It was not altogether Wan’s fault, Lurvy knew. They were all smelling extremely high. Among all their sweats and secretions were pheromones enough to make a monk horny, much less an impressionable virgin kid. And that was not at all Wan’s fault, in fact exactly the reverse. If he had not insisted, they would not have lugged so much water aboard; if they had not, they would be even filthier and sweatier than their rationed sponge baths left them. They had, when you came right down to it, left the Food Factory far too impulsively. Payter had been right.
Astonishingly, Lurvy realized that she actually missed the old man. In the ship they were wholly cut off from communication of any kind. What was he doing? Was he still well? They had had to take the mobile bio-assay unit-they had only one, and four people needed it more than one. But that was not really true, either, because away from the shipboard computer it was balled into a shiny, motionless mass, and would stay that way until they established radio contact with Vera from Heechee Heaven-and meanwhile, what was happening to her father?
The curious thing was that Lurvy loved the old man, and thought that he loved her back. He had given every sign of it but verbal ones. It was his money and ambition that had put them all on the flight to the Food Factory in the first place, buying them participants’ shares by scraping the bottom of the money, if not of the ambition. It had been his money that had paid for her going to Gateway in the first place, and when the gamble went sour he had not reproached her. Or not directly, and not much.
After six weeks in Wan’s ship, Lurvy began to feel adjusted to it. She even felt fairly comfortable, not counting the smells and irritations and worries; at least, as long as she didn’t think too much about the trips that had earned her her five Out bangles from Gateway. There was very little good to remember in any of them.
Lurvy’s first trip had been a washout. Fourteen months of round-trip travel to come out circling a planet that had been flamed clean in a nova eruption. Maybe something had been there once. Nothing was there when Lurvy arrived, stark solitary and already talking to herself in her one-person ship. That had cured her of single flights, and the next was in a Three. No better. None of them any better. She became famous in Gateway, an object of curiosity-strong contender for the record of most flights taken and fewest profits returned. It was not an honor she liked, but it was never as bad until the last flight of all.
That was disaster.
Before they even reached their destination she had awakened out of an edgy, restless sleep to horror. The woman she had made her special friend was floating bloodily next to her, the other woman also dead not far away, and the two men who made up the rest of the Five’s crew engaged in screaming, mutilating hand-to-hand battle.
The rules of the Gateway Corporation provided that any payments resulting from a voyage were to be divided equally among the survivors. Her shipmate Stratos Kristianides had made up his mind to be the only survivor.
In actuality, he didn’t survive. He lost the battle to her other shipmate, and lover, Hector Possanbee. The winner, with Lurvy, went on to find-again-nothing. Smoldering red gas giant. Pitiful little binary Class-M companion star. And no way of reaching the only detectable planet, a huge methane-covered Jupiter of a thing, without dying in the attempt.
Lurvy had come back to Earth after that with her tail between her legs, and no second chance in sight. Payter had given her that opportunity, and she did not think there would be another. The hundred and some thousand dollars it had cost him to pay her way to Gateway had put a very big dent in the money he had accumulated over his sixty or seventy years-she didn’t really know how many years-of life. She had failed him. Not just him. And she accepted, out of his kindness and forbearance to hate her, the fact that he really did love his daughter-and kind, pointless Paul and silly young Janine, too. In some way, Payter loved them all.
And was getting very little out of it, Lurvy judged.
She rubbed her Out bangles moodily. They had been very expensive to obtain.
She was not easy in her mind about her father, or about what lay ahead.
Making love to Paul helped pass the time-when they could convince themselves that they didn’t have to supervise the younger ones for a quarter of an hour or so. It was not the same for Lurvy as making love to Hector, the man who had survived the last Gateway flight with her, the man who had asked her to marry him. The man who asked her to ship out with him again and to build a life together. Short, broad, always active, always alert, a dynamo in bed, kind and patient when she was sick or irritable or scared-there were a hundred reasons why she should have married Hector. And only one, really, why she did not. When she was wrenched out of that terrible sleep she had found Hector and Stratos battling. While she watched, Stratos died.
Hector had explained to her that Stratos had gone out of control to try to slay them all; but she had been asleep when the slaughter started. One of the men had obviously tried to murder his shipmates.
But she had never known for sure which one.
He proposed to her when things were bleakest and grimiest, a day before they reached Gateway on the sorry return trip. “We are really most delightfully good together, Dorema,” he said, arms about her, consolingly. “Just us and no one else. I think I could not have borne this with the others around. Next time we will be more fortunate! So let’s get married, please?”
She burrowed her chin into his hard, warm, cocoa-colored shoulder. “I’ll have to think, dear,” she said, feeling the hand that had killed Stratos kneading the back of her neck.
So Lurvy was not unhappy when the trip was over and Janine called her out of her private room, all thrilled and excited; the great glassy spiral was filling with hot specks of darting golden light, the ship was lurching tentatively in one direction and another; the mottled gray mud was gone from the viewscreen and there were stars. More than stars. There was an object that glowed blue in patches amid featureless gray. It was lemonshaped and spun slowly, and Lurvy could form no idea of its size until she perceived that the surface of the object was not featureless. There were tiny projections jutting out here and there, and she recognized the tiniest of them as Gateway-type ships, Ones and Threes, and there a Five; the lemon had to be more than a kilometer long! Wan, grinning with pride, settled himself in the central pilot seat (they had stuffed it with extra clothing, a device that had never occurred to Wan), and grasped the lander control levers. It was all Lurvy could do to keep her hands off. But Wan had been performing this particular maneuver all his life. With coarse competence he banged and slammed the ship into a downward spiral that matched the slow spin of the blueeyed gray lemon, intersected one of the waiting pits, docked, locked, and looked up for applause. They were on Heechee Heaven.
The Food Factory had been the size of a skyscraper, but this was a world. Perhaps, like Gateway, it had once been an asteroid; but, if so, it had been so tooled and sculpted that there was no trace of original structure. It was cubic kilometers of mass. It was a rotating mountain. So much to explore! So much to learn!
And so much to fear. They skulked, or strutted, through the old halls, and Lurvy realized she was clinging to her husband’s hand. And Paul was clinging back. She forced herself to observe and comment. The sides of the walls were veined with luminous tracing of scarlet; the overhead was the familiar blue Heecheemetal glow. On the floor-and it was really a floor; they had weight here, though not more than a tenth of Earth-normal- diamond-shaped mounds contained what looked like soil and grew plants. “Berryfruit,” said Wan proudly over his shoulder, shrugging toward a waist-high bush with fuzzed objects hanging among its emerald leaves. “We can stop and eat some if you like.”
“Not right now,” said Lurvy. A dozen paces farther along the corridor was another planted lozenge, this one with slate-green tendrils and soft, squashed cauliflower-shaped buds. “What’s that?”
He paused and looked at her. It was clear he thought it was a silly question. “They are not good to eat,” he shrilled scornfully. “Try the berryfruit. They are quite tasty.”