Heechee Rendezvous Part 9

She was asleep when her dreams were interrupted by the hating, fearing, obsessed stab of Wan's troubled mind through the TPT, and no more than half awake when he flung himself back into the main cabin and stood over her. "A person!" he gabbled, his eyes blinking wildly as sweat streamed into them from his forehead. "Now I must reach inside!"

And meanwhile, I was dreaming of a deep, steep gravitational hole and a treasure concealed in it. While Wan was deploying his stolen gadgets, sweating with terror, I was sweating with pain. While Dolly was staring wonderingly at the great ghostly blue object on her screen, I was staring at the same object. She had never seen it before. I had. I had a picture of it over my bed, and I had taken that picture at a time when I hurt even more and was even more disoriented. I tried to sit up, and Essie's strong, gentle hand pushed me back. "Are still on life-support systems, Robin," she scolded. "Must not move around too much!"

I was in the little hospice chamber we had built onto the house at Tappan Sea, when it began to seem too much trouble to go to some clinic every time one of us needed repairs. "How did I get here?" I managed.

"By airplane, how else?" She leaned past me to study something on the screen over my head and nodded.

"I've had the operation," I deduced. "That son of a b.i.t.c.h Albert knocked me out. You flew me home while I was still under."

"How clever! Yes. Is all over. Doctor says you are healthy peasant pig and will recover quickly," she went on, "only with bellyache continuing awhile because of two point three meters new intestine. Eat now. Then sleep some more."

I leaned back while Essie fussed with the chef program and stared at the holopic. It was put there to remind me, no matter how unpleasant the tinkering that was going on to keep me alive, that there had been times far more unpleasant still, but that wasn't what it was reminding me of. What it was reminding me of was a woman I had lost. I will not say I had not thought of her for years, because that would be untrue. I thought of her often-but as a remote memory, and now I was thinking of her as a person. "Time now," Essie-caroled merrily, "for nouris.h.i.+ng fish broth!" By G.o.d, she wasn't fooling; that was what it was, nauseous-smelling but, she said, laced with all the things I needed and could tolerate in my present condition. And meanwhile, Wan was fis.h.i.+ng in the black hole with the clever and complicated machinery of the Heechee; and meanwhile, it had just occurred to me that the sickening stuff I was eating was laden with more than medicine; and meanwhile, the clever machinery was performing a separate task Wan did not know about; and meanwhile, I forced myself awake enough to ask Essie how long I had been asleep, and how much longer I could expect to be, and she was saying, "Quite some time, both ways, dear Robin," and then I was asleep again.

The separate task was notification, for of all the Heechee artifacts the disruptor of order in aligned systems was the one the Heechee worried about most. Improperly used, they feared, it could disrupt their own order decisively and nastily, and so each one had a built-in alarm.

When you fear that somebody may sneak up on you in the dark you set snares-a dragline of clas.h.i.+ng tin pans on a tripcord, or a b.o.o.bytrap to crash down on an intruder's head, whatever. And there is no greater dark than the dark between the stars, so the Heechee set up their early-warning sentinels. The snares the Heechee had set were numerous, supple, and very, very loud. When Wan deployed his corkscrew it was signaled at once, and at once was when Captain's communications officer reported it to him. "The alien has done it," he said, muscles writhing, and Captain uttered a biological expletive. In translation it would not sound like much to a human being, because it referred to the act of s.e.xual coupling at a time when the female was not in love. Captain didn't say it for its technical meaning. He said it because it was violently obscene, and because nothing less would relieve his feelings. When he saw that Twice started nervously as she leaned to her remote-control board he was instantly contrite.

Captain had the most worries, because he was Captain, but it was Twice who had most of the work. She was operating three remotes at once: the command s.h.i.+p they were about to transfer to, the cargo hauler for hiding the sails.h.i.+p away, and a special drone in the Earth planetary system commanded to survey all transmissions and locate all s.p.a.ceborne artifacts. And she was in no condition for any of this. The time of loving had come on her, steroids flowed briskly through her wiry veins, the biological program was running, and her body had ripened for its job. Not just her body. Twice's personality ripened, too, and softened. The strain of trying to guide her drones with a body and nervous system that was tuned for a season of preoccupying s.e.xual coupling was torture. Captain leaned toward her. "Are you all right?" he asked. She didn't answer. That was answer enough.

