Ludolfo Amheiro came in, a plump little man with gray sideburns with nine blue bangles on his left forearm-not many people wore them anymore, but Walthers knew that each one represented a Heechee-vessel flight in the days when you never knew where your ship was taking you; so here was a man with experience! “Glad to have you aboard, Walthers,” he said perfunctorily. “Do you know how to relieve the watch? There’s nothing to it, really. If you’ll just put your hands on the wheel over Yee-xing’s-“ Walthers nodded and did as he was ordered. Her hands felt warm and soft as she slipped them carefully out from under his, then slid her pretty bottom off the pilot’s seat to allow Walthers to occupy it. “That’s all there is, Walthers,” said the captain, satisfied. “First Officer Madjhour will actually fly the vessel”-nodding to the dark, smiling man who had just moved into the right-hand seat- “and he’ll tell you what’s necessary for you. You get a pee break of ten minutes each hour … and that’s about it. Join me for dinner tonight, will you?”
And the invitation was reinforced by a smile from Third Officer Janie Yee-xing; and it was astonishing to Walthers, as he turned to listen to his instructions from Ghazi Madjhour, to realize that it had been all of ten minutes since he had thought of gone-away Dolly.
It was not quite as easy as that. Piloting was piloting. You didn’t forget it. But navigation was something else. Especially as a lot of the old Heechee navigation charts had been unraveled, or at least partly unraveled, while Walthers was flying shepherds and prospectors around Peggy’s.
The star charts on the S. Ya. were far more complicated than the ones Audee had used on the trip out. They came in two varieties. The most interesting one was Heechee. It had queer gold and gray-green markings that were only imperfectly understood, but it showed everything. The other, far less detailed but a lot more useful to human beings, was human-charted and English-labeled. Then there was the ship’s log to check, as it automatically recorded everything the ship did or saw. There was the whole internal system display-not the pilot’s concern, of course, except that if something went wrong the pilot needed to know about it. And all of this was new to Audee.
The good part of that was that learning the new skills kept Walthers busy. Janie Yee-xing was there to teach him, and that was good, too, because she kept his thoughts busy in a different way … except in those bad times just before he fell asleep.
Since the S. Ya. was on a return trip it was almost empty. More than thirty-eight hundred colonists had gone out to Peggy’s Planet. Coming back, there were hardly any. The three dozen human beings in the ship’s crew; the military detachments maintained by the four governing nations of the Gateway Corp; and about sixty failed immigrants. They were the steerage. They had impoverished themselves to go out. Now they glumly bankrupted themselves to get back to whatever desert or slum they had fled, because, when push came to shove, they couldn’t quite hack pioneering in a new world. “Poor bastards,” Walthers said, circling to pass a work party of them cleaning air filters at a slave’s torpid pace; but Yeewig would have none of that.
“Don’t waste your pity on them, Walthers. They had it made and they chickened out.” She snarled something in Cantonese at the work party, who resentfully moved minutely faster for a moment.
“You can’t blame people for being homesick.”
“Home! God, Walthers, you talk as if there was a ‘home’ left-you’ve been out in the boonies too long.”
She paused at the junction of two corridors, one glowing blue with tracings of Heechee metal, the other gold. She waved at the party of armed guards in the uniforms of China, Brazil, the United States, and the Soviet Union. “Do you see them fraternizing?” she demanded. “Used to be they didn’t take this seriously. They’d pal around with the crew, they never carried weapons, it was just an all-expense-paid cruise in space for them. But now.” She shook her head and reached out abruptly to grab Walthers’ arm as he started to get closer to the guards. “Why don’t you listen to me?” she demanded. “They’ll give you hell if you try to go in there.”
“What’s in there?”
She shrugged. “The Heechee stuff they didn’t take out of the ship when they converted it. That’s one of the things they’re guarding-although,” she added, her voice lower, “if they knew the ship better they’d do a better job. But come on, we go this way.”
