It took us another two days to do that, but finally we had it in place. The welding fluxes they had given us to secure steel to Heechee metal actually worked. As far as we could tell from static inspection, it was solid. We retired into the ship and commanded Vera to give it a ten percent thrust.
At once we felt a tiny lurch. It was working. We all grinned at each other, and I reached into my private hold-all for the bottle of champagne I had been saving for this occasion- Another lurch.
Click, click, click, click-one after another our grins snapped off. There should have been only one felt acceleration.
Lurvy jumped to the cyber board. “Vera! Report delta-V!” The screen lighted up with a diagram of forces: the Food Factory imaged in the middle, force arrows showing in two directions. One was our thruster, doing its job of pushing against the hull. The other was not.
“Additional thrust now affecting course. . . Lurvy,” Vera reported. “Vector result now same in direction and magnitude as previous delta-V.”
Our rocket was pushing against the Food Factory. But it wasn’t doing much good. The factory was pushing back.
Day 1298. So we did what we obviously had to do. We turned everything off and screamed for help.
We slept, and ate, and wandered around the factory for what seemed like forever, wishing the 25-day delay did not exist. Vera wasn’t much help. “Transmit full telemetry,” she said, and, “Stand by for further directives.” Well, we were doing that already.
After a day or two I pulled the champagne out anyway, and we all drank up. At .01G the carbonation had more muscle than gravity did, and actually I had to hold my thumb over the bottle and my palm over each glass to squirt and catch the spraying champagne. But after a fashion we toasted. “Not so bad,” said Payter when he had chug-a-lugged his wine. “At least we’ve got a couple million each.”
“If we ever live to collect it,” snarled Janine.
“Don’t be such a downer, Janine. We knew when we started out that the mission might bum out.” And so we had; the ship was designed so that we could start back on our basic fuel, then rerig the photon-thrusters to get us home-in another four years or so.
“And then what, Lurvy? I’ll be an eighteen-year-old virgin! And a failure.”
“Oh, God. Janine, go explore for a while, won’t you? I’m tired of the sight of you.”
And so were all of us, of each other. We were more tired of each other, and less tolerant, than we had been all the way out in the cramped quarters of the ship. Now that we had more space to lose each other in, as much as a quarter-kilometer of it at farthest stretch, we were more abrasive on each other than ever. Every twenty hours or so Vera’s small, dull brain would stumble through her contingency programs and come up with some new experiment: test thrusts at one percent of power, at thirty percent of power, even at full power. And we would get together long enough to suit up and carry them out. But they were always the same. No matter how hard we pushed against the Food Factory, the artifact sensed it, and pushed back at exactly the right magnitude and in exactly the right direction to keep its steady acceleration to whatever goal it had in mind. The only useful thing Vera came up with was a theory: the factory had used up the comet it was working on and was moving on to a new one. But that was only intellectually interesting. It did not do a practical thing to help. So we wandered around, mostly alone, carrying the cameras into every room and corridor we could reach. What we saw they saw, and what they saw was transmitted on the time-sharing beam to Earth, and none of it offered much help.
We found where Trish Bover had entered the factory easily enough-Payter did that, and called us all to look, and we gathered silently to inspect the remnants of a long-decayed lunch, the discarded pantyhose and the graffiti she had scratched on the walls:
TRISH BOVER WAS HERE
and
GOD HELP ME!
“Maybe God will,” said Lurvy after a while, “but 1 don’t see how anybody else can.”
“She must have been here longer than I thought,” Payter said. “There’s junk scattered all around in some of the rooms.”
“What kind of junk?”
“Old spoiled food, mostly. Down toward the other landing face, you know where the lights are?” I did, and Janine and I went to see. It was her idea to keep me company, and not an idea I had been enthusiastic about at first. But maybe the 12C temperature and the lack of anything like a bed tempered her interest, or maybe she was too depressed and disappointed to be very interested in her ambition to lose her virginity. We found the discarded food easily enough. It didn’t look like Gateway rations to me. It seemed to come in packets; a couple of them were unopened, three biggish ones, the size of a slice of bread, wrapped in bright red something or other-it felt like silk. Two smaller ones, one green, one the same red as the others but mottled with pink dots. We opened one experimentally. It stank of rotten fish and was obviously no longer edible. But had been.
I left Janine there to go back to find the others. They opened the little green one. It did not smell spoiled, but was hard as rock. Payter sniffed it, then licked It, then broke off a crumb against the wall and chewed it thoughtfully. “No taste at all,” he reported, then looked up at us, looked startled, then grinned.
“You waiting for me to drop dead?” he inquired. “I don’t think so. You chew on it awhile, it gets soft. Like stale crackers, maybe.”
Lurvy frowned. “If it really was food-“ She stopped and thought. “If it really was food, and Trish left it there, why didn’t she just stay here? Or why didn’t she mention it?”
“She was scared silly,” I suggested.
“Sure she was. But she did tape a report. She didn’t say a word about food. The Gateway techs were the ones who decided this was a Food Factory, remember? And all they had to go on was the wrecked one they found around Phyllis’s World.”
“Maybe she just forgot.”
“I don’t think she forgot,” said Lurvy slowly, but she didn’t say any more than that. There wasn’t anything more to be said. But for the next day or two we did not do much solitary exploring.
Day 1311. Vera received the information about the food packages in silence. After a while she displayed an instruction to submit the contents of the packages to chemical- and bio-assay. We had already done that on our own, and if she drew conclusions she did not say what they were.
For that matter, neither did we. On the occasions when we were all awake together what we mostly talked about was what we would do if Base could not figure out a way for us to move the Food Factory. Vera had already suggested that we install the other five side-cargos, turn them all on full-power at once and see if the factory could out-muscle six thrusters. Vera’s suggestions were not orders, and Lurvy spoke for all of us when she said, “If we turn them on full and they don’t work, the next step is to turn them on to over rated capacity. They could get damaged. And we could get stuck.”
“What do we do if we hear from Earth and they make it an order?” I asked.
Payter cut in ahead of her. “We bargain,” he said, nodding sagely. “They want us to take extra risks, they give us extra pay.”
“Are you going to do the bargaining, Pa?”
“You bet I am. And listen. Suppose it don’t work. Suppose we have to go back. You know what we do then?” He nodded to us again. “We load up the ship with everything we can carry. We find little machines that we can take out, you know? Maybe we see if they work. We stuff that ship with everything it can hold, throw away everything we can spare. Leave most of the side-. cargos here and load on big machines outside, you see? We could come back with, God, I don’t know, another twenty, thirty million dollars’ worth of artifacts.”
“Like prayer fans!” Janine cried, clapping her hands. There were piles of them in the room where Payter had found the food. There were other things there, too, a sort of metal-mesh couch, tulip-shaped things that looked like candleholders on the walls. But hundreds of prayer fans. By my quick guess, at a thousand dollars each, there was half a million dollars’ worth of prayer fans in that room alone, delivered to the curio markets in Chicago and Rome. . . if we lived to deliver them. Not counting all the other things I could think of, that I was inventorying in my mind. I wasn’t the only one.