I found that I was holding my chest, as though the metaphor were real. I spat on the end of the cigarette to put it out and folded it into a disposal bag. Little crumbs of ash were floating around where I had flicked them without thinking, but I didn’t feel like chasing them. I watched the big mottled crescent of the planet swing into view in the corner of the screen, admiring it as an art object: yellowish green on the daylight side of the terminator, an amorphous black that obscured the stars on the rest of it. You could see where the outer, thinner stretches of the atmosphere began by the few bright stars that peeped twinklingly through it, but most of it was so dense that nothing came through. Of course, there was no question of landing on it. Even if it had a solid surface, it would be buried under so much dense gas that we could never survive there. The Corporation was talking about designing a special lander that could penetrate the air of a Jupiter-like planet, and maybe someday they would; but not in time to help us now.
Klara was still in the toilet.
I stretched my sling across the cabin, pulled myself into it, put down my head, and went to sleep.
Four days later they were back. Empty.
Dred and Ham Tayeh were glum, dirty, and irritable; Sam Kahane looked quite cheerful. I wasn’t fooled by it; if he had found anything worth having they would have let us know by radio. But I was curious. “What’s the score, Sam?”
“Batting zero,” he said. “It’s just rock, couldn’t get a flicker of anything worth going down for. But I have an idea.”
Klara came up beside me, looking curiously at Sam. I was looking at the other two; they looked as though they knew what Sam’s idea was, and didn’t like it.
“You know,” he said, “that star’s a binary.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“I put the scanners to work. You’ve seen that big blue baby out—” He looked around, then grinned. “Well, I don’t know which direction it is now, but it was near the planet when we first took the pictures. Anyway, it looked close, so I put the scanners on it, and they gave a proper motion I couldn’t believe. It has to be binary with the primary here, and not more than half a light-year away.”
“It could be a wanderer, Sam,” said Ham Tayeh. “I told you that. Just a star that passes in the night.”
Kahane shrugged. “Even so. It’s close.”
Klara put in, “Any planets?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Wait a minute—there it is, I think.”
We all looked toward the viewscreen. There was no question which star Kahane was talking about. It was brighter than Sirius as seen from Earth, minus-two magnitude at least.
Klara said gently, “That’s interesting, and I hope I don’t know what you’re thinking, Sam. Half a light-year is at best maybe two years’ travel time at top lander speed, even if we had the fuel for it. Which we don’t, boys.”
“I know that,” Sam insisted, “but I’ve been thinking. If we could just give a little nudge on the main capsule drive—”
I astounded myself by shouting, “Stop that!” I was shaking all over. I couldn’t stop. Sometimes it felt like terror, and sometimes it felt like rage. I think if I had had a gun in my hand at that moment I could have shot Sam without a thought.
Klara touched me to calm me down. “Sam,” she said, quite gently for her, “I know how you feel.” Kahane had come up empty on five straight trips. “I bet it’s possible to do that.”
He looked astonished, suspicious and defensive, all at once. “You do?”
“I mean, I can imagine that if we were Heechee in this ship, instead of the human clods we really are—why, then, we’d know what we were doing. We’d come out here and look around and say, ‘Oh, hey, look, our friends here—‘ or, you know, whatever it was that was here when they set a course for this place—‘our friends must’ve moved. They’re not home anymore.’ And then we’d say, ‘Oh, well, what the hell, let’s see if they’re next door.’ And we’d push this thing here and this one there, and then we’d zap right over to that big blue one—” She paused and looked at him, still holding my arm. “Only we’re not Heechee, Sam.”
“Christ, Klara! I know that. But there has to be a way—”
She nodded. “There sure does, but we don’t know what it is. What we know, Sam, is that no ship ever has changed its course settings and come back to tell about it. Remember that? Not one.”
He didn’t answer her directly; he only stared at the big blue star in the viewscreen and said: “Let’s vote on it.”
The vote, of course, was four to one against changing the settings on the course board, and Ham Tayeh never got from in between Sam and the board until we had passed light-speed on the way home.
The trip back to Gateway was no longer than the trip out, but it seemed like forever.
17
It feels as if Sigfrid’s air conditioning isn’t working again, but I don’t mention it to him. He will only report that the temperature is exactly 22.50 Celsius, as it always has been, and ask why I express mental pain as being too hot physically. Of that crap I am very tired.
“In fact,” I say out loud, “I am altogether tired of you, Siggy.”
“I’m sorry, Rob. But I would appreciate it if you would tell me a little more about your dream.”
“Oh, shit.” I loosen the restraining straps because they are uncomfortable. This also disconnects some of Sigfrid’s monitoring devices, but for once he doesn’t point that out to me. “It’s a pretty boring dream. We’re in the ship. We come to a planet that stares at me, like it had a human face. I can’t see the eyes very well because of the eyebrows, but somehow or other I know that it’s crying, and it’s my fault.”
“Do you recognize that face, Rob?”
“No idea. Just a face. Female, I think.”
“Do you know what she is crying about?”
“Not really, but I’m responsible for it, whatever it is. I’m sure of that.”
Pause. Then: “Would you mind putting the straps back on, Rob?”
My guard is suddenly up. “What’s the matter,” I sneer bitterly, “do you think I’m going to leap off the pad and assault you?”
“No, Robbie, of course I don’t think that. But I’d be grateful if you would do it.”
I begin to do it, slowly and unwillingly. “What, I wonder, is the gratitude of a computer program worth?”
He does not answer that, just outwaits me. I let him win that and say: “All right, I’m back in the straitjacket, now what are you going to say that’s going to make me need restraint?”
“Why,” he says, “probably nothing like that, Robbie. I just am wondering why you feel responsible for the girl in the planet crying?”
“I wish I knew,” I say, and that’s the truth as I see it.
“I know some reality things you do blame yourself for, Robbie,” he says. “One of them is your mother’s death.”
I agreed. “I suppose so, in some silly way.”
“And I think you feel quite guilty about your lover, Gelle-Klara Moynlin.”
I thrash about a little. “It is fucking hot in here,” I complain.
“Do you feel that either of them actively blamed you?”
“How the fuck would I know?”
“Perhaps you can remember something they said?”
“No, I can’t!” He is getting very personal, and I want to keep this on an objective level, so I say: “I grant that I have a definite tendency toward loading responsibility on myself. It’s a pretty classic pattern, after all, isn’t it? You can find me on page two hundred and seventy-seven of any of the texts.”
He humors me by letting me get impersonal for a moment. “But on the same page, Rob,” he says, “it probably points out that the responsibility is self-inflicted. You do it to yourself, Robbie.”
“No doubt.”
“You don’t have to accept any responsibility you don’t want to.”
“Certainly not. I want to.”
He asks, almost offhandedly, “Can you get any idea of why that is? Why you want to feel that everything that goes wrong is your responsibility?”
“Oh, shit, Sigfrid,” I say in disgust, “your circuits are whacko again. That’s not the way it is at all. It’s more—well, here’s the thing. When I sit down to the feast of life, Sigfrid, I’m so busy planning on how to pick up the check, and wondering what the other people will think of me for paying it, and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay the bill, that I don’t get around to eating.”