The S. Ya. was double-hulled. The space between the hulls was narrow and dark, but it could be entered. So Yee-xing led Walthers through narrow passages close to the skin of the great spacecraft, through a maze of empty colonists’ bunks, past the crude, huge kitchen that fed them, into a space that smelled of stale garbage and ancient rot-into a vast, ill-lit chamber. “Here they are,” she said. Her voice was lowered, although she had promised him they were too far from the guards to be overheard. “Put your head close to that sort of silvery basket-you see where I’m pointing?-but you don’t touch it. That’s important!”
“Why is it important?” Walthers stared around at what looked like the Heechee equivalent of an attic. There were at least forty devices in the chamber, large and small, all of them firmly linked to the structure of the ship itself. There were big ones and little ones, spherical ones with splayed mountings joining the deck, squarish ones that glowed in the blue
The Heechee charting and navigation systems were not easy to decipher. For navigation, the system looks up two points, the start and finish of the trip. It then looks up all intervening obstacles such as dust or gas clouds, perturbing radiation, gravitational fields, and so on, and selects points of safe passage around or between them, after which it constructs a spline to fit the points and directs the vessel along it.
Many objects and points on the charts were tagged with attention marks-flickering auras, check marks, and so on. We realized early that these were often warnings. The difficulty was that we didn’t know which signs were warnings, or what they warned against.
and green colors of the metal. Of the woven metal shroud Janie Yee-xing was indicating, there were three, all exactly alike.
“It’s important because I don’t want my ass kicked off this ship, Audee. So pay attention!”
“I am paying attention. Why are there three of them?”
“Why did the Heechee do anything? Maybe all these things were spares. Now here’s the part you have to listen to. Put your head close to the metal part, but not too close. As soon as you start feeling things that don’t come out of you, that’s close enough. You’ll know when. But don’t get any closer, and above all don’t touch, because this is a two-way thing. As long as you’re just satisfied with sort of general feelings, nobody will notice. Probably. But if they do notice, the captain will have us both walking the plank, you understand?”
“Of course I understand,” Walthers said, a little annoyed, and moved his head within a dozen centimeters of the silvery mesh. He twisted around to look at Yee-xing. “Nothing,” he said.
“Try a little closer.”
It was not very easy to move your head a centimeter at a time when it was bent at a strange angle and you didn’t have anything to hold on to, but Walthers tried to do as instructed- “That’s it!” Yee-xing cried, watching his face. “No closer, now!” He didn’t answer. His mind was filled with the barest suspicion of sensations-a confused mumble of sensations. There were dreams and daydreams, and someone’s desperate shortness of breath; there was someone’s laughter, and someone, or actually what seemed to be three couples of someones, engaged in sexual activity. He twisted to grin at Janie, started to speak- And then, suddenly, there was something else there. Walthers froze. From Yee-xing’s description he had expected a sort of sense of company. The presence of other people. Their fears and joys and hungers and pleasures-but the “they” was always human.
This new thing was not.
Walthers moved convulsively. His head touched the mesh. All the sensations became a thousandfold clearer, like the focusing of a lens, and he felt the new and distant presence-or presences?-in a different and immediate way. It was a distant, slippery, chilling sensation, and it did not emanate from anything human. If the sources had depressions or fantasies Walthers could not comprehend them. All he could feel was that they were there. They existed. They did not respond They did not change.
If you could get inside the mind of a corpse, he thought in panic and revulsion, this was how it might feel-
All this in a moment, and then he was aware that Yee-xing was tugging at his arm, shouting in his ear: “Oh, damn you, Walthers! I felt that! So did the captain and everybody on this God-damned ship. Now we’re in trouble!”
As soon as his head came away from the silvery mesh the sensation was gone. The gleaming walls and shadowy machines were real again, with Janie Yee-xing’s furious face thrust into his. In trouble? Walthers found himself laughing. After the chill, slow hell he had just glimpsed, nothing human could seem like trouble. Even when the four-power guard came boiling in, weapons drawn, shouting at them in four languages, Walthers almost welcomed them.
For they were human, and alive.
The question that was digging at his mind was the one that anybody would have asked himself Had he tuned in somehow on the cryptic, hidden Heechee?
If so, he told himself, shuddering, heaven help the human race.
5 A Day in a Tycoon’s Life
Dreading the Heechee was a popular sport in more places than the S. Ya.
I even did a fair amount of it myself. Everybody did. We did it a lot when I was a kid, though then the Heechee were nothing more than strange vanished creatures that had amused themselves digging tunnels on the planet Venus hundreds of thousands of years before. We did it when I was a Gateway prospector-oh, yes, my God how we did it then! Trusting ourselves to old Heechee ships and scooting around the universe to places no human had ever seen, and always wondering if the owners of the ships would turn up at the end of a trip-and what they would do about it! And we brooded about them even more when we untangled enough of their old sky atlases to discover where they had gone to hide, deep in the core of our own Galaxy.
It did not occur to us, then, to wonder what they were hiding from.
That certainly was not all I did, to be sure. I had plenty of other things to fill my days. There was my steadfast preoccupation with my crotchety health, which forced itself upon my attention whenever it wanted to, and wanted to more often all the time. But that was only the beginning. I was about as busy, with about as many myriad diverse things, as it was possible for a human being to be.
If you looked at any average day in the life of Robin Broadhead, aging tycoon, visiting him at his luxurious country home looking over the broad Tappan Sea just north of New York City, you would find him doing such things as strolling along the riverfront with his lovely wife, Essie … venturing culinary experiments in the cuisines of Malaya, Iceland, and Ghana in his lavishly equipped kitchen… chatting with his wise data-retrieval system, Albert Einstein… hitting his mail:
“To that youth center in Grenada, let’s see, yeah. Here is the check for three hundred thousand dollars as promised, but please don’t name the center after me. Name it after my wife if you want to, and we will both certainly try to get down there for the opening.
“To Pedro Lammartine, Secretary General, United Nations. Dear Pete. I’m working on the Americans to share data with the Brazilians on finding that terrorist ship, but somebody has to get after the Brazilians. Will you use your influence, please? It’s in everybody’s interest. If the terrorists are not stopped, God knows where we’ll all wind up.
“To Ray McLean, wherever he’s living now. Dear Ray. By all means use our docking facilities in the search for your wife. I wish you all the luck from the heart, etc., etc.
“To Gorman and Ketchin, General Contractors. Dear Sirs. I won’t accept your new completion date of October 1st for my ship. It’s completely unreasonable. You’ve had one extension already, and that’s all you get. I remind you of the heavy penalty charges in the contract if there is any further delay.
“To the President of the United States. Dear Ben. If the terrorist ship is not located and neutralized at once, the peace of the whole Earth is threatened. Not to mention property damage, loss of lives, and everything else that’s at risk. It is an open secret that the Brazilians have developed a direction-finder for signals from a ship in FTL flight and that our own military people have a procedure for FTL navigating that will let them approach it. Can’t they get together? As Commander in Chief, all you have to do is order the High Pentagon to cooperate. There’s lots of pressure on the Brazilians to do their share, but they’re waiting for a sign from us.