Broadhead leaned back, gasping. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I- thought I was going to die. I pretty near did. Can you give me some water?”
Paul did, a couple of sips at a time, and then allowed the man just a corner of one of the brown and yellow packets, the blandest there was. “Slowly!” he ordered. “I’ll give you more later.” But he was beginning to realize how good it was to have another human being there after-what was it?-it must have been two months, at least, of his solitary skulking and hiding and plotting. “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” he said at last, “but I’m glad to see you.”
Broadhead licked the last crumbs off his lips and managed to grin. “Why, that’s simple,” he said, eyes avidly on the rest of the food in Paul’s hands. “I came here to rescue you.”
Broadhead had been dehydrated and almost asphyxiated, but not really starved. He kept down the crumbs Paul let him have and demanded more; kept that down too, and was even able to help Paul clean up the mess he had made. Paul found him clean clothes from Wan’s sparse store in the ship-the garments were too long and too slim by far, but the waistband of the kilt did not really need to close all the way-and led him to the largest of the water troughs to get himself clean. It wasn’t daintiness. It was fear. The Old Ones did not hear any better than human beings, nor see even quite as well. But their noses were astonishingly acute. After two weeks of the narrowest of escapes, in his first terrified blundering around Heechee Heaven after Wan and Lurvy had been captured, Paul had learned to bathe three times a day.
And much more.
He took post at a juncture of three corridors, mounting guard while Broadhead got the worst of his thirty days in a Heechee ship off his skin. Rescue them! In the first place, it wasn’t true- Broadhead’s intentions were more subtle and complicated than that. In the second place, Broadhead’s plans were not the same as those Paul had been maturing for two months. He had some notion of tricking information out of the Dead Men and only the haziest notion of what to do with the information when he got it. And he expected Paul to help him carry two or three metric tons of machinery around Heechee Heaven, never mind the risk, never mind that Paul might have ideas of his own. The trouble with being rescued was that the rescuers expected to be in charge of the operation. And expected Paul to be grateful!
Well, he admitted to himself, turning slowly to keep each corridor in view-though the Old Ones were less diligent in patrolling than they had been at first-he would have been grateful enough if Broadhead had showed up at first, in those days of panic when he ran and hid and did not dare either stay or leave; or again, a couple of weeks later, when he had begun to work out a plan, had dared to go to the Dead Men’s room and make contact with the Food Factory-and learned that Peter Herter was dead. The shipboard computer was no use to him, too stupid and too overburdened even to relay his messages to Earth. The Dead Men were maddeningly- Were maddening. He was entirely on his own. And slowly his nerve came back and he began to plan. Even to act. When he found that he could dare coming quite near the Old Ones provided he bathed enough to leave no odor trace, he began his plan. Spying. Scheming. Studying. Recording-that was one of the hardest parts. It is very difficult to keep records of how your enemy behaves, what paths are frequented and on what occasions none of them are likely to be about, when you have nothing to write with. Or a watch. Or even the change of day and night, unheard of in the steady blue glow from the Heechee-metal walls. It had finally occurred to him to use the habits of the Old Ones themselves as his chronometer of their behavior. When he saw a party of them going back toward the spindle where the Oldest One lay motionless, they were getting ready to sleep. When he saw a party moving away, it meant the beginning of a new day. They all slept at once, or almost all, out of some imperative he could not imagine; and so there were times when he dared come nearer and nearer to the place where Wan, Janine and Lurvy were kept. Had even seen them once or twice, daring to hide behind a berryfruit bush as the Old Ones were beginning to stir, peering between the branches and then racing breathlessly away. He knew. He had it all worked out. There were no more than a hundred or so of the Old Ones, and they traveled usually in parties of only two or three.
Remained the question of how to deal with, even, a party of two or three.
Paul Hall, leaner and angrier than he had ever been in his life, thought he knew how to do that. In his first panicked days of flight and hiding, after the others had been captured, he had blundered far and far into the green and red corridors of Heechee Heaven. In some of them even the lights were fading and sparse. In some of them the air had a sour and unhealthful tang, and when he slept there he awoke with his head pounding and thick. In all of them there were objects, machines, gadgets- things; some of them still purring or ticking quietly to themselves, some flickering with a ceaseless rainbow of lights.
He could not stay in those places, because there was no food or water, and he could not find what he most sought. There were no real weapons. Perhaps the Heechee had not needed them. But there was one machine that had a gate of metal strips at one side and, when he wrenched them away, it did not blow up or electrocute him, as he had half thought it would. And he had a spear. And half a dozen times he encountered what looked like smaller, more complicated versions of the Heechee tunnelers.
And some of them still worked. When the Heechee built they built forever.
It took Paul three frightened, thirsty, baffling days of experiment to make any of them function, stopping to creep back to the gold corridors or the ship for food and water, always sure that the thundering noise of the machine would draw the Old Ones down on him before he was ready. But it did not. He learned to squeeze the nipple that hung down from the steering yoke to make the ready lights spring into life, to shove the ponderous knurled wheel forward or back to make it advance or retreat, to tread on the oval floorplate that caused the blue-violet glow to lance out before the machine, softening even the Heechee metal it touched. That was the noisy part. Paul feared greatly that he would destroy something that would wreck Heechee Heaven itself, if he did not bring down a search party. When he came to move the machine to the place he had picked out it was almost quiet, oozing forward on its rollogons. And he stopped to consider.
He knew where the Old Ones went, and when.
He had a spear that could kill a single Old One, maybe could let him defeat even two or three if he came on them by surprise.
He possessed a machine that could annihilate any number of Old Ones, if he could only get them to mass in front of it.
It all added up to a strategy that might even work. It was chancy-oh, God, it was chancy! It depended on at least half a dozen trials by combat. Even though the Old Ones did not seem to seek him armed, who was to say that they might not learn? And what arms might they have? It meant killing some of them, one by one, so expertly and carefully that he did not attract the attention of the whole tribe until he was ready for it-and then attracting them all at once, or so large a majority of them that he could handle the rest with his spear. (Was that really a good gambling bet?) And, above all, it meant that the Oldest One, the great machine Paul had only glimpsed once or twice at long range and about whose powers he knew nothing, must not intervene, and how likely was that?
He had no sure answers. He did have hopes. The Oldest One was too large to move easily through any of the corridors but the gold-skeined ones. Nor did it seem to move frequently at all. And perhaps he could somehow trick it, too, before the devouring haze of the tunneling machine-which could not, in this place, really be a tunneling machine, but seemed to work in about the same way. At every step the odds were against him, true.