He sighed and turned to the next problem. "Well, Shoe?"

The communications officer looked almost as distraught as Twice. "A few conceptual correspondences have been established, Captain," he reported. "But the translation program is very far from complete."

Captain twitched his cheek muscles. Was there any unexpected, illogical thing that could go wrong that had not gone wrong already? These communications.-not only was it dangerous that they could exist in the first place, but they were in several languages! Several! Not just two, as was right and proper in the Heechee scheme of things. Not just The Language of Do and The Language of Feel, as the Heechee themselves spoke, but in literally scores of mutually incomprehensible tongues. It might have eased the pain of hearing this endless blab of chatter i1 at least, he had been able to find out what they were saying.

So many worries and problems! Not just the visible sight of Twice getting weaker and more erratic every hour, not just the terrible shock of knowing that some non-Heechee creature was activating the mechanisms that could pierce a black hole; the biggest worry for Captain was whether or not he was capable of dealing with all these consequential challenges. Meanwhile, there was a job to be done. They located the sails.h.i.+p and homed in on it, no problem. They dispatched a message to its crew but, wisely, did not wait for an answer. The command s.h.i.+p, wakened out of its millennia-long powered-down sleep, turned up on schedule. They transferred themselves, lock to lock, to the bigger, more powerful vessel. That, too, was almost no problem, though Twice, gasping and whimpering as she raced from board to board, was slow in taking over her remote-command functions in the new s.h.i.+p. No harm done, though. And the lumbering cargo bubble also appeared where it was supposed to, and even when.

The whole process took nearly twelve hours. For Twice, they were hours of unremitting toil. Captain had less to do, which left him plenty of time to keep an eye on her. He watched her coppery skin turn purple with unfulfilled amorousness even while it was darkening with fatigue. It worried him. They had been so unready for all these challenges! If they had known there was going to be an emergency, he could easily have s.h.i.+pped an extra drone operator to share Twice's burden. If they had dreamed it would be necessary, they could have taken a command vessel in the first place and spared the strain of changing s.h.i.+ps. If they had thought-if they had suspected-If they had had any intimation at all- But they hadn't. Really, how could they? Even by galactic time it had been only a few decades since the last peek outside the hiding place at the core-only a wink in astronomical time, and how could anyone have believed that so much could happen in it?

Captain rummaged through food packets until he found the tastiest and easiest to digest, and fed them affectionately to Twice at her board. She had little appet.i.te. Her movements were slower, less sure, more difficult for her every hour. But she was getting the job done. When at last the photon s.h.i.+p's sails had been furled, the great maw of the bubble vessel was open, the mothlike capsule that carried the sails.h.i.+p pa.s.sengers slipping slowly into the bubble, Captain began to breathe freely again. For Twice, at least, that was the hardest part of what they would have to do. Now she would have a chance to rest-maybe even a chance to do, with him, what her body and soul were overready to do.

Because the sails.h.i.+p people had responded to his message instantly- for them it was instantly-their reply came before the great gleaming sphere had closed on them. The communications officer, Shoe, keyed his screen and the message appeared: We accept that we must not complete our voyage.

We request that you convey us to a place where we will be safe.

We query: Are the a.s.sa.s.sins returning?

The Heechee left only small scout s.h.i.+ps for human beings to discover; they were careful not to leave their special-purpose s.p.a.cecraft where they were easily located. For example, the bubble transport. This was nothing more than a hollow metal sphere fitted with faster-than-light drive and navigation equipment. The Heechee apparently used it to move bulk materials from place to place; the human race could have used it very well indeed. Each bubble transport could hold the equivalent of a thousand S. Ya.-cla.s.s transports. Ten of them could have solved Earth's population problem in a decade.

