“Christ,” grumbled Paul. “Is he always like that?”
“No, not always,” Wan shrilled. “But sometimes he is worse. Shall I try one of the others for you?”
“Are they any better?”
“Well, no,” Wan admitted. “Tiny Jim is the best.”
Paul closed his eyes in despair, and opened them again to glare at Lurvy. “How simply bloody wonderful,” he said. “Do you know what I’m beginning to think? I’m beginning to think your father was right. We should have stayed on the Food Factory.”
Lurvy took a deep breath. “Well, we didn’t,” she pointed out. “We’re here. Let’s give it forty-eight hours, and then- And then we’ll make up our minds.”
Long before the forty-eight hours were up they had made up their minds to stay. At least for a while. There was simply too much in Heechee Heaven to abandon it.
The big factor in the decision was reaching Payter on the FTL radio. No one had thought to ask Wan if his ability to call Heechee Heaven from the Food Factory implied that he could call in the other direction. It turned out he could not. He had never had a reason to try, because there had never been anyone there to answer the phone. Lurvy drafted Janine to help her carry food and a few essentials out of the ship, fighting depression and worry all the way, and returned to find Paul proud and Wan jubilant. They had made contact. “How is he?” Lurvy demanded at once.
“Oh, you mean your father? He’s all right,” Paul said. “He sounded grouchy, come to think of it-cabin fever, I suppose. There were about a million messages. He patched them through as a burst transmission and I’ve got them on tape-but it’ll take us a week to play them all.” He rummaged through the stuff Janine and Lurvy had brought until he found the tools he had demanded. He was patching together a digitalized picture transmitter, to make use of the voice-only FTL circuits. “We can only transmit single frames,” he said, eyes on the picture-tape machine. “But if we’re going to be here for very long, maybe I can work out a burst-transmission system from here. Meanwhile, we’ve got voice and-oh, yeah. The old man said to kiss you for him.”
“Then I guess we’re going to stay for a while,” said Janine.
“Then I guess we’d better bring more stuff out of the ship,” her sister agreed. “Wan? Where should we sleep?”
So while Paul worked on the communications, Wan and the two women hustled the necessities of life to a cluster of chambers in the red-walled corridors. Wan was proud to show them off. There were wall bunks larger than the ones the ship had offered-large enough, actually, for even Paul to sleep in, if he didn’t mind bending his knees. There was a place for toilet facilities, not quite of human design. Or not of very recent human design. The facilities were simply lustrous metal slits in the floor, like the squat-toilets of Eastern Europe. There was even a place to bathe. It was something between a wading pool and a tub, with something between a shower head and a small waterfall coming out of the wall behind it. When you got inside tepid water poured out. After that they all began to smell much better. Wan, in particular, bathed ostentatiously often, sometimes beginning to undress to bathe again before the last drops of unsopped water had dried on the back of his neck from the bath before. Tiny Jim had told him that bathing was a custom among polite people. Besides, he had perceived that Janine did it regularly. Lurvy watched them both, remembered how much trouble it had been to get Janine to bathe on the long flight up from Earth, and did not comment.
As pilot, therefore captain, Lurvy constituted herself head of the expedition. She assigned Paul to establish and maintain communication with her father on the Food Factory, with Wan’s help in dealing with the Dead Men. She assigned Janine, with her own help and Wan’s, to housekeeping tasks like washing their clothes in the tepid tub. She assigned Wan, with anyone who could be spared, to roam the safe parts of Heechee Heaven, photographing and recording for transmission to Payter and Earth. Usually Wan’s compaanion was Janine. When someone else could be spared, the two young people were chaperoned, but that was seldom.
Janine did not seem to mind either way. She had not finished with the preliminary thrill of Wan’s companionship and was in no hurry to move to a further stage-except when they touched. Or when she caught him staring at her. Or when she saw the knotted bulge in his ragged kilt. Even then, her fantasies and reveries were almost as good as that next stage, at least for now. She played with the Dead Men, and munched on berryfruit, brown-skinned and green-fleshed, and did her chores, and waited to grow up a little more.
There were not many objections to Lurvy’s rule, since she had taken care to assign tasks that the draftees were willing to do anyhow, which left for herself such drudgery as going through the backed-up cormuands and persuasions from Payter, and faroff Earth.
The communication was a long way from satisfactory. Lurvy had not appreciated Shipboard-Vera until she had to get along without her. She could not command priority messages first, or have the computer sort them out by theme. There was no computer she could use, except the overtaxed one in her own head. The messages came in higgledy-piggledy, and when she replied, or transmitted reports for downlink relay to Earth, she had no confidence at all that they were getting where they were supposed to go.
The Dead Men seemed to be basically read-only memories, interactive but limited. And their circuits had been further scrambled in the makeshift attempt to use them for communication to the Food Factory, a task for which they had never been designed. (But what had they really been designed for? And by whom?) Wan blustered and bluffed, in his pose as expert, and then miserably confessed that they were not doing what they were supposed to do any more. Sometimes he would dial Tiny Jim and get Henrietta, and sometimes a former-English Lit professor named Willard; and once he got a voice he had never heard before, shaking and whispering on the near side of inaudibility, muttering on the far side of madness. “Go to the gold,” whimpered Henrietta, fretful as ever, and without pause Tiny Jim’s thick tenor would override: “They’ll kill you! They don’t like castaways!”
That was frightening. Especially as Wan assured them that Tiny Jim had always been the most sensible of the Dead Men. It puzzled Lurvy that she was not more terrified than she was, but there had been so many alarms and terrors that she had become used to them. Her circuits were scrambled, too.
And the messages! In one five-minute burst of clear transmission Paul had recorded fourteen hours of them. Commands from downlink: “Report all control settings shuttle ship. Attempt secure tissue samples Heechee/Old Ones. Freeze and store berryfruit leaves, fruits, stems. Exercise extreme caution.” Half a dozen separate communications from her father; he was lonesome; he didn’t feel well; he was not receiving proper medical attention because they had taken the mobile bio-assay unit away; he was being barraged by peremptory orders from Earth. Information messages from Earth: their first reports had been received, analyzed and interpreted for them, and now there were suggestions for follow-up programs beyond counting. They should interrogate Henrietta about her references to cosmological phenomena-Shipboard-Vera was making a hash of it, and Downlink-Vera could not communicate in real time, and old Payter did not know enough astrophysics to ask the right questions, so it was up to them. They should interrogate all the Dead Men on their memories of Gateway and their missions-assuming they remembered anything. They should attempt to find out how living prospectors became stored computer programs. They should- They should do everything. All at once. And almost none of it was possible; tissue samples of the Heechee, forsooth! When an occasional message was clear and personal and undemanding, Lurvy treasured it.
And some of those were surprises. Besides the fan letters from Janine’s pen-pals and the continuing plea for any information they might come across from Trish Bover’s relict, there was one for Lurvy personally, from Robinette Broadhead:
“Dorema, I know you’re being swamped. Your whole mission was important and hazardous to begin with, and now it turns out about a million times more so. All I expect from you is that you do the best you can. I don’t have the authority to override Gateway Corp orders. I can’t change your assigned objectives. But I want you to know I’m on your side. Find out all you can. Try not to get into a spot you can’t retreat from. And I’ll do everything I can to see that you get rewarded as fully and lavishly as you can hope for. I mean it, Lurvy. I give you my word.”