Heechee rendezvous (10 page)

This new thing was not.

Walthers moved convulsively. His head touched the mesh. All the sensations became a thousandfold clearer, like the focusing of a lens, and he felt the new and distant presence-or presences?-in a different and immediate way. It was a distant, slippery, chilling sensation, and it did not emanate from anything human. If the sources had depressions or fantasies Walthers could not comprehend them. All he could feel was that they were there. They existed. They did not respond They did not change.

If you could get inside the mind of a corpse, he thought in panic and revulsion, this was how it might feel-

All this in a moment, and then he was aware that Yee-xing was tugging at his arm, shouting in his ear: “Oh, damn you, Walthers! I felt that! So did the captain and everybody on this God-damned ship. Now we’re in trouble!”

As soon as his head came away from the silvery mesh the sensation was gone. The gleaming walls and shadowy machines were real again, with Janie Yee-xing’s furious face thrust into his. In trouble? Walthers found himself laughing. After the chill, slow hell he had just glimpsed, nothing human could seem like trouble. Even when the four-power guard came boiling in, weapons drawn, shouting at them in four languages, Walthers almost welcomed them.

For they were human, and alive.

The question that was digging at his mind was the one that anybody would have asked himself Had he tuned in somehow on the cryptic, hidden Heechee?

If so, he told himself, shuddering, heaven help the human race.

Dreading the Heechee was a popular sport in more places than the S. Ya.

I even did a fair amount of it myself. Everybody did. We did it a lot when I was a kid, though then the Heechee were nothing more than strange vanished creatures that had amused themselves digging tunnels on the planet Venus hundreds of thousands of years before. We did it when I was a Gateway prospector-oh, yes, my God how we did it then! Trusting ourselves to old Heechee ships and scooting around the universe to places no human had ever seen, and always wondering if the owners of the ships would turn up at the end of a trip-and what they would do about it! And we brooded about them even more when we untangled enough of their old sky atlases to discover where they had gone to hide, deep in the core of our own Galaxy.

It did not occur to us, then, to wonder what they were hiding from.

That certainly was not all I did, to be sure. I had plenty of other things to fill my days. There was my steadfast preoccupation with my crotchety health, which forced itself upon my attention whenever it wanted to, and wanted to more often all the time. But that was only the beginning. I was about as busy, with about as many myriad diverse things, as it was possible for a human being to be.

If you looked at any average day in the life of Robin Broadhead, aging tycoon, visiting him at his luxurious country home looking over the broad Tappan Sea just north of New York City, you would find him doing such things as strolling along the riverfront with his lovely wife, Essie ... venturing culinary experiments in the cuisines of Malaya, Iceland, and Ghana in his lavishly equipped kitchen... chatting with his wise data-retrieval system, Albert Einstein... hitting his mail:

“To that youth center in Grenada, let’s see, yeah. Here is the check for three hundred thousand dollars as promised, but please don’t name the center after me. Name it after my wife if you want to, and we will both certainly try to get down there for the opening.

“To Pedro Lammartine, Secretary General, United Nations. Dear Pete. I’m working on the Americans to share data with the Brazilians on finding that terrorist ship, but somebody has to get after the Brazilians. Will you use your influence, please? It’s in everybody’s interest. If the terrorists are not stopped, God knows where we’ll all wind up.

“To Ray McLean, wherever he’s living now. Dear Ray. By all means use our docking facilities in the search for your wife. I wish you all the luck from the heart, etc., etc.

“To Gorman and Ketchin, General Contractors. Dear Sirs. I won’t accept your new completion date of October 1
^st
for my ship. It’s completely unreasonable. You’ve had one extension already, and that’s all you get. I remind you of the heavy penalty charges in the contract if there is any further delay.

“To the President of the United States. Dear Ben. If the terrorist ship is not located and neutralized at once, the peace of the whole Earth is threatened. Not to mention property damage, loss of lives, and everything else that’s at risk. It is an open secret that the Brazilians have developed a direction-finder for signals from a ship in FTL flight and that our own military people have a procedure for FTL navigating that will let them approach it. Can’t they get together? As Commander in Chief, all you have to do is order the High Pentagon to cooperate. There’s lots of pressure on the Brazilians to do their share, but they’re waiting for a sign from us.

“To what’s-his-name, Luqman. Dear Luqman. Thanks for the good news. I think we should move to develop that oil field immediately, so when you come to see me, bring along your plan for production and shipment with cost estimates and a cash-flow capital plan. Every time the S. Ya. comes back empty we’re losing money ...”

And on and on-I kept busy! Had a lot to keep busy with, and that’s not even counting keeping track of my investments and riding herd on my managers. Not that I spent a lot of time on business. I always say that after he’s made his first hundred million or so, anybody who does anything just for the money is insane. You need money, because if you don’t have money you don’t have freedom to do the things that are worth doing. But after you have that freedom, what’s the use of more money? So I left most of the business to my financial programs and the people I hired-except for the ones that I was in not so much for the money as because they were doing something I wanted done.

And yet, if the name Heechee does not appear anywhere in the list of my daily concerns, it was always there. It all came back to the Heechee in the long run. My ship building out in the construction orbits was human-designed and human-built, but most of the construction, and all of the drive and communications systems, were adapted from Heechee designs. The S. Ya., which I was planning to fill with oil on the nearly empty return trips from Peggy’s Planet, was a Heechee artifact; for that matter, Peggy’s was a gift from the Heechee, since they had provided the navigation to find it and the ships to get there in. Essie’s fast-food chain came from the Heechee machines to manufacture CHON-food out of the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in the frozen gases of comets. We’d built some of the food factories on Earth-there was one right now off the shore of Sri Lanka, getting its nitrogen and oxygen from the air, its hydrogen from water out of the Indian Ocean, and its carbon from whatever unfortunate plants, animals, or carbonates slipped through its intake valves. And, now that the Gateway Corporation had so much money to invest that it didn’t know what to do with it all, it was able to invest some wisely-in chartering systematic exploration trips-and as a big shareholder in Gateway, I encouraged them to keep on doing that. Even the terrorists were using a stolen Heechee ship and a stolen Heechee telempathic psychokinetic transceiver to inflict their worst wounds on the world-all Heechee!