Captain shrugged with sympathy. To Shoe he said, "Transmit to them: 'We are returning you to your home system for the time being. If possible, we will bring you back here later.'"

Shoe's expression was strained, with a mixture of emotions. "What about their query about the a.s.sa.s.sins?"

Captain felt a quick shudder in his abdomen. "Tell them not yet," he said.

But it was not the fear of the other ones that was uppermost in Captain's mind, not even his concern for Twice. The Heechee shared with the human race an astonis.h.i.+ng number of traits: curiosity, male-female love, family solidarity, devotion to children, a pleasure in the manipulation of symbols. The magnitude of the shared traits was not always the same, however. There was one psychological characteristic that the Heechee possessed in a far stronger degree than most humans: Conscience.

The Heechee were almost physically incapable of repudiating an obligation or letting a wrong ~go unrighted. For the Heechee, the sails.h.i.+p people were a special case. The Heechee owed them. It was from them that they had learned the most frightening fact the Heechee had ever had to face.

The Heechee and the sails.h.i.+p people had known each other well, but not recently, and not for very long. The relations.h.i.+p had begun badly for the sails.h.i.+p people. For the Heechee, it had ended even worse. It was not possible for either of them ever to forget the other.

In the slow, gurgling eddas the sails.h.i.+p people sang it was told how the cone-shaped landing vessels of the Heechee had suddenly appeared, terribly hard and terribly swift, in the sweet slush of their home. The Heechee s.h.i.+ps had flashed about the floating arcologies of the people with much cavitation and significant local temperature rises. Many had died. Much damage had been done before the Heechee understood that these were sentient and even civilized beings, if slow ones.

The Heechee were terribly shocked at what they had done. They tried to make amends. The first step was communication, and that was difficult. The task took a very long time-long, at least, for the Heechee, though the time for the sludge dwellers was bewilderingly short before a hard, hot octahedral prism slid itself cautiously into the middle of an arcology. Almost at once it began to speak to them in a recognizable, though laughably ungrammatical, form of their own language.

After that events moved with blinding speed-for the slush dwellers. For the Heechee, watching them in their daily lives was a lot like watching lichens grow. Captain himself had visited their great gas-giant planet, not a captain then, almost what could have been called a cabin boy; young; yeasty; adventurous, with that considerable, if cautious, Heechee optimism for the boundless future that had collapsed on them so terrifyingly. The gas giant was not the only marvelously exciting place the young Heechee visited. He visited Earth and met the australopithecines, he helped chart gas clouds and quasars, he ferried crews to outposts and construction projects. Years pa.s.sed. Decades pa.s.sed. The slow work of translating the sludge dwellers' communications inched forward. It could have gone a little faster if the Heechee had thought it particularly important; but they did not. It couldn't have gone very much faster in any case, because the sludge dwellers couldn't.

But it was interesting, in an antiquarian, touristy sort of way, because the sludge dwellers had been around for a long, long time. Their chill biochemistry was something like three hundred times slower than a Heechee's, or a human's. Heechee recorded history went back five or six millennia-more or less the same as humanity's, at the same stage in technological evolution. The recorded history of the sludge dwellers went back three hundred times as far. There were nearly two million years of consecutive, dated historical data. The earliest folk tales and legends and eddas were ten times earlier still. They were no harder to translate than the later ones, because the slush dwellers did not move very fast even in the evolution of their language, but the ma.s.sed minds who translated them judged them not very interesting. They put the work of translating them off... until they discovered that two of them spoke of visitations from s.p.a.ce.

When I think of all those years the human race labored under the galling knowledge of inferiority-because the Heechee had done so much more than we had, and done it so much earlier-I have many regrets. I think I regret most that we didn't know about the Two Eddas. I don't mean just knowing the eddas themselves, for they would only have given us one more thing to worry about, though a rea.s.suringly remote one. I mean mostly what they did to the Heechee morale.

