“Prayer fans are the least of it,” Lurvy said thoughtfully. “But that’s not in our contract, Pa.”
“Contract! So what are they going to do with us, shoot us? Cheat us? After we give up eight years of our lives? No. They’ll give us the bonuses.”
The more we thought about it, the better that sounded. I went to sleep thinking about which of the gadgets and what-you-call‘ems I’d seen could be carried back, and what among them seemed the most valuable, and had my first pleasant dreams since we had tested the thruster-
And woke up with Janine’s urgent whisper in my ear. “Pop? Paul? Lurvy? Can you hear me?”
I swam up to a sitting position and looked around. She wasn’t speaking in my ear; it was my radio. Lurvy was awake beside me, and Payter came hurrying around a corner to join us, their radios going too. I said, “We hear you, Janine. What-“
“Shut up!” the whisper came, hissing out with white sound as though her lips were pressed against the microphone. “Don’t answer me, just listen. There’s someone here.”
We stared at each other. Lurvy whispered, “Where are you?”
“I said shut up! I’m out at the far docking area, you know? Where we found that food. I was looking for something we could bring back with us, like Pop said, only- Well, I saw something on the floor. Like an apple, only it wasn’t-kind of reddish brown on the outside and green on the inside, and it smelled like- I don’t know what it smelled like. Strawberries. And it wasn’t any hundred thousand years old, either. It was fresh. And I heard-wait a minute.”
We did not dare answer, just listened to her breathing for a moment. When she spoke again her whisper sounded scared. “It’s coming this way. It’s between me and you, and I’m stuck. I-keep thinking it’s a Heechee, and it’s going to be-“
Her voice stopped. We heard her gasp; then, out loud, “Don’t you come any closer!”
I had heard enough. “Let’s go,” I said, jumping toward the corridor. Payter and Lurvy were right behind me as we hurried in long, swimming leaps down the blue-walled tunnel. When we got near the docks we stopped, looking around irresolutely.
Before we could make a decision on which way to search, Janine’s voice came again. It was neither whisper nor terrified cry. “He-he stopped when I told him,” she said unbelievingly. “And I don’t think he’s a Heechee. He looks like just an ordinary person to me-well, kind of scruffy. He’s just standing there staring at me, kind of sniffing the air.”
“Janine!” I shouted into the radio. “We’re at the docks-which way from here?”
Pause. Then, strangely, a kind of shocked giggle. “Just keep coming straight,” she said shakily. “Come on quick. You-you wouldn’t believe what he’s doing now!”
3 Wan in Love
The trip to the outpost seemed longer than usual to Wan, because he was troubled in his mind. He missed the companionship of the Dead Men. He missed even more what he had never had. A female. The notion of Wan in love was a fantasy for him, but it was a fantasy he wanted to make real. So many of the books helped it along, Romeo and Juliet and Anna Karenina and the old romantic Chinese classics.
What drove the fantasies out of his mind at last was the sight of the outpost as he drew near. The board lighted up to signal the beginning of docking maneuvers, the flow lines on the screen melted away, and the shape of the outpost snapped into vision. But it was not the same shape as always. There was a new ship in one of the docking hatches, and a strange jagged structure strapped to one side of the hull.
What could such things mean? When the docking was complete Wan poked his head through the hatch and stared around, sniffing and listening.
After a time he concluded that no one was near. He did not remove his books or other possessions from the ship. He resolved to stay ready to flee at a moment’s notice, but he decided to explore. Once before, long ago, some other person had been at the outpost, and he believed it had been a female. Tiny Jim had helped him identify the garment then. Perhaps he should ask Tiny Jim for advice now? Munching on a berryfruit, he handed himself easily along the rails toward the dreaming room, where the pleasure couch lay surrounded by the book machines.
And stopped.
Had that been a sound? A laugh, or a cry, from far away?
