Captain’s ship was bigger and stronger. Even so, the shaking, tossing, racking strains of passing through the event horizon threw Captain and Twice and the other four members of the crew violently and hurtingly against their retaining harnesses; the diamond-bright corkscrew coruscated with great fat silent sparks of radiance showering all around the cabin; the light hurt their eyes, the violent motion bruised their bodies; and it went on and on. For an hour or more by the crew’s own subjective time, which was a queer, shifting blend of the normal pace of the universe at large and the slowed-down tempo inside the black hole.
But at last they were through into the unstressed space. The terrible lurching stopped. The blinding lights faded. The Galaxy glowed before them, a velvet dome of cream splattered with bright, bold stars, for they were too far inside the center to see more than the occasional patch of blackness.
“Massed minds be thanked,” said Captain, grinning as he crawled out of his harness-he looked like a med school skull when he grinned-“I think we’ve made it!” And the crew followed his example, unstrapping themselves, chattering cheerfully back and forth. As they rose to begin the data-collection process, Captain’s bony hand reached out to hold Twice’s. It was an occasion for rejoicing-as the captains of Nantucket whalers rejoiced when they passed Cape Horn, as the covered-wagon pioneers began to breathe again as they came down the slopes into the promised land of Oregon or California. The violence and peril were not over. They would have to go through it all again on the way back inside. But now, for at least a week or more, they could relax and collect data and this was the pleasure part of the expedition.
Or it should have been.
It should have been but was not, for as Captain secured the ship and the officer named Shoe opened the communication channels, every sensor on the board flared violet. The thousand automatic orbiting stations were reporting big news! Important news-bad news, and all the datastores clamored to announce their evil tidings at once.
There was a shocked silence among the Heechee. Then their training overcame their astonished terror, and the cabin of the Heechee ship became a whirlwind of activity. Receive and collate, analyze and compare. The messages mounted. The picture took shape.
The last record-tapping expedition had been only a few weeks before, by the slow creep of time inside the great central black hole-decades or so as time was measured in the galloping universe outside. But even so, not much time! Not in the scale of stars!
And yet the whole world was different.
Q.-What is worse than a prediction that doesn’t come true?
A.-A prediction that comes true sooner than you expect.
It had been the Heechee conviction that intelligent and technological life would arise in the Galaxy. They had identified more than a dozen inhabited worlds-and not merely inhabited, but bearing the promise of intelligence. They had made a plan for each of them.
Some of the plans had failed. There was a species of furry quadrupeds on a damp, cool planet so near the Orion nebula that its aurora filled the sky, small quick creatures with paws as nimble as a raccoon’s and lemur eyes. They would discover tools one day, the Heechee thought; and fire; and farming; and cities; and technology and space travel. And so they had, and used them all to poison their planet and decimate their race. There was another race, six-limbed segmented ammonia-breathers, very promising, sadly too near a star that went supernova. End of the ammonia-breathers. There were the chill, slow, sludgy creatures who occupied a special place in Heechee history. They had carried the terrible news that drove the Heechee into hiding, and that was enough to make them unique. More, they were not merely promising but actually intelligent already; not merely intelligent but civilized! Technology was already within their grasp. But they were a longshot entry in the galactic sweepstakes anyway, for their sludgy metabolism was simply too slow to compete with warmer, quicker races.
But one race, someday, would reach into space and survive. Or so the Heechee hoped.
And so the Heechee feared, too, for they knew even as they planned their retreat that a race that could catch up with them could also surpass them. But how could that possibility loom near so quickly? It had been only sixty terrestrial years since the last checkup!
Then the distant monitors orbiting the planet Venus had shown the sapiens bipeds there, digging out the abandoned Heechee tunnels, exploring their little solar system in spacecraft that moved on jets of chemical flame. Pitiably crude, of course. But promising. In a century or two- four or five centuries at most, the Heechee thought-they would likely enough find the Gateway asteroid. And in a century or two after that they might begin to understand the technology- But events had moved so swiftly! The human beings had found the
Gateway ships, the Food Factory-the immense distant habitat the Heechee had used to pen specimens of Earth’s then most promising race, the australopithecines. All had fallen to the humans, and that was not the end of it.