The first song was from the very dawn of the slush dwellers' civilization, and quite ambiguous. It was a visitation of the G.o.ds. They came, s.h.i.+ning so brightly that even the slushers' rudimentary optics could perceive them-s.h.i.+ning with such a turbulence of energy that they caused the soupy gases to seethe and boil, and many died. They did no more than that, and when they went away they never returned. The song itself didn't mean much. It had no details that the Heechee found believable,

Robin doesn't tell much about the sails.h.i.+p people, mostly because he didn't then know much. But that's a pity. They're interesting. Their language was made up of words of one syllable- one consonant, one vowel. They had some fifty distinguishable consonants, and fourteen vowels and diphthongs to play with- therefore they had for three-syllable units, such as names, 3.43 x 108 combinations. That was plenty, especially for names, because that was orders of magnitude more males than they had ever had to give names to, and they didn't name the females. combinations. That was plenty, especially for names, because that was orders of magnitude more males than they had ever had to give names to, and they didn't name the females.

When a male impregnated a female, he produced a male child. He only did it rarely, because it cost him a great investment of energy. Unfertilized females produced females, more or less routinely. Bearing males, however, cost them their lives. They didn't know that-or anything else, really. There are no love stories in the eddas of the sails.h.i.+p people.

and most of it was about a certain ur-slusher hero who dared defy the visitors and came to rule a whole soggy sector of their planet as a reward.

But the second song was more specific. It dated from millions of years later-almost within the historical period. It sang once more of visitors from outside the dense home world, but this time they were not mere tourists. They weren't conquerors, either. They were refugees. They plunged down to the soggy surface, one s.h.i.+pload of them, it seemed, poorly equipped to survive in an environment that was cold, dense poison for them.

They hid there. They stayed for a long time, by their standards-more than a hundred years. Long enough for the slush dwellers to discover them and even to establish a kind of communication. They had been attacked by alien a.s.sa.s.sins that flamed like fire, wielding weapons that crushed and burned. Their home planet had been flamed clean. Every vessel they owned in s.p.a.ce had been pursued and destroyed.

And then, when generations of the refugees had managed to survive and even multiply, it all came to an end. The flaming a.s.sa.s.sins found them and boiled a whole huge shallow of the sludgy methane sea dry to destroy them.

When the Heechee heard this song they might have taken it for fable, except for one term. The term was not easy to translate, for it had had to survive both the incomplete communications with the refugees and the lapse of two million years. But it had survived.

It was what caused the Heechee to stop everything they did so that they could concentrate on a single task: the verification of the old edda. They sought out the home of the fugitives and found it-a planet scorched bare by a sun that had exploded. They sought for, and found, artifacts of previous s.p.a.cegoing civilizations. Not many. None in good condition. But nearly forty separate bits and pieces of half-melted machines, and they isotope-dated them to two separate epochs. One of them coincided in time with the fugitives who fled to the slush planet. The other was many millions of years older.

They concluded that the stories were true: There had been such a race of a.s.sa.s.sins; they had wiped out every s.p.a.cefaring civilization they had discovered, for more than twenty million years.

And the Heechee came to believe that they were still somewhere around. For the term that had been so hard to translate described the expansion of the heavens and the reversal by the flame-wielders so that all the stars and galaxies would crush together again. For a purpose. And it was impossible to believe that these t.i.tans, whoever they were, would not linger to see the results of the process they had begun.

And the bright Heechee dream crumbled, and the slush dwellers sang a new edda: the song of the Heechee, who visited, learned to be afraid, and ran away.

So the Heechee set their b.o.o.by-traps, hid most of the other evidence of their existence, and retreated to their hidey-hole at the core of the Galaxy.

