Hanging there, creeping through space, on a trip that a Heechee ship could have done in a day-if we had had one, and could have made it do what we wanted it to-I felt a kind of a sympathy with Payter’s old man. It wasn’t that different with us. All we were missing was the cowflop.
Day 1284. The course change went very smoothly, after we all struggled into our life-support systems and wedged ourselves into our acceleration seats, neatly fitted to our air and vital-signs packs. Considering the tiny delta-V involved, it was hardly worth the effort. Not to mention that there wouldn’t be much use in life-support systems if anything went wrong enough for us to need them, five thousand A.U.s from home. But we did it by the book, because that was the way we had been doing it for three and a half years.
And-after we had turned, and the chemical rockets had done their thing and stopped and let the ion-thrusters take over again, and after Vera had fumbled and clucked and hesitantly announced that it looked all right, as far as she could tell, of course pending confirmation some weeks later from Earth-we saw it! Lurvy was the first one out of her seat and at the visuals, and she snapped it into focus in a matter of seconds.
We hung around, staring at it. The Food Factory!
It jiggled annoyingly in the speculum, hard to keep in focus. Even an ion rocket contributes some vibration to a spaceship, and we were still a long way off. But it was there. It gleamed faintly blue in the darkness punctuated by stars, strangely shaped. It was the size of an office building and more oblong than anything else. But one end was rounded, and one side seemed to have a long, curved slice taken out of it. “Do you think it’s been hit by something?” Lurvy asked apprehensively.
“Ah, not in the least,” snapped her father. “It is how it was constructed! What do we know of Heechee design?”
“How do you know that?” Lurvy asked, but her father didn’t answer that; didn’t have to, we all knew that he had no way to know, was only speaking out of hope, because if it was damaged we were in trouble. Our bonuses were good just for going out there, but our hopes for real payoff, the only kind of payoff that would pay for seven round-trip years of misery, rested on the Food Factory being operable. Or at least studyable and copyable. “Paul!” Lurvy said suddenly. “Look at the side that’s just turning away-aren’t those ships?”
I squinted, trying to make out what she saw. There were half a dozen bulges on the long, straight side of the artifact, three or four smallish ones, two quite large. They looked like pictures I had seen of the Gateway asteroid, right enough, as far as I could tell. But- “You’re the ex-prospector,” I said. “What do you think?”
“I think they are. But, my God, did you see those two end Ones? They were huge. I’ve been in Ones and Threes, and I’ve seen plenty of Fives. But nothing like that! They’d hold, I don’t know, maybe fifty people! If we had ships like that, Paul- If we had ships like that-“
“If, if,” snarled her father. “If we had such ships, and if we could make them go where we wanted, yes, the world would be ours! Let us hope they still work. Let us hope any part of it works!”
“It will, Father,” caroled a sweet voice from behind us, and we turned to see Janine, propped with one knee under the digester hose, holding out a squeeze bottle of our best home-made genuine recycled grain neutral spirits. “I’d say this really calls for a celebration.” She smiled.
Lurvy looked at her thoughtfully, but her control was in good shape and she only said, “Why, that’s a nice idea, Janine. Pass it around.”
Janine took a ladylike small swig and handed it to her father. “I thought you and Lurvy might like a nightcap,” she said, after clearing her throat-she had just graduated to drinking the hard stuff on her fourteenth birthday, still did not like it, insisted on it only because it was an adult prerogative.
“Good idea,” Payter nodded. “I have been up now for, what is it, yes, nearly twenty hours. We will all need our rest when we touch down,” he added, handing the bottle to my wife, who squeezed two ounces into her well-practiced throat and said:
“I’m not really sleepy yet. You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to play Trish Bover’s tape again.”
“Oh, God, Lurvy! We’ve all seen it a zillion times!”
“I know, Janine. You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to, but I kept wondering if one of those ships was Trish’s and-Well, I just want to look at it again.”
Janine’s lips thinned, but the genes were strong and her control was as good as her sister’s when she wanted it to be-that was one of the things we were measured on, before they signed us for the mission. “I’ll dial it up,” she said, pushing herself over to Vera’s keyboard. Payter shook his head and retired to his own private, sliding the accordion-pleated barrier into place to shut us out, and the rest of us gathered around the console. Because it was tape we could get visual as well as sound, and in about ten seconds it crackled on and we could see poor, angry Trish Bover talking into the camera and saying the last words anybody would ever hear from her.
Tragedy can only be tragic just so long, and we’d heard it all for three and a half years. Every once in a while we’d play the tape, and look at the scenes she had picked up with her handheld camera. And look at them. And look at them, freeze-frame and blowup, not because we thought we’d get any more information out of them than Gateway Corporation’s people already had, although you never knew. Just because we wanted to reassure ourselves it was all worth it. The real tragedy was that Trish didn’t know what she had found.
“This is Mission Report Oh-Seventy-Four Dee Nineteen,” she began, steadily enough. Her sad, silly face was even trying to smile. “I seem to be in trouble. I came out at a Heechee artifact kind of thing, and I docked, and now I can’t get away. The lander rockets work. But the main board won’t. And I don’t want to stay here till I starve.” Starve! After the boffins went over Trish’s photos they identified what the “artifact” was-the CHON-Food Factory they had been looking for.
But whether it was worth it was still an open question, and Trish surely didn’t think it was worth it. What she thought was that she was going to die there, and for nothing, not even going to cash in her awards for the mission. And then at the end, what she finally did, she tried to make it back in the lander.
She got into the lander and pointed it for the sun, and turned on the motors, and took a pill. Took a lot of pills; all she had. And then she turned the freezer up to max and got in and closed the door behind her. “Defrost me when you find me,” she said, “and remember my award.”
And maybe somebody would. When they found her. If they found her. Which would likely be in about ten thousand years. By the time her faint radio message was heard by anybody, on maybe its five hundredth automatic repetition, it was too late to matter to Trish; she never answered.
Vera finished playing the tape and quietly restowed it as the screen went dark. “If Trish had been a real pilot instead of one of those Gateway go-go prospectors, jump in and push the button and let the ship do its thing,” said Lurvy, not for the first time, “she would have known better. She would have used what little delta-V she had in the lander to kill some angular momentum instead of wasting it by pointing straight in.”
“Thank you, expert rocket pilot,” I said, not for the first time either. “So she could’ve counted on being inside the asteroids a whole lot sooner, right? Maybe in as little as six or seven thousand years.”
Lurvy shrugged. “I’m going to bed,” she said, taking a last squeeze from the bottle. “You, Paul?”
“Aw, give me a break, will you?” Janine cut in. “I wanted Paul to help me go over ignition procedures for the ionthrusters.”
Lurvy’s guard went up at once. “You sure that’s what you want him to go over? Don’t pout, Janine. You know you’ve gone over it plenty already, and anyway it’s Paul’s job.”
“And what if Paul’s out of action?” Janine demanded. “How do we know we won’t hit the crazy time just as we’re doing it?”