Captain’s crew was well trained. When the data had been accepted, and filtered through the massed minds, and tabulated, and summarized, the specialists prepared their reports. White-Noise was the navigator. It was his responsibility to take position fixes on all reported sources and update the ship locator file. Shoe was the communications officer, busiest of all-except perhaps for Mongrel, the integrator, who flew from board to board, whispering to the massed minds and suggesting cross-checks and correlations. Neither Burst, the black-hole-piercer specialist, nor Twice herself whose skill was in remote handling of slaved equipment, were needed for their specialties at this time, so they backed up the others, as did Captain, the ribbed muscles of his face twisting like serpents as he waited for the consolidated reports.
Mongrel was fond of her Captain, too, and so she gave him the least threatening ones first.
First, there was the fact that Gateway ships had been found and used. Well, there was nothing wrong with that! It was part of the plan, although it was disconcerting to have it happen so soon.
Second, there was the fact that the Food Factory had been found, and the artifact humans called Heechee Heaven. These were old messages, now decades old. Also not serious. Also disconcerting-quite disconcerting, because Heechee Heaven had been designed to trap any ships that docked there, and for two-way contact to have been established meant a quite unexpected sophistication among these upstart bipeds.
Third, there was a message from the sailship people, and that made the tendons in Captain’s face writhe faster. Finding a ship in a solar system was one thing-locating one in interstellar space was distressingly impressive.
There is a possible slight confusion here that I should eliminate. Robinette (and all the rest of the human race) called these people Heechee. Of course, they didn’t call themselves that, any more than native Americans called themselves Indians or the African Khoi-San tribes called themselves Hottentots and Bushmen. What the Heechee in fact called themselves was the intelligent ones. But that proves little. So does Homo sapiens.
And fourth- Fourth was White-Noise’s plot of the present whereabouts of all known Heechee vessels now operated by human beings, and when Captain saw that he squeaked with rage and shock. “Plot it against banned spaces!” he commanded. And as soon as the datafans were in place and the combined images appeared, the tendons in his cheeks trembled like plucked harpstrings. “They are exploring black holes,” he said, his voice thin.
White-Noise nodded. “There is more,” he said. “Some of the vessels carry order disruptors. They can penetrate.”
And Mongrel the integrator added: “And it does not seem that they understand the danger signs.”
Having given their reports, the rest of the crew waited politely. It was Captain’s problem now. They hoped very much that he was going to be able to handle it.
The female named Twice was not exactly in love with Captain, because it wasn’t time for that yet, but she knew she would be. Quite soon. Within the next few days, most likely. So in addition to her concern for this astonishing and frightening news, there was also her concern for Captain. He was the one who had his upper lip in the pincer. Although it was not yet time, she reached out and placed her lean hand over his. So deep in thought was Captain that he didn’t even notice, but patted it absently.
Shoe made the sniffling sound that was the Heechee equivalent of clearing his throat before asking, “Do you want to establish contact with the massed minds?”
“Not now,” hissed Captain, rubbing his ribcage with his free fist. It made a grating noise, loud in the stillness of the cabin. What Captain really wanted to do was to go back into his black hole in the core of the Galaxy and pull the stars up over his head. That was not possible. Next best would be to flee back to that same safe, friendly core and report to higher authority. Higher authority could then make the decisions. They could be the ones to deal with the massed minds of the ancestors, who would be eager to interfere. They could decide what to do about it-if possible, with some other Heechee captain and crew actually dispatched to this terrible swift space to carry out their orders. That was a possible option, but Captain was too well trained to allow himself so easy a way out. He was the one on the scene. Therefore he was the one who should make the first swift responses. If they were wrong-well, pity poor Captain! There would be consequences. Shunning, at least, though that was only for minor offenses. For graver ones there was the equivalent of being kicked upstairs-and Captain was not eager to join that mighty mass of stored minds that were all of his ancestors.