“Forget that, Wan,” Janine said wisely. “They’ll never let us do that.”
“Not so fast, my girl,” her father said. “That is not for you to decide. What the boy is saying is interesting. If he can open the gates of heaven for us, who are we to stand outside in the cold?”
Janine studied her father, but his expression was bland. “You don’t mean you’d let Wan and me go there alone?”
“That,” he said, “is not the question. The question is, how can we most rapidly complete this God-bedamned mission and return to our reward. There is no other.”
“Well,” said Lurvy after a moment, “we don’t have to decide that right now. Heaven will wait for us, for all our lives.”
Her father said, “That is true, yes. But, expressed concretely, some of us have less lives to wait than others.”
Every day new messages came in from Earth. Infuriatingly, these related only to a remote past, before Wan, irrelevant to everything they were doing or planning now: Submit chemical analyses of this. X-ray that. Measure these other things. By now the slow packets of photons that transmitted the word of their reaching the Food Factory had arrived at Downlink-Vera on Earth, and perhaps replies were already on their way. But they would not arrive for weeks. The base at Triton had a smarter computer than Vera, and Paul and Lurvy argued for transmitting all their data there for interpretation and advice. Old Peter rejected the idea with fury. “Those wanderers, gypsies? Why should we give them what costs us so much to get!”
“But nobody’s questioning us, Pa,” Lurvy coaxed. “It’s all ours. The contracts spell it all out.”
“No!”
So they fed all that Wan told them into Shipboard-Vera, and Vera’s small, slow intelligence painfully sorted the bits into patterns. Even into graphics. The external appearance of the place Wan had come from-it was probably not a very good likeness, because it was apparent that Wan had not had the curiosity to study it very closely. The corridors. The machines. The Heechee themselves; and each time Wan offered corrections:
“Ah, no. They both have beards, males and females. Even when they are quite young. And the breasts on the females are-“ He held his hands just below his rib cage, to show how low they swung. “And you do not give them the right smell.”
“Holos don’t smell at all, Wan,” said Paul.
“Yes, exactly! But they do, you see. In rut, they smell very much.”
And Vera mumbled and whined over the new data, and shakily drew in the new revisions. After hours of this, what had been a game for Wan turned into drudgery. When he began saying, “Yes, it is perfect, that is exactly how the Dead Men’s room looks,” they all understood that he was merely agreeing with anything that would stop the boredom for a while, and gave him a rest. Then Janine would take him for a wander through the corridors, sound and vision pickups strapped to her shoulder, in case he said something of value or pointed out a treasure, and they spoke of other things. His knowledge was as astonishing as his ignorance. Both were unpredictable.
It was not only Wan that needed study. Every hour Lurvy or old Peter would come up with a new idea for diverting the Food Factory from its programmed drive, so that they could try to accomplish their original purpose. None worked. Every day more messages came in from Earth. They were still not relevant. They were not even very interesting; Janine let a score of letters from her pen-pals stay in Vera’s memory without bothering to retrieve them, since the messages she was getting from Wan filled her needs. Sometimes the communications were odd. For Lurvy, the announcement that her college had named her its Woman of the Year. For old Peter, a formal petition from the city he had been born in. He read it and burst into laughter. “Dortmund still wishes me to run for Burgermeister! What nonsense!”
“Why, that’s really nice,” Lurvy said agreeably. “It’s quite a compliment.”
“It is quite nothing,” he corrected her severely. “Burgermeister! With what we have I could be elected president of the Federal Republic, or even-“ He fell silent, and then said gloomily, “If, to be sure, I ever see the Federal Republic again.” He paused, looking over their heads. His lips worked silently for a moment, and then he said: “Perhaps we should go back now.”