In one sense, the sludge dwellers were just one of the b.o.o.by-traps. LaDzhaRi knew that; they all did; that was why he had followed the ancestral commandment and reported that first touch of another mind on his. He expected an answer, though it had been years, even in LaDzhaRi's time, since there had been a Heechee manifestation of any kind, and then only the quick touch of a routine TPT survey. He had also expected that when the answer came he would not like it. The whole epic struggle of building and launching the interstellar s.h.i.+p, the centuries already invested in their millennium-long journey-wasted! It was true that a flight of a thousand years to LaDzhaRi was no more than an ordinary whaling voyage for a Nantucket captain; but a whaler would not have liked being picked up in mid-Pacific and taken home empty, either. The whole crew had been upset. The excitement in the sails.h.i.+p had been so great that some of the crew involuntarily went into fast mode; the sludgy liquid was so churned that cavitation bubbles formed. One of the females was dead. One of the males, TsuTsuNga, was so demoralized that he was pawing over the surviving females, and not for dinner, either. "Please don't be foolish," LaDzhaRi pleaded. For a male to impregnate a female, as TsuTsuNga seemed about to do, involved so large an investment of energy that sometimes it threatened his life. For the females there was no threat-their lives were simply forfeited in order to bear a fertilized child-but they didn't know that, of course, or much of anything else, really. But TsulsuNga said steadily: "If I cannot become immortal by voyaging to another star, then at least I will father a son."

"No! Please! Think, my friend," begged LaDzhaRi, "we can be home if we wish. Can return as heroes to our arcologies, can sing our eddas so the entire world will hear." For the sludge of their homes carried sound as well as a sea, and their songs reached as far as a great whale's.

TsuTsuNga touched LaDzhaRi briefly, almost contemptuously, at least dismissively. "We're not heroes!" he said. "Go away and let me do this female."

And LaDzhaRi reluctantly released him, and listened to the dwindling sounds as he moved away. It was true. They were failed heroes at best.

Robin does not explain very well what the Heechee were afraid of. They had deduced that the purpose of causing the universe to contract again was to return it to the primordial atom after which it would burst in another Big Bang and start a new universe. They further deduced that in that case, the physical laws that govern the universe might develop in a different way.

What scared them most was the thought of beings who thought they would be happier in a universe with different physical laws.

The sails.h.i.+p people were not without such human traits as pride. It did not please them to be the Heechees'-what? Slaves? Not exactly, for the only service they were required to perform was to report, via sealed-beam communicator, any evidence of other s.p.a.cefaring intelligence. They were very glad to do that for their own sakes, more than for the Heechees'. If not slaves, then what?

There was only one word that was right: pets.

So the racial psyche of the slush dwellers contained a patch of tarnish they could never burnish away, with whatever feats of interstellar venturing they might accomplish in their vast, slow starjammers. They knew they were pets. It was not the first time for them. Long before the Heechee came they had been chattels, in almost the same way, to beings quite unlike the Heechee, or humans, or themselves; and when, generations before, their sooth-singers had roared the ancient eddas about those others into the Heechee listening machine, the slush dwellers had not failed to notice that the Heechee ran away. A pet was not the worst thing one could be.

So love and fear were abroad in the universe. For love (what pa.s.sed among the slush dwellers for love) TsuTsuNga damaged his health and risked his life. Dreaming of love, I lay in my hospice, waking less than an hour every day, while my store-bought innards reconciled themselves to the rest of me. Terrified by love, Captain saw Twice grow thinner and darker.

For Twice had not got better once the cargo bubble was en route. The surcease had come too late. The closest thing they had to a medical specialist was Burst, the black-hole operator, but even at home, even with the finest care, few females could survive unrequited love combined with terrible strain.

It was no surprise to Captain when Burst appeared, hangdog, pitying, and said, "I'm sorry. She is joining the ma.s.sed minds."

It is not a cheap commodity, love. Some of us can have it and never face the bill, but only if someone else picks up the check.

14 The New Albert

Everyone conspired against me-even the wife of my bosom-even my trusted data-retrieval program. In the brief moments they allowed me to be awake they gave me a free choice. "You can go to the clinic for a complete checkup," said Albert, sucking judiciously at his pipe.

"Or can stay the d.a.m.n h.e.l.l asleep until are d.a.m.n sure you are all better," said Essie.

"Ah-ha," I said, "I thought so! You've been keeping me unconscious, haven't you? It's probably been days since you knocked me out and let them cut me open." Essie avoided my eyes. I said n.o.bly, "I don't blame you for that, but, don't you see, I want to go look at this thing Walthers found! Can't you understand that?"

