So they built a sort of space barge out of Heechee metal. They loaded it with scraps of junk, and ran a Five out there on lander power. That’s just hydrogen and oxygen, and it’s easy enough to pump that back in. Then they tied the Five to the barge with monofilament Heechee metal cables.
We watched the whole thing from Gateway on PV. We saw the cables take up slack as the Five put a strain on them with its lander jets. Craziest-looking thing you ever saw.
Then they must have activated the long-range start-teat.
All we saw on the PV was that the barge sort of twitched, and the Five simply disappeared from sight.
It never came back. The stop-motion tapes showed at least the first little bit of what happened. The cable truss had sliced that ship into segments like a hard-boiled egg. The people in it never knew what hit them. The Corporation still has that ten million; nobody wants to try for it anymore.
I got a politely reproachful lecture from Shicky, and a really ugly, but brief, P-phone call from Mr. Hsien, but that was all. After a day or two Shicky began letting us take time off again.
I spent most of it with Klara. A lot of times we’d arrange to meet in her pad, or once in a while mine, for an hour in bed. We were sleeping together almost every night; you’d think we would have had enough of that. We didn’t. After a while I wasn’t sure what we were copulating for, the fun of it or the distraction it gave from the contemplation of our own self-images. I would lie there and look at Klara, who always turned over, snuggled down on her stomach, and closed her eyes after sex, even when we were going to get up two minutes later. I would think how well I knew every fold and surface of her body. I would smell that sweet, sexy smell of her and wish—oh, wish! Just wish, for things I couldn’t spell out: for an apartment under the Big Bubble with Klara, for an airbody and a cell in a Venusian tunnel with Klara, even for a life in the food mines with Klara. I guess it was love. But then I’d still be looking at her, and I would feel the inside of my eyes change the picture I was seeing, and what I would see would be the female equivalent of myself: a coward, given the greatest chance a human could have, and scared to take advantage of it.
When we weren’t in bed we would wander around Gateway together. It wasn’t like dating. We didn’t go much to the Blue Hell or the holofilm halls, or even eat out. Klara did. I couldn’t afford it, so I took most of my meals from the Corporation’s refectories, included in the price of my per-capita per diem. Klara was not unwilling to pick up the check for both of us, but she wasn’t exactly anxious to do it, either—she was gambling pretty heavily, and not winning much. There were groups to be involved with—card parties, or just parties; folk dance groups, music-listening groups, discussion groups. They were free, and sometimes interesting. Or we just explored.
Several times we went to the museum. I didn’t really like it that much. It seemed—well, reproachful.
The first time we went there was right after I got off work, the day Willa Forehand shipped out. Usually the museum was full of visitors, like crew members on pass from the cruisers, or ship’s crews from the commercial runs, or tourists. This time, for some reason, there were only a couple of people there, and we had a chance to look at everything. Prayer fans by the hundreds, those filmy, little crystalline things that were the commonest Heechee artifact; no one knew what they were for, except that they were sort of pretty, but the Heechee had left them all over the place. There was the original anisokinetic punch, that had earned a lucky prospector something like twenty million dollars in royalties already. A thing you could put in your pocket. Furs. Plants in formalin. The original piezophone, that had earned three crews enough to make every one of them awfully rich.
The most easily swiped things, like the prayer fans and the blood diamonds and the fire pearls, were kept behind tough, breakproof glass. I think they were even wired to burglar alarms. That was surprising, on Gateway. There isn’t any law there, except what the Corporation imposes. There are the Corporation’s equivalent of police, and there are rules—you’re not supposed to steal or commit murder—but there aren’t any courts. If you break a rule all that happens is that the Corporation security force picks you up and takes you out to one of the orbiting cruisers. Your own, if there is one from wherever you came. Any one, if not. But if they won’t take you, or if you don’t want to go on your own nation’s ship and can persuade some other ship to take you, Gateway doesn’t care. On the cruisers, you’ll get a trial. Since you’re known to be guilty to start with, you have three choices. One is to pay your way back home. The second is to sign on as crew if they’ll have you. The third is to go out the lock without a suit. So you see that, although there isn’t much law on Gateway, there isn’t much crime, either.
But, of course, the reason for locking up the precious stuff in the museum was that transients might be tempted to lift a souvenir or two.
So Klara and I would muse over the treasures someone had found. . . and somehow not discuss with each other the fact that we were supposed to go out and find some more.
It was not just the exhibits. They were fascinating; they were things that Heechee hands (tentacles? claws?) had made and touched, and they came from unimaginable places incredibly far away. But the constantly flickering tube displays held me even more strongly. Summaries of every mission ever launched displayed one after another. A constant total of missions versus returns; of royalties paid to lucky prospectors; the roster of the unlucky ones, name after name in a slow crawl along one whole wall of the room, over the display cases. The totals told the story: 2355 launches (the number changed to 2356, then 2357 while we were there; we felt the shudder of the two launches), 841 successful returns.
Standing in front of that particular display, Klara and I didn’t look at each other, but I felt her hand squeeze mine.
That was defining “successful” very loosely. It meant that the ship had come back. It didn’t say anything about how many of the crew were alive and well.
We left the museum after that, and didn’t speak much on the way to the upshaft.
The thing in my mind was that what Emma Fother had said to me was true: the human race needed what we prospectors could give them. Needed it a lot. There were hungry people, and Heechee technology probably could make all their lives a lot more tolerable, if prospectors went out and brought samples of it back.
Even if it cost a few lives.
Even if the lives included Klara’s and mine. Did I, I asked myself, want my son—if I ever had a son—to spend his childhood the way I had spent mine?
We dropped off the up-cable at Level Babe and heard voices. I didn’t pay attention to them. I was coming to a resolution in my mind. “Klara,” I said, “listen. Let’s—”
But Klara was looking past my shoulder. “For Christ’s sake!” she said. “Look who’s here!”
And I turned, and there was Shicky fluttering in the air, talking to a girl, and I saw with astonishment that the girl was Willa Forehand. She greeted us, looking both embarrassed and amused.
“What’s going on?” I demanded. “Didn’t you just ship out—like maybe eight hours ago?”
“Ten,” she said.
“Did something go wrong with the ship, so you had to come back?” Klara guessed.
Willa smiled ruefully. “Not a thing. I’ve been there and back. Shortest trip on record so far: I went to the Moon.”
“Earth’s moon?”
“That’s the one.” She seemed to be controlling herself, to keep from laughter. Or tears.
Shicky said consolingly, “They’ll surely give you a bonus, Willa. There was one that went to Ganymede once, and the Corporation divvied up half a million dollars among them.”
She shook her head. “Even I know better than that, Shicky, dear. Oh, they’ll award us something. But it won’t be enough to make a difference. We need more than that.” That was the unusual, and somewhat surprising, thing about the Forehands: it was always “we.” They were clearly a very closely knit family, even if they didn’t like to discuss that fact with outsiders.