Sheri again. “Yeah. What’s your name?”
“Did I forget that again? I’m Jimmy Chou. Pleased to meet you all. Now let’s go.”
Now I know a lot more than my instructor did, including what happened to him half an orbit later—poor old Jimmy Chou, he went out before I did, and came back while I was on my second trip, very dead. Flare burns, they say his eyes were boiled out of his bead. But at that time he knew it all, and it was all very strange and wonderful to me.
So we crawled into the funny elliptical hatch that let you slip between the thrusters and down into the landing capsule, and then down a peg-ladder one step further into the main vehicle itself.
We looked around, three Ali Babas staring at the treasure cave. We heard a scratching above us, and a head poked in. It had shaggy eyebrows and pretty eyes, and it belonged to the girl I had been dancing with the night before. “Having fun?” she inquired. We were clinging together as far from anything that looked movable as we could get, and I doubt we really looked at ease. “Never mind,” she said, “just look around. Get familiar with it. You’ll see a lot of it. That vertical line of wheels with the little spokes sticking out of them? That’s the target selector. That’s the most important thing not to touch for now—maybe ever. That golden spiral thing over next to you there, the blond girl? Anybody want to guess what that’s for?”
You-there-blond-girl, who was one of the Forehand daughters, shrank away from it and shook her head. I shook mine, but Sheri hazarded, “Could it be a hatrack?”
Teacher squinted at it thoughtfully. “Hmm. No, I don’t think so, but I keep hoping one of you fish will know the answer. None of us here do. It gets hot sometimes in flight; nobody knows why. The toilet’s in there. You’re going to have a lot of fun with that. But it does work, after you learn how. You can sling your hammocks and sleep there—or anywhere you want to, actually. That corner, and that recess are pretty dead space. If you’re in a crew that wants some privacy, you can screen them off. A little bit, anyway.”
Sheri said, “Don’t any of you people like to tell your names?” Teacher grinned. “I’m Gelle-Klara Moynlin. You want to know the rest about me? I’ve been out twice and didn’t score, and I’m killing time until the right trip comes along. So I work as assistant instructor.”
“How do you know which is the right trip?” asked the Forehand girl.
“Bright fellow, you. Good question. That’s another of those questions that I like to hear you ask, because it shows you’re thinking, but if there’s an answer I don’t know what it is. Let’s see. You already know this ship is a Three. It’s done six round trips already, but it’s a reasonable bet that it’s got enough reserve fuel for a couple more. I’d rather take it than a One. That’s for long-shot gamblers.”
“Mr. Chou said that,” said the Forehand girl, “but my father says he’s been all through the records since Orbit One, and the Ones aren’t that bad.”
“Your father can have mine,” said Gelle-Klara Moynlin. “It’s not just statistics. Ones are lonesome. Anyway, one person can’t really handle everything if you hit lucky, you need shipmates, one in orbit—most of us keep one man in the ship, feels safer that way; at least somebody might get help if things go rancid. So two of you go down in the lander to look around. Of course, if you do hit lucky you have to split it three ways. If you hit anything big, there’s plenty to go around. And if you don’t hit, one-third of nothing is no less than all of it.”
“Wouldn’t it be even better in a Five, then?” I asked.
Klara looked at me and half-winked; I hadn’t thought she remembered dancing the night before. “Maybe, maybe not. The thing about Fives is that they have almost unlimited target acceptance.”
“Please talk English,” Sheri coaxed.
“Fives will accept a lot of destinations that Threes and Ones won’t. I think it’s because some of those destinations are dangerous. The worst ship I ever saw come back was a Five. All scarred and seared and bent; nobody knows how it made it back at all. Nobody knows where it had been, either, but I heard somebody say it might’ve actually been in the photosphere of a star. The crew couldn’t tell us. They were dead.
“Of course,” she went on meditatively, “an armored Three has almost as much target acceptance as a Five, but you take your chances any way you swing. Now let’s get with it, shall we? You—” she pointed at Sheri, “sit down over there.”
The Forehand girl and I crawled around the mix of human and Heechee furnishings to make room. There wasn’t much. If you cleared everything out of a Three you’d have a room about four meters by three by three, but of course if you cleared everything out it wouldn’t go.
Sheri sat down in front of the column of spoked wheels, wriggling her bottom to try to get a fit. “What kind of behinds did the Heechee have?” she complained.
Teacher said, “Another good question, same no-good answer. If you find out, tell us. The Corporation puts that webbing in the seat. It isn’t original equipment. Okay. Now, that thing you’re looking at is the target selector. Put your hand on one of the wheels. Any one. Just don’t touch any other. Now move it.” She peered down anxiously as Sheri touched the bottom wheel, then thrust with her fingers, then laid the heel of her hand on it, braced herself against the V-shaped arms of the seat, and shoved. Finally it moved, and the lights along the row of wheels began to flicker.
“Wow,” said Sheri, “they must’ve been pretty strong!”
We took turns trying with that one wheel—Klara wouldn’t let us touch any other that day—and when it came my turn I was surprised to find that it took about as much muscle as I could bring to bear to make it move. It didn’t feel rusted stuck; it felt as though it were meant to be hard to turn. And, when you think how much trouble you can get into if you turn a setting by accident in the middle of a flight, it probably was.
Of course, now I know more about that, too, than my teacher did then. Not that I’m so smart, but it has taken, and is still taking, a lot of people a hell of a long time to figure out what goes on just in setting up a target on the course director.
What it is is a vertical row of number generators. The lights that show up display numbers; that’s not easy to see, because they don’t look like numbers. They aren’t positional, or decimal. (Apparently the Heechee expressed numbers as sums of primes and exponents, but all that’s way over my head.) Only the check pilots and the course programmers working for the Corporation really have to be able to read the numbers, and they don’t do it directly, only with a computing translator. The first five digits appear to express the position of the target in space, reading from bottom to top. (Dane Metchnikov says the prime ordering isn’t from bottom to top but from front to back, which says something or other about the Heechee. They were three-D oriented, like primitive man, instead of two-D oriented, like us.) You would think that three numbers would be enough to describe any position anywhere in the universe, wouldn’t you? I mean, if you make a threedimensional representation of the Galaxy you can express any point in it by means of a number for each of the three dimensions. But it took the Heechee five. Does that mean there were five dimensions that were perceptible to the Heechee? Metchnikov says not. . . .
Anyway. Once you get a lock on the first five numbers, the other seven can be turned to quite arbitrary settings and you’ll still go when you squeeze the action teat.
What you usually do—or what the course programmers the Corporation keeps on the payroll to do this sort of thing for you usually do—is pick four numbers at random. Then you cycle the fifth digit until you get a kind of warning pink glow. Sometimes it’s faint, sometimes it’s bright. If you stop there and press the flat oval part under the teat, the other numbers begin to creep around, just a couple of millimeters one way or another, and the pink glow gets brighter. When they stop it’s shocking pink and shockingly bright. Metchnikov says that’s an automatic fine-tuning device. The machine allows for human error—sorry, I mean for Heechee error—so when you get close to a real, valid target setting it makes the final adjustments for you automatically. Probably he’s right.