Heechee rendezvous (29 page)

“Please be still!” cried Wan, appearing disheveled and irritated from his bunk. “I cannot sleep with all this foolish yelling~”

“We weren’t yelling, Wan,” Klara said peaceably.

‘Weren’t yelling!” he yelled. “Mali!” He stomped over to the pilot seat and sat down, fists clenched on his thighs, shoulders hunched, glowering at her. “What if I want something to eat now?” he demanded.

“Do you?”

He shook his head. “Or what if I wanted to make love?”

“Do you?”

“Do I, do I! It is always an argument with you! And you are not really a very good cook and, also, in bed you are far less interesting than you claimed. Dolly was better.”

Klara found she was holding her breath, and forced herself to release it slowly and silently. She could not force herself to smile.

Wan grinned, pleased to see that he bad scored on her. “You remember Dolly?” he went on jovially. “That was the one you persuaded me to abandon on Gateway. There they have the rule of no pay, no breathe, and she had no money. I wonder if she is still alive.”

“She’s still alive,” gritted Klara, hoping it was true. But Dolly would always find someone to pay her bills. ‘Wan?” she began, desperate to change the subject before it got worse. ‘What do those yellow flashes on the screen mean? The Dead Men don’t seem to know.”

“No one knows. If the Dead Men do not know, is it not foolish to think I would know? You are very foolish sometimes,” he complained. And in the very nick of time, just as Klara was reaching the boiling point, the thin voice of the female Dead Man came again:

“Setting twenty-three, eighty-four, ninety-seven, eight, fourteen.”

‘What?” said Klara, startled.

“Setting twenty-three-“ The voice repeated the numbers. “What’s that?” Klara asked, and Wan took it upon himself to answer. His position had not changed, but the expression on his face was different
less hostile. More strained. More fearful.

“It is a chart setting, to be sure,” he said.

“Showing what?”

He looked away. “Set it and find out,” he said.

It was difficult for Klara to operate the knurled wheels, for in all her previous experience such ~n act was tantamount to suicide: the chart-displaying function had not been learned, and a change in the settings almost invariably meant an unpredictable, and usually fatal, change in course. But all that happened was that the images on the screen flickered and whirled, and steadied to show-what? A star? Or a black hole? Whatever it was, it was bright cadmium yellow on the screen, and around it flickered no fewer than five of the upside-down question marks. “What is it?” she demanded.

Wan turned slowly to stare at it. “It is very big,” he said, “and very far away. And it is where we are going now.” All that combativeness was gone from his face now. Klara almost wished it were back, for what had replaced it was naked, unrelieved fear.

And meanwhile- Meanwhile, the task of Captain and his Heechee crew was nearing the end of its first phase, though it brought no joy to any of them. Captain was still grieving for Twice. Her slim, sallow, shiny body, emptied of personality, had been disposed of. At home it would have gone to join the other refuse in the settling tanks, for the Heechee were not sentimental about cadavers. On shipboard there were no settling tanks, so it had been jettisoned into space. The part of Twice that remained was in store with the rest of the ancestral minds, and as Captain roamed about his new and unfamiliar ship he touched the pouch where she was stored from time to time without knowing that he did it.

It was not just the personal loss. Twice was their drone controller, and the cleanup job could not be done properly without her. Mongrel was doing her best, but she was not primarily an operator of enslaved equipment. Captain, standing nervously over her, was not helping much. “Don’t kill your thrust yet, that’s no stable orbit!” he hissed, and, “I hope those people don’t get motion sickness, the way you’re jerking them around.” Mongrel pulsed her jaw muscles but did not respond. She knew why Captain was so tense and withdrawn.

But at last he was satisfied and tapped Mongrel on the shoulder to signify that she could discharge cargo. The great bubble lurched and revolved. A line of dark appeared from pole to pole, and it opened like a flower. Mongrel, hissing with satisfaction at last, disengaged the crumpled sailship and allowed it to slide free.