It was no wonder that there were fringe religious cults all over the Earth, worshipping the Heechee, for they surely met all the objective tests of divinity. They were capricious, powerful-and invisible. There were times when I myself felt very nearly tempted, in those long nights when my gut was hurting and things didn’t seem to be going right, to sneak a little prayer to Our Father Who Wert in the Core. It couldn’t hurt anything, could it?

Well, yes, it could. It could hurt my self-respect. And for all of us human beings, in this tantalizing, abundant Galaxy the Heechee had given us-but only a dab at a time-self-respect was getting harder and harder to keep.

Of course, I had not then actually met a real, live Heechee.

I had not yet met any, but one who was going to be a big part of my later life (I won’t quibble over the terminology anymore!), namely Captain, was halfway to the breakout point where normal space began and meanwhile, on the £ Ya., Audee Walthers was getting his ass royally reamed and beginning to think that he should not plan for much of a future working on that ship; and meanwhile- Well, as always, there were a lot of meanwhiles, but the one that would have interested Audee the most was that meanwhile, his errant wife was beginning to wish she hadn’t erred.

Eloping with a lunatic was not, on balance, very much better than being bored out of her mind in Port Hegramet. It was different, oh, heavens, yes, it was different! But parts of it were equally boring, and parts of it simply scared her to death. Since the ship was a Five there was room for the two of them-or should have been. Since Wan was young, and rich, and almost, in a way, handsome-if you looked at him the right way- the trip should have been lively enough. Neither of those was true.

And besides, there were the scary parts.

If there was one thing every human being knew about space, it was that black holes were meant to be stayed away from. Not by Wan. He sought them out. And then he did worse than that.

What the gidgets and gadgets were that Wan played with Dolly did not know. When she asked, he wouldn’t answer. When, wheedling, she put one of her puppets on her hand and asked through its mouth, he scowled and frowned and said, “If you are going to do your act do something funny and dirty, not ask questions that are none of your business.” When she tried to find out why they were none of her business, she was more successful. She didn’t get a straight answer. But from the bluster and confusion with which Wan responded it was easy to figure out they were stolen.

And they had something to do with black holes. And, although Dolly was almost positive that she had heard, once, that there was no way in or out of a black hole, she was also almost positive that what Wan was trying to do was to find some certain black hole and then to go into it. That was the scary part.

And when she wasn’t scared half out of her young mind, she was bone-crackingly lonesome, for Captain Juan Henriquette Santos-Schmitz, the dashing and eccentric young multimillionaire whose exploits still titillated the readers of gossip services, was rotten company. After three weeks in his presence, Dolly could hardly stand the sight of him.

Although she admitted to herself, trembling, that the sight of him was a lot less worrisome than the sight she was actually looking at.

What Dolly was looking at was a black hole. Or not really at the hole itself, for you could look at that all day and not see anything; black holes were black because they could not be seen at all. She was actually seeing a spiraling aurora of bluish, violetish light, unpleasant for the eyes even through the viewing plate over the control panel. It would have been far more unpleasant to be exposed to. That light was only the iceberg tip of a flood of lethal radiation. Their ship was armored against such things, and so far the armor had easily held. But Wan was not within the armor. He was down in the lander, where he had tools and technologies that she did not understand, and that he refused to explain. And she knew that at some time, in some such situation, she would be sitting in the main ship and would feel the little lurch that meant the lander had disengaged. And then he would be venturing even closer to one of these terrible objects! And what would happen to him then? Or to her? Not that she would go with him, certainly! But if he died, and left her alone, a hundred lightyears from anything she knew-what then?

She heard an angry mumble and knew that at least that time was not now. The hatch opened and Wan crawled out of the lander, wrathful. “Another empty one!” he snarled at her, as though he were holding her accountable for it.

And, of course, he was. She tried to look sympathetic rather than scared. “Aw, honey, what a pity. That makes three of them.”

“Three! Huh! Three with you along, you mean. More than that in all, indeed!” His tone was scornful, but she didn’t mind the scorn. It was drowned in the relief when he slipped past her. Dolly moved inconspicuously as far away from the control board as she could-not far, in a Heechee ship that would have fit readily into a good-sized living room. As he sat down and consulted his electronic oracles she kept silent.

When Wan talked to his Dead Men he did not invite Dolly to take part. If he conducted his end of the conversation in words she could at least hear that half of it. If he tapped out instructions on his keyboard she did not have even that much. But this time she could figure it out easily enough. He punched out his questions, scowled at what one of the Dead Men said in his earphones, punched out a correction, and then set up a course on the Heechee board. Then he took the headphones off, scowled, stretched, and turned to Dolly. “All right,” he said, “come, you can pay another installment on your passage.”

“Why, sure, honey,” she said obligingly, though it would have been so very much nicer if he didn’t always have to put it like that. But her spirits were a little higher. She felt the tiny suggestion of a lurch that meant that the spacecraft was starting off on another trip, and indeed, the great blue and violet horror on the screen was already dwindling away. That made up for a lot!

Of course, it only meant they were on their way to the next one.