“Aw, Pop,” Janine began. And stopped, because the old man turned on her the look of an alpha wolf on a cub. There was a sudden tension among them, until Paul cleared his throat and said:
“Well, that’s certainly one of our options. Of course, there’s a legal question of contract-“
Peter shook his head. “I have thought of that. They owe us so much already! Simply for stopping the fever, if they pay us only one percent of the damage we save it is millions. Billions. And if they won’t pay-“ He hesitated, and then said, “No, there is no question that they won’t pay. We simply must speak to them. Report that we have stopped the fever, that we cannot move the Food Factory, that we are coming home. By the time a return message can arrive we will be weeks on our way.”
“And what about Wan?” Janine demanded.
“He will come with us, to he sure. He will be among his own kind again, and that is surely what is best for him.”
“Don’t you think we ought to let Wan decide that? And what happened to sending a bunch of us to investigate his heaven?”
“That was a dream,” her father said coldly. “Reality is that we cannot do everything. Let someone else explore his heaven, there is plenty for all; and we will be back in our homes, enjoying riches and fame. It is not just a matter of the contract,” he went on, almost pleadingly. “We are saviors! There will be lecture tours and endorsements for the advertising! We will be persons of great power!”
“No, Pop,” Janine said, “listen to me. You’ve all been talking about our duty to help the world-feed people, bring them new things to make their lives better. Well, aren’t we going to do our duty?”
He turned on her furiously. “Little minx, what do you know about duty? Without me you would be in some gutter in Chicago, waiting for the welfare check! We must think of ourselves as well!”
She would have replied, but Wan’s wide-eyed, frightened stare made her stop. “I hate this!” she announced. “Wan and I are going to go for a walk to get away from the lot of you!”
“He is not really a bad person,” she told Wan, once they were beyond the sound of the others. Quarreling voices had followed them and Wan, who had little experience of disagreements, was obviously upset.
Wan did not reply directly. He pointed to a bulge in the glowing blue wall. “This is a place for water,” he said, “but it is a dead one. There are dozens of them, but almost all dead.”
Out of duty, Janine inspected it, pointing her shoulder-held camera at it as she slid the rounded cover back and forth. There was a protuberance like a nose at the top of it, and what must be a drain at the bottom; it was almost large enough to get into, but bone dry. “You said one of them still works, but the water isn’t drinkable?”
“Yes, Janine. Would you like me to show it to you?”
“Well, I guess so.” She added, “Really, don’t let them get to you. They just get excited.”
“Yes, Janine.” But he was not in a talkative mood.
She said, “When I was little he used to tell me stories. Mostly they were scary, but sometimes not. He told me about Schwarze Peter, who, as far as I can figure out, was something like Santa Claus. He said if I was a good little girl Schwarze Peter would bring me a doll at Christmas, but if I wasn’t he’d bring me a lump of coal. Or worse. That’s what I used to call him, Schwarze Peter. But he never gave me a lump of coal.” He was listening intently as they moved down the glowing corridor, but he did not respond. “Then my mother died,” she said, “and Paul and Lurvy got married and I went to live with them for a while. But Pop wasn’t so bad, really. He came to see me as often as he could-I guess. Wan! Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“No,” he said. “What’s Santa Claus?”
“Oh, Wan!”
So she explained Santa Claus to him, and Christmas, and then had to explain winter and snow and gift-giving. His face smoothed, and he began to smile; and curiously, as Wan’s mood improved Janine’s grew worse. Trying to make Wan understand the world she lived in made her confront the world ahead. Almost, she thought, it would be better to do what Peter proposed, pack it all in, go back to their real lives. All the alternatives were frightening. Where they were was frightening, if she let herself feel it-in some kind of an artifact that was doggedly plowing its way through space to some unknown destination. What if it arrived? What would they confront? Or if they went back with Wan, what would be there? Heechee? Heechee! There was fear! Janine had lived all her young life with the Heechee just outside it-terrifying if real, less real than mythical. Like Schwarze Peter or Santa Claus. Like God. All myths and deities are tolerable enough to believe in; but what if they become real?