By the time I finally got into the toilet, the emergency didn’t seem as emergent; and when I came out Klara was alone in the capsule, checking star images with the theodolitic camera. She turned to regard me, then nodded. “You’re looking a little less green,” she said approvingly.
“I’ll live; Where are the boys?”
“Where would they be? They’re down in the lander. Dred thinks maybe we should split things up so you and I get the lander to ourselves part of the time while they’re up here, then we come up here and they take it.”
“Hmm.” That sounded pretty nice; actually, I’d been wondering how we were going to work out anything like privacy. “Okay. What do you want me to do now?”
She reached over and gave me an absentminded kiss. “Just stay out of the way. Know what? We look like we’re going almost toward straight Galactic North.”
I received that information with the weighty consideration of ignorance. Then I said, “Is that good?”
She grinned. “How can you tell?” I lay back and watched her. If she was as frightened as I was, and I had little doubt she was, she certainly was not letting it show.
I began wondering what was toward Galactic North—and, more important, how long it would take us to get there.
The shortest trip to another star system on record was eighteen days. That was Barnard’s Star, and it was a bust, nothing there. The longest, or anyway the longest anybody knows of so far—who knows how many ships containing dead prospectors are still on their way back from, maybe, M-31 in Andromeda? — was a hundred and seventy-five days each way. They did come back dead. Hard to tell where they were. The pictures they took didn’t show much, and the prospectors themselves, of course, were no longer in condition to say.
When you start out it’s pretty scary even for a veteran. You know you’re accelerating. You don’t know how long the acceleration will last. When you hit turnaround you can tell. First thing, you know formally because that golden coil in every Heechee ship flickers a little bit. (No one knows why.) But you know that you’re turning around even without looking, because the little pseudo-grav that had been dragging you toward the back of the ship now starts dragging you toward the front. Bottom becomes top.
Why didn’t the Heechee just turn their ships around in midflight, so as to use the same propulsive thrust for both acceleration and deceleration? I wouldn’t know. You’d have to be a Heechee to know that.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that all their viewing equipment seems to be in front. Maybe it’s because the front part of the ship is always heavily armored, even in the lightweight ships against, I guess, the impact of stray molecules of gas or dust. But some of the bigger ships, a few Threes and almost all the Fives, are armored all over. They don’t turn around either.
So, anyway, when the coil flickers and you feel the turnaround, you know you’ve done one-quarter of your actual travel time. Not necessarily a quarter of your total out-time, of course. How long you stay at your destination is another matter entirely. You make up your own mind about that. But you’ve gone half of the automatically controlled trip out.
So you multiply the number of days elapsed so far by four, and if that number is less than the number of days your life-support capability is good for, then you know that at least you don’t have to starve to death. The difference between the two numbers is how long you can hang around at destination.
Your basic ration, food, water, air replenishment, is for two hundred fifty days. You can stretch it to three hundred without much trouble (you just come back skinny, and maybe with a few deficiency diseases). So if you get up to sixty or sixty-five days on the outbound leg without turnaround, then you know you may be having a problem, and you begin eating lighter. If you get up to eighty or ninety, then your problem solves itself, because you don’t have any options anymore, you’re going to die before you get back. You could try changing the course settings. But that’s just another way of dying, as far as can be told from what the survivors say.
Presumably the Heechee could change course when they wanted to, but how they did it is one of those great unanswered questions about the Heechee, like why did they tidy everything up before they left? Or what did they look like? Or where did they go?
There used to be a jokey kind of book they sold at the fairs when I was a kid. It was called Everything We Know About the Heechee. It had a hundred and twenty-eight pages, and they were all blank.
If Sam and Dred and Mohamad were gay, and I had no reason to doubt it, they didn’t show much of it in the first few days. They followed their own interests. Reading. Listening to music tapes with earphones. Playing chess and, when they could talk Klara and me into it, Chinese poker. We didn’t play for money, we played for shift time. (After a couple of days Klara said it was more like winning to lose, because if you lost you had more to occupy your time.) They were quite benignly tolerant of Klara and me, the oppressed heterosexual minority in the dominantly homosexual culture that occupied our ship, and gave us the lander an exact fifty percent of the time even though we comprised only forty percent of the population.
We got along. It was good that we did. We were living in each other’s shadow and stink every minute.
The inside of a Heechee ship, even a Five, is not much bigger than an apartment kitchen. The lander gives you a little extra space—add on the equivalent of a fair-sized closet—but on the outleg at least that’s usually filled with supplies and equipment. And from that total available cubage, say forty-two or forty-three cubic meters, subtract what else goes into it besides me and thee and the other prospectors.
When you’re in tau space, you have a steady low thrust of acceleration. It isn’t really acceleration, it is only a reluctance of the atoms of your body to exceed c, and it can as well be described as friction as gravity. But it feels like a little gravity. You feel as though you weighed about two kilos.
This means you need something to rest in when you are resting, and so each person in your crew has a personal folding sling that opens out and wraps around you to sleep in, or folds to become a sort of a chair. Add to that each person’s own personal space: cupboards for tapes and disks and clothing (you don’t wear much of that); for toilet articles; for pictures of the near and dear (if any); for whatever you have elected to bring, up to your total allowance of weight and bulk (75 kilograms, % of a cubic meter); and you have a certain amount of crowding already.
Add onto that the original Heechee equipment of the ship. Three-quarters of that you will never use. Most of it you wouldn’t know how to use if you had to; what you do with it, most of all, is leave it alone. But you can’t remove it. Heechee machinery is integrally designed. If you amputate a piece of it, it dies.
Perhaps if we knew how to heal the wound we could take out some of the junk and the ship would operate anyway. But we don’t, and so it stays: the great diamond-shaped golden box that explodes if you try to open it; the flimsy spiral of golden tubing that, from time to time, glows, and even more often, becomes unneighborly hot (no one knows why, exactly) and so on. It all stays there, and you bump against it all the time.
Add on to that the human equipment. The spacesuits: one apiece, fitted to your form and figure. The photographic equipment. The toilet and bath installations. The food-preparing section. The waste disposers. The test kits, the weapons, the drills, the sample boxes, the entire rig that you take down to the surface of the planet with you, if you happen to be lucky enough to reach a planet you can land on.
What you have left is not very much. It is a little like living for weeks on end under the hood of a very large truck, with the engine going, and with four other people competing for space.
After the first two days I developed an unreasoning prejudice against Ham Tayeh. He was too big. He took more than his fair share.
To be truthful, Ham wasn’t even as tall as I was, though he weighed more. But I didn’t mind the amount of space I took up. I only minded when other people got in the way of it. Sam Kahane was a better size, no more than a hundred and sixty centimeters, with stiff black beard and coarse crinkled hair all up his abdomen over his cache-sexe to his chest, and all up and down his back as well. I didn’t think of Sam as violating my living space until I found a long, black beard hair in my food. Ham at least was almost hairless, with a soft golden skin that made him look like a Jordanian harem eunuch. (Did the Jordanian kings have eunuchs in their harems? Did they have harems? Ham didn’t seem to know much about that; his parents had lived in New Jersey for three generations.)