"I will go looking for my-I will go out of here and enjoy myself," he said savagely. "That is also one of my rights!"

"Yes, it is," she agreed. "Wan? Would you like to tell me what it was you started to say, before you changed your mind?"

"No," he said, getting up, "I would not like to tell you what it is I will do; instead, I will do it. Good-bye."

"You're going to look for your father, aren't you?" the psychoa.n.a.lytic program called after him, but he didn't answer. The only indication he gave that he heard was that instead of merely closing the door, he slammed it.

A normal human being-in fact, almost any human being at all, really would have told his a.n.a.lyst that she was right. Would have at some time in three long weeks have told his ship companion and bed companion the same thing, if only to have someone to share in his outside-chance hope and his very real fear. Wan had never learned to share his feelings, because he had never learned to share anything at all. Brought up in Heechee Heaven, without any sort of warm-blooded human companion for the most crucial decade of his childhood, he had become the archetype of a sociopath. That terrible yearning for love was what drove him to seek his lost father through all the terrors of s.p.a.ce. Its total lack of fulfillment made it impossible for him to accept love, or sharing, now. His closest companions for those terrified ten years had been the computer programs of stored, dead intelligences called the Dead Men. He had copied them and taken them with him when he took a Heechee starship, and he talked to them, as he would not to flesh-and-blood Dolly, because he knew they were only machines. They didn't mind being treated that way. To Wan, flesh-and-blood human beings were also machines-vending machines, you might call them. He had the coin to make them yield what he wanted. s.e.x. Or conversation. Or the preparation of his food, or cleaning up after his piggish habits.

It did not occur to him to consider a vending machine's feelings. Not even when the vending machine was actually a nineteen-year-old female human being who would have been grateful for the chance of being allowed to think she loved him.

The Heechee early discovered how to store the intelligence and even an approximation of the personality of a dead or dying person in mechanical Systems-as human beings learned when they first encountered the so-called Heechee Heaven where the boy Wan grew up. Robin considered that a tremendously valuable invention. I don't see it that way. Of course, I may be considered prejudiced in the matter-a person like me, being mechanical storage in the first place, doesn't need it; and the Heechee, having discovered that, did not bother to invent persons like me.

7 Homecoming

In the Lofstrom Loop in Lagos, Nigeria, Audee Walthers debated the measure of his responsibility toward Janie Yee-xing as the magnetic ribbon caught their descending pod, and slowed it, and dropped it off at the Customs and Immigration terminal. For playing with the forbidden toys he had lost the hope of a job, but for helping him do it Yee-xing had lost a whole career. "I have an idea," he whispered to her as they lined up in the anteroom. "I'll tell you about it outside."

He did indeed have an idea, and it was a pretty good one, at that. The idea was me.

Before Walthers could tell her about his idea, he had to tell her about what he had felt in that terrifying moment at the TPT. So they checked into a transit lodge near the base of the landing loop. A bare room, and a hot one; there was one medium-sized bed, a washstand in the corner, a PV set to stare at while the traveler waited for his launch capsule, windows that opened on the hot, muggy African coastal air. The windows were open, though the screens were tight against the myriad African bugs, but Walthers hugged himself against the chill as he told her about that cold, slow being whose mind he had felt on the Ya.

And Janie Yee-xing shivered, too. "But you never said anything, Audee!" she said, her voice a little shrill because her throat was tight. He shook his head. "No. But why didn't you? Isn't there-" She paused. "Yes, I'm sure there's a Gateway bonus you could get for that!"

"We could get, Janie!" he said strongly, and she looked at him, then accepted the partnership with a nod. "There sure is, and it's a million dollars. I checked it out on the ship's standing orders, same time I copied the ship's log." And he reached into his scanty luggage and pulled out a datafan to show her.

She didn't take it from him. She just said, "Why?"

"Well, figure it out," he said. "A million dollars. There's two of us, so cut it in half. Then I got it on the S. Ya., with the S. Ya.'s equipment, so the ship and its owners and the whole d.a.m.n crew might get a share- we'd be lucky if it was only half. More likely three-quarters. Then-well, we broke the rules, you know. Maybe they'd overlook that, considering everything. But maybe they wouldn't, and we'd get nothing at all."