“They got a rough ride,” commented the communications officer, coming over to stand beside his captain.

Captain twitched his abdomen, in the Heechee equivalent of a shrug.

The sailship was quite clear of the opened sphere now, and Mongrel began to close the great hemisphere. “What about your own task, Shoe? Are the human beings still chattering?”

“More than ever, I’m afraid.”

“Massed minds! Have you made any progress in translating what they’re yelling about?”

“The minds are working on it.” Captain nodded gloomily and reached for the eight-sided medallion clipped to the pouch between his legs. He stopped himself barely in time. The satisfaction he might gain from asking the minds how they were getting along with the translation would not justify the pain of hearing Twice among them. Sooner or later he would hear her, necessarily. Not yet.

He blew air through his nostrils and addressed Mongrel. “Button it up, power it down, let it float there. We can’t do any better than that for now. Shoe! Transmit a message to them. Tell them we’re sorry we can’t fix them up any better right now but we’ll try to come back. White-Noise!

Plot all vessels in space for me.”

The navigator nodded, turned to his instruments, and in a moment the screen filled with a whirling mass of yellow-tailed comets. The color of the nucleus indicated distance, the length of the tail velocity. “Which one is the fool with the corkscrew?” Captain demanded, and the screen contracted its field to show one particular comet. Captain hissed in astonishment. That particular ship, last time he looked, had been safely moored in its home system. Now it was traveling at very high velocity indeed, and had left its home far behind. “Where is he going?” he demanded.

White-Noise twitched his corded face muscles. “It’ll take a minute, Captain.”

“Well, do it!”

Under other circumstances, White-Noise might have taken offense at Captain’s tone. Heechee did not talk uncivilly to each other. The circumstances, however, were not to be ignored. The fact that these upstart humans were in possession of black-hole-piercing equipment was terribly frightening in itself. The knowledge that they were filling the air with their loud, foolish communications was worse. Who knew what they would do next? And the death of a shipmate was the final straw, making this trip just about the worst since those long-ago days, before White-Noise had been born, when they learned of the existence of the others

“It doesn’t make sense,” White-Noise complained. “There’s nothing along their course that I can see.”

Captain scowled at the cryptic graphics on the screen. Reading them was a task for a specialist~. but Captain had to have a smattering of everyone’s skills and he could see that along the plotted geodesic there was nothing in reasonable range. “What about that globular cluster?” he demanded.

“I don’t think so, Captain. It’s not directly in line of flight, and there’s nothing there. Nothing at all, really, all the way to the edge of the Galaxy.”

“Minds!” said a voice from behind them. Captain turned. The black-hole piercer, Burst, was standing there, and all his muscles were rippling madly. The man’s fear communicated itself to Captain even before Burst said tightly:

“Extend the geodesic.” White-Noise looked at him uncomprehendingly. “Extend it! Outside the Galaxy!”

The navigator started to object, then caught his meaning. His own muscles were twitching as he obeyed. The screen flickered. The fuzzed yellow line extended itself. It passed through regions where there was nothing else on the screen at all, undiluted black space, empty.

Not quite empty.

A deep-blue object emerged from the darkness of the screen, paling and yellowing. It was quintuply flagged. There was a hiss from every member of the crew as it steadied, and stopped, and the fuzzy yellow geodesic reached out to touch it.

The Heechee looked at each other, and not one of them had a word to say. The one ship that could do the greatest damage one could imagine was on its way to the place where the damage was waiting to be done.

The High Pentagon isn’t exactly a satellite in geostationary orbit. It’s five satellites in geostationary orbit. The orbits are not precisely identical, so all five of these armored, pulse-hardened chunks of metal waltz around each other. First Alpha’s on the outside and Delta’s nearest the Earth, then they swing awhile and it’s Epsilon that’s facing out and maybe Gamma that’s inboard, swing your partners, do-si-do, and so on. Why, one might ask, did they do it that way instead of just building one big one? Well, one is answered, five satellites are five times as hard to hit as one satellite. Also, I personally think, because both the Soviet Orbit Tyuratam and the Peep-China command post are single structures. Naturally the U. S. of A. wanted to show that they could do the job better. Or at least different. It all dated from the time of the wars. At one time, they said, it had been the very latest in defense. Its huge nuke-fueled lasers were supposed to be able to zap any enemy missile from fifty thousand miles away. Probably they indeed could-when they were built-and for maybe three months after that, until the other fellows began using the same pulse-hardening and radar-decoy tricks and everybody was back to Go. Unfortunately they all “went,” but that’s a whole other story.