He threw the berryfruit away and stood for a moment, all his senses tensely extended. The sound was not repeated. But there was something-a smell, very faint, quite pleasant, quite strange. It was not unlike the smell in the garment he had found, and carried around for many days until the last vestige of scent was gone from it and he put it back where it was found.
Had that person come back?
Wan began to shake. A person! It had been a dozen years since be had smelled or touched a person! And then only his parents. But it might not be a person, it could be something else. He launched himself toward the dock where that other person had been, craftily avoiding the main passages, hurling himself down narrower, less direct ways where he did not think any stranger was likely to go. Wan knew every inch of the outpost, at least as far within it as it was possible to travel without coming to the dead-end locked walls that he did not know how to open. It took him only a few minutes to reach the place where he had carefully rearranged the debris left by the outpost’s one visitor.
Everything was there. But not, he saw, as he had left it. Some things bad been picked up and dropped again.
Wan knew he had not done that. Apart from the discipline he had always imposed upon himself, of leaving the outpost exactly as he had found it, so that no one could ever know he was there, this time he had been especially careful to arrange the litter precisely as it had been left. Someone else was on the outpost.
and he was many minutes away from his ship.
Cautiously but quickly he returned to the docks on the other side, pausing at every intersection to look and smell and listen. He reached his ship and hovered at the hatch, indecisively. Run or explore?
But the smell was stronger now, and irresistible.
Step by step he ventured down one of the long, dead-end corridors, ready to retreat instantly.
A voice! Whispering, almost inaudible. But it was there. He peered around a doorway, and his heart pounded. A person! Huddled against a wall, with a metal object at its lips, staring at him in terror. The person cried out at him: “Don’t you come any closer!” But he could not have if he had wanted to; he was frozen. It was not merely a person. It was a female person! The diagnostic signs were clear, as Tiny Jim had explained them to him: two swellings at the chest, a swelling around the hips and a narrowing at the waist, a smooth brow with no bulges over the eye sockets-yes, female! And young. And dressed in something that revealed bare legs and, oh, bare arms; smooth hair tied behind the head in a long tail, great eyes staring at him.
Wan responded as he had learned to respond. He fell gently to his knees, opened his garment and touched his sex. It had been several days since he had masturbated, and with no such stimulus as this; he was erect at once and shuddering with excitement.
He hardly noticed the noises behind him as three other persons came racing up. It was not until he was finished that he stood up, adjusted his clothing and smiled politely to them where they were ranged around the young female, talking excitedly and almost hysterically among themselves. “Hello,” he said. “I am Wan.” When they did not respond, he repeated the greeting in Spanish and Cantonese, and would have gone on to his other languages except that the second female person stepped forward and said:
“Hello, Wan. I’m Dorema Herter-Hall—they call me ‘Lurvy’. We’re very glad to see you.”
In all of Wan’s fifteen years there had never been twelve hours as exciting, as frightening and as heart-stoppingly thrilling, as these. So many questions! So much to say and to hear. So shuddery-pleasant to touch these other persons, and to smell their smells and feel their presence. They knew so incredibly little, and so astonishingly much-did not know how to get food from the lockers, had not used the dreaming couch, had never seen an Old One or talked with a Dead Man. And yet they knew of spaceships and cities, of walking under an open sky (“sky”? it took a long time for Wan to grasp what they were talking about) and of Making Love. He could see that the younger female was willing to show him more of that, but the older one did not wish her to; how strange. The older male did not seem to make love with anyone; even stranger. But it was all strange, and he was expiring of the delights and terrors of so much strangeness. After they had talked for a long time, and he had shown them some of the tricks of the outpost, and they had shown him some of the wonders of their ship (a thing like a Dead Man, but which had never been alive; pictures of people on Earth; a flush toilet) after all these wonders, the Lurvy person had commanded that they all rest. He had at once started toward the dreaming couch, but she had invited him to stay near them and he could not say no, though all through the sleep he woke from time to time, trembling and sniffing and staring around in the dim blue light.