Well, nobody could know that, and as a matter of fact I had been forming the opinion that we would. It came in cycles of about a hundred and thirty days, give or take a dozen. We were pushing it close. I said, “Actually, I’m a little tired, Janine. I promise we’ll do it tomorrow.” Or whenever one of the others was awake at the same time-the important thing was not to be alone with Janine. In a ship with the total cubage of a motel room, you’d be surprised how hard that is to arrange. Not hard. Practically impossible.
But I really wasn’t tired, and when Lurvy was tucked alongside me and out of it, her breathing too quiet to be called anything like a snore, but diagnostic of sleep all the same, I stretched against the sheets, wide awake, counting up our blessings. I needed to do that at least once a day. When I could find any to count.
This time I found a good one. Four thousand A.U. plus is a long trip-and that’s as the crow flies. Or, actually, as the photon fires, because of course there aren’t a lot of crows in near-interstellar space. Call it half a trillion kilometers, near enough. And we were spiraling out, which meant most of a revolution around the sun before we got there. Our track wasn’t just 25 light-days, it was more like 60. And, even power-on the whole way, we weren’t coming up to anything like the speed of light. Three and a half years. . . and all the way we were thinking, Jeez, suppose someone figures out the Heechee drive before we get there? It wouldn’t have helped us a bit. It would’ve been a lot more than three and a half years before they got around to doing all the things they wanted to do when that happened. And guess where on that list the job of coming after us would have been?
So the good thing I found to dwell on was that at least we weren’t going to find the trip was for nothing, because we were almost there!
All that remained was to strap the big ion-thrusters onto it see if it worked. . . start the slow return trip, shoving the thing back down toward the Earth. . . and, somehow, survive till we got there. Call it, oh, another four years; I went back to cherishing the fact that we were almost there.
The idea of mining comets for food wasn’t new, it went back to Krafft Ehricke in the 1950s anyway, only what he suggested was that people colonize them. It made sense. Bring along a little iron and trace elements-the iron to build a place to live in, the trace elements to turn CHON-chow into quiche lorraine or hamburgers-and you can live indefinitely on the food around you. Because that’s what comets are made of. A little bit of dust, a few rocks, and a hell of a lot of frozen gases. And what are the gases? Oxygen. Nitrogen. Hydrogen. Carbon dioxide. Water. Methane. Ammonia. The same four elements over and over again. CHON. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and what does CHON spell?
Wrong. What comets are made of is the same thing you are made of, and what C-H-O-N spells is “food.”
The Oort cloud was made up of millions of megaton-sized servings of chow. Back on Earth there were ten or twelve billion hungry people looking toward it and licking their lips.
There was still a lot of argument about what comets were doing there, out in the cloud. It was still arguable about whether they even came in families. Opik a hundred years ago said more than half the comets ever sighted fit into well-defined groups, so there, and so did his followers ever since. Whipple said bullshit, there’s not a group you can identify that has more than three comets in it. And so did his followers. Then Oort came along to try to make sense of it. His idea was that there was this great shell of comets all the hell around the solar system, and every once in a while the sun would reach out and pluck one out, and it would come loping in to perihelion. Then we would have Halley’s comet, or the one that was supposed to have been the Star of Bethlehem, or whatever. Then a bunch of the guys began kicking that around, asking why exactly that should happen. It turned out it couldn’t-not if you assume Maxwellian distribution for the Oort cloud. In fact, if you assume normal distribution, you also have to assume that there isn’t any Oort cloud in the first place. You can’t get the observed nearly parabolic orbits out of an Oort cloud; so said R. A. Lyttleton. But then somebody else said, well, who says the distribution can’t be non-Maxwellian? And so it proved. It’s all lumpy. There are clusters of comets, and great volumes of space with almost none.
And while no doubt the Heechee had set their machine to graze in rich comet pastures, that had been a lot of hundreds of thousands of years ago, and it was now in a kind of cometary desert. If it worked, it had little left to work on. (Maybe it had eaten them all up?)
I fell asleep wondering what CHON-food would taste like. It couldn’t be a lot worse than what we had been eating for three and a half years, which was mainly recycled us.
Day 1285. Janine almost got to me today. I was playing chess with Vera, everybody asleep, happy enough, when her hands came around the big earpieces and covered my eyes. “Cut it out, Janine,” I said. When I turned around she was pouting.
“I just wanted to use Vera,” she said.
“For what? Another hot love letter to one of your movie stars?”
“You treat me like a child,” she said. For a wonder, she was fully dressed; her face shone, her hair was damp and pulled down straight to the back of her neck. She looked like your model serious-minded young teen-ager. “What I wanted,” she said, “was to go over thruster alignments with Vera. Since you won’t help me.”
One of the reasons Janine was along with us was that she was smart-we all were; had to be to be accepted for the mission. And one of the things she was smart at was getting at me. “All right,” I said, “you’re right, what can I say? Vera? Recess the game and give us the program for providing propulsion for the Food Factory.”
“Certainly,” she said,”. . . Paul.” And the board disappeared, and in its place she built up a holo of the Food Factory. She had updated her specs from the telescopic views we had obtained, and so it was shown complete with its dust cloud and the glob of dirty snowball adhering to one side. “Cancel the cloud, Vera,” I ordered, and the blur disappeared and the Food Factory showed up like an engineering drawing. “Okay, Janine. What’s the first step?”
“We dock,” she said at once. “We hope the lander facsimile fits, and we dock it. If we can’t dock we link up with braces to some point on the surface; either way, our ship becomes a rigid part of the structure, so we can use our thrust for attitude control.”
“Next?”
“We all dismount the number-one thruster and brace it to the aft section of the factory-there.” She pointed out the place on the holo. “We slave it to the board here, and as soon as it is installed we activate.”
“Guidance?”
“Vera will give us coordinates-oops, sorry, Paul.” She had been drifting out of orientation with me and Vera, and she caught my shoulder with her hand to pull herself back. She kept her hand there. “Then we repeat the process with the other five. By the time we have all six going we have a delta-V of two meters per second per second, running off the 239pu generator. Then we start spreading the mirror foils-“
“No.”
“Oh, sure, we inspect all the moorings to see that they’re holding under thrust first; well, I take that for granted. Then we start with solar power, and when we’ve got it all spread we should be up to maybe two and a quarter meters-“
“At first, Janine. The closer we get in, the more power we get. All right. Now let’s go through the hardware. You’re bracing our ship to the Heechee-metal hull; how do you go about it?”
And she told me, and kept on telling me; and by gosh she knew it all. The only thing was her hand on my shoulder became a hand under my arm, and it moved across my chest, and began to roam; and all the time she was giving me the specs for coldwelding and how to get collimation for the thrusters, her face serious and concerned, and her hand stroking my belly. Fourteen years old. But she didn’t look fourteen, or feel fourteen, or smell fourteen-she’d been into Lurvy’s quarter of an ounce of remaining Chanel. What saved me was Vera; good thing, everything considered, because I was losing interest in saving myself. The holo froze while Janine was adding an extra strut to one of the thrusters, and Vera said, ‘Action message coming in. Shall I read it out for you. . . Paul?”