She was still not meeting my eyes. She glowered at the hologram of Albert Einstein. "Seems d.a.m.n peppy today. You keeping this khuligan tranked up good?"

Albert's image coughed. "Actually, Mrs. Broadhead, the medical program advised against any unnecessary sedation at this point."

"Oh, G.o.d! Will be awake, bothering us day and night! That settles it, you Robin, you go to clinic tomorrow." And all the time she was snarling at me, her hand was on the back of my neck, caressing; words can be liars, but you can feel the touch of love.

So I said: "I'll meet you halfway. I'll go to the clinic for the complete physical on condition that if I pa.s.s you don't give me any more arguments about going into s.p.a.ce."

Essie was silent, calculating, but Albert c.o.c.ked an eyebrow at me. "I think that might be a mistake, Robin."

"That's what us human beings are for, to make mistakes. Now, what's for dinner?"

You see, I bad calculated that if I showed a happy appet.i.te they would take it as a good sign, and maybe they did. I had also calculated that my new s.h.i.+p wouldn't be ready for several weeks, anyway, so there was no real hurry-I wasn't about to take off in another cramped, smelly Five when I had a yacht of my own coming along. What I had not calculated on was that I had forgotten how much I hated hospitals.

When Albert examined me, he measured my temperature bolometrically, scanned my eyes for clarity and my skin for external blemishes like burst blood vessels, pumped hypersound through my torso to peer at the organs inside, and sampled the contributions I left in the toilets for biochemical imbalances and bacteria counts. Albert called these procedures noninvasive. I called them polite.

The diagnostic procedures at the clinic didn't bother to be polite. They weren't really painful. They numbed the surface of my skin before going much farther, and once you get inside the surface there aren't that many nerve endings to worry about. All I really felt were tweaks and pokes and tickles. But a lot of them, and besides, I knew what they were doing. Hair-thin light pipes were peering around the inside of my belly. Needle-sharp pipettes were sucking out plugs of tissue for a.n.a.lysis. Siphons were sipping up my bodily fluids; sutures were checked, scars were appraised. The whole thing took less than an hour, but it seemed longer and, honestly, I'd rather have been doing something else.

Then they let me put my clothes back on and I was allowed to sit down in a comfortable chair in the presence of a real-live human doctor. They even let Essie sit in, but I didn't give her a chance to talk. I got in first. "What do you say, Doe?" I asked. "How long after the operation can I go into s.p.a.ce? I don't mean rockets, I mean a Lofstrom loop, about as traumatic as an elevator. You see, the loop just sort of pulls you along on a magnetized ribbon-"

The doctor held up his hand. He was a plump, white-haired Santa Claus of a man, with a neat, close-trimmed white beard and bright blue eyes. "I know what a Lofstrom loop is."

"Good, I'm glad of that. Well?"

"Well," he said, "the usual practice after surgery such as yours is to avoid anything like that for three to four weeks, but-"

"Oh, no! Doc, no!" I said. "Please! I don't want to have to hang around for practically a month!"

He looked at me and he looked at Essie. Essie wouldn't meet his eyes, either. He smiled. "Mr. Broadhead," he said, "I think you should know two things. The first is that it is often desirable to keep a convalescent patient unconscious for some time. With electrically stimulated muscle exercise, ma.s.sage, good diet, and proper nursing care there is no impairment of function, and it's a lot easier on the patient's nervous system. And everybody else's, too."

"Yes, yes," I said, not very interested. "What's the other thing?"

"The other thing is that you were operated on forty-three days ago this morning. You can do just about anything you want to now. Including taking a ride on a loop."