Unraveling the Heechee maps was extremely difficult, especially as they showed clear indications that they were intended to be difficult to unravel. There were not many of them to go on. Two or three fragments found in vessels like the so-called Heechee Heaven or S. Va., and a nearly complete one found in an artifact circling a frozen planet around a star in Boötes. It was my personal opinion, though not supported by the official reports of the cartographical study commissions, that many of the haloes, check marks, and flickering indicia were meant as warning signs. Robin didn’t believe me then. He said I was a cowardly pudding of spun photons. By the time he came to agree with me, what he called me no longer mattered.
Walthers followed willingly enough, grateful for the sight-seeing tour as much as for their destination. The S Ya. was far the biggest ship he, or any other human being, had ever seen, Heechee-built, very old-and still, in some ways, very puzzling. They were halfway home, and Walthers had not yet explored a quarter of its mazy, glowing corridors. The part he had especially not explored was Yee-xing’s private cabin, and he was looking forward to that with the interest of any ten-day virgin. But there were distractions. “What’s that?” he asked, pausing at a pyramidal construction of green-glowing metal in an alcove. A heavy steel grating had been welded in front of it to keep prying hands off.
“Beats me,” said Yee-xing. “Nobody else knows, either-that’s why they’ve left it here. Some of the stuff can be cut out and moved easily, some gets wrecked-now and then if you try to remove something, it blows up in your face. Here, right down this little alley. This is where I live.”
Neat, narrow bed, pictures of an old Oriental couple on the wall- Janie’s parents?-sprays of flowers on the wail chest; Yee-xing had made the place her own. “On return trips, that is,” she explained. “On the way out this is the captain’s cabin, and the rest of us sleep on cots in the pilot room.” She tugged at the cover on the bed, which was already quite straight. “There’s not much chance to fool around on outgoing trips,” she said meditatively. “Would you like a glass of wine?”
“I certainly would,” said Walthers. And so he sat down and had the wine, and then he had the share of a joint with pretty Janie Yee-xing, and by and by had the other refreshments the tiny cabin had to offer, which were excellent in quality and satisfying to his soul, and if he thought at all of lost Dolly in the next half hour or so it was not at all with jealousy and rage, but almost with compassion.
There was plenty of room to fool around on return trips, it turned out, even in a cabin no bigger than the one Horatio Hornblower had occupied centuries before. And the wine was Peggy’s Planet’s best, but when they had finished emptying the bottle, and themselves, the cabin began to seem a lot smaller and there was still an hour or more before their shifts began. “I’m hungry,” Yee-xing announced. “I’ve got some rice and stuff here, but maybe-“
It was not a time to push his luck, although a home-cooked meal sounded good. Even rice and stuff. “Let’s go to the galley,” said Walthers, and, in no particular hurry, they wandered hand in hand back to the working part of the ship. They paused at a junction of corridors, where the long-gone Heechee had, for reasons of their own, planted little clusters of shrubs and bushes-not, no doubt, the same ones that were still growing there. Yee-xing paused to pick a bright blue berry.
“Look at that,” she said. “They’re all ripe, and the deadbeats don’t even pick them.”
“You mean the returning colonists? But they pay their way-“
“Oh, sure,” she said bitterly. “No pay, no fly. But when they get back they’ll go right on welfare, because what else is there for them?”
Walthers sampled one of the juicy, thin-skinned fruits. “You don’t like the returnees very much.”
Yee-xing grinned. “I don’t keep that a secret very well, do I?” But the grin faded. “In the first place, there’s nothing for them to go home to-if they had a decent life, they wouldn’t have left it. In the second place, things have got a lot worse since they left. More terrorist trouble. More international friction-why, there are countries that are building up their armies again! And in the third place, they’re not only going to suffer from all that; they’re part of the cause of it. Half the goons you see here will be in some terror group in a month-or supporting one, anyway.”