So we never saw four-fifths of the Pentagon, except on our screens. The hunk they vectored us in on was the one that held crew quarters, administration-and the brig. That was Gamma, sixty thousand tons of metal and meat, about the size of the Great Pyramid and pretty much the same shape, and we found out right away that no matter how open-handed General Manzbergen had been back on Earth, here in orbit we were about as welcome as a cold sore. For one thing, they kept us waiting for permission to unseal. “Suppose they must have been hard-hit in the minute madness,” Essie speculated, scowling at the viewscreen, which showed nothing but the metal flank of Gamma.

“That’s no excuse,” I said, and Albert chipped in his two cents’ worth:

“They were not hit so hard but that they were ready to hit much harder, I’m afraid. I have seen too much war; I do not like such things.” He was fingering his Two Percent button and acting, for a hologram, rather nervous. What he said was true enough. A couple weeks earlier, when the terrorists had zapped everybody from space with their TPT, the whole station had gone crazy for a minute. Literally one minute; it was no more than that. And a good thing it was no longer, because in that one minute eight of the eleven duty stations that had to be manned in order to aim a proton beam at terrestrial cities were in fact manned. And raring to go.

That wasn’t what was troubling Essie. “Albert,” she said, “do not play games that make me nervous. You have not in fact seen any war, ever. You are only a program.”

He bowed. “As you say, Mrs. Broadhead. Please? I have just received permission for us to unseal and you may enter the satellite.”

So we entered, with Essie looking thoughtfully over her shoulder at the program we left behind. The ensign waiting for us did not seem enthusiastic. He ran his thumb over the ship’s data chip as though he were trying to make sure the magnetic ink didn’t come off. “Yeah,” he said, “we got a signal about you. Only thing, I’m not sure if the brigadier can see you now, sir.”

“It was not a brigadier we wished to see,” Essie explained sweetly, “simply a Mrs. Dolly Walthers, whom you are holding here.”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. But Brigadier Cassata has to sign your pass, and right now we’re all pretty busy.” He excused himself to whisper into a phone, then looked happier. “If you’ll just come with me, sir and ma’am,” he said, and conducted us out of the port at last.

You lose the habit of maneuvering in low-G or zero-G if you don’t practice it, and I was long out of practice. Also I was rubbernecking. All this was new to my experience. Gateway is an asteroid, tunneled out by the Heechee long ago and every interior surface lined by them with their favorite blue-glowing metal. The Food Factory, Heechee Heaven, and all of the other large structures I had visited in space were also Heechee construction. It was confusing for me to be for the first time in a very large human-made space artifact. It seemed more alien than anything Heechee. No familiar blue glow, just painted steel. No spindle-shaped chamber at the core. No prospectors looking sick-scared or triumphant, no museum collections of bits and pieces of Heechee technology found here and there around the Galaxy. What there was plenty of was military personnel in skintights and, for some reason, crash helmets. The curiousest thing of all was that although every one of them wore a weapons holster, all the holsters were empty.

I slowed down to point this out to Essie. “Looks like they don’t trust their own people,” I commented.

She shook me by the collar and pointed ahead, where the ensign was waiting. “Do not talk against hosts, Robin, not until are behind their backs, anyway. Here. This must be place.”

Not a minute too soon; I was beginning to run out of breath with the exertion of puffing myself along a zero-G corridor. “Right inside, sir and ma’am,” said the ensign hospitably, and of course we did as he said.