Time was when the road to the stars led through Guiana or Baikonur or the Cape. You had to burn about a million dollars' worth of liquid hydrogen to get into orbit, before you could transs.h.i.+p to something going farther away. Now we had the Lofstrom launch loops s.p.a.ced around the equator, immense gossamer structures that you couldn't see until you were almost beside them-well, within twenty kilometers, which was where the satellite landing field was. I watched it with pleasure and pride as we circled and descended to touchdown. In the seat beside me Essie was frowning and muttering to herself as she worked on some project-a new kind of computer programming, or maybe a pension plan for her Big Chon employees; I couldn't tell which, because she was doing it in Russian. On the pull-down console in front of me Albert was displaying my new s.h.i.+p, rotating the image slowly while he recited the statistics of capacity, accessories, ma.s.s, and amenities. Since I had put quite a few million dollars and a lot of my time into that plaything, I was interested, but not as interested as I was in what was coming next. "Later, Albert," I ordered, and obediently he winked out. I craned my neck to keep the loop in view as we entered final approach. Faintly, along the top of the ski-jump launch section, I could see capsules speeding up through three gravities' acceleration and neatly, gently detaching themselves at the steepest part of the upslope to disappear into the blue. Beautiful! No chemicals, no combustion, no damage to the ozone layer. Not even the energy-wastage of a Heechee lander launch; some things we could do even better than the Heechee did!

Time was when even being in orbit was not enough, and then you had to take the long, slow Hohmann journey to the Gateway asteroid. Usually you were scared out of your bird, because everybody knew that more Gateway prospectors got killed than got rich; and because you were s.p.a.ce sick and cramped and condemned to inhabit that interplanetary slammer for weeks or months on end before you even got to the asteroid; and most of all because you'd risked everything you owned or could borrow to pay for it. Now we had a Heechee Three chartered and waiting for us in low-Earth orbit. We could transs.h.i.+p in our s.h.i.+rtsleeves and be on our way to the far stars before we'd finished digesting our last meal on Earth-that is, we could, because we had the muscle and the money to pay for it.

Time was when going out into that interstellar nothingness was a lot like playing Russian roulette. The only difference was that if the luck of the draw was favorable, whatever you found at the end of the journey might make you rich beyond richness forever-as it ultimately did me. But what you mostly got made was dead.

"Is much better now." Essie sighed as we climbed down out of the aircraft and blinked around in the hot South American sun "Now, where is d.a.m.n courtesy van from crummy fleabag hotel?"

I did not comment on her reading my mind. After all the time we had been married I was used to it. Anyway, it wasn't telepathy; it was what any human being would think if he were doing what we were doing at that time. "I wish Audee Walthers were going with us," I said, looking out at the launch loop. We were still kilometers away, on the far sh.o.r.e of Lake Tehigualpa. I could see the loop reflected in it, blue at the center of the lake, greeny-yellow near the sh.o.r.e, where they had sown edible algae, and it was a pretty sight.

"If you wanted him with you, should not have given him two mil to chase his wife with," said Essie practically, and then, looking at me more closely, "How you feeling?"

"Absolutely in the pink," I said. It wasn't far from true. "Quit worrying about me. When you've got Full Medical Plus they don't dare let you die before you reach a hundred-it's bad for business."

"Don't have much to say about it," she said gloomily, "when customer is reckless desperado who spends time chasing for make-believe Heechee Anyway," she added, brightening, "here is van for fleabag, hop in."

So when we were inside the van I leaned over and kissed the back of her neck-easy to do, because she had braided her long hair and brought it around her neck to tie in front like a kind of a necklace-getting ready for the launch, you see. She leaned against my lips. "Khuligan." She sighed. "But not bad khuligan."

The hotel wasn't really a fleabag. They had given us a comfortable suite on the top floor, looking over the lake and the loop. Besides, we would only be in it for a few hours. I left Essie to key in her programs on the hotel PV screen while I wandered over to the window, telling myself~ indulgently, that I wasn't really a hooligan. But that wasn't true, because it certainly was not the act of a responsible senior citizen of wealth and substance to skylark off into interstellar s.p.a.ce just for the glamour and excitement of it.

It occurred to me then that Essie might not be taking quite that view of my motives. She might think I was after something else.

It then occurred to me that maybe my own view was wrong. Was it really the Heechee I was looking for? Sure it was, or anyway could be; everybody was desperately curious about the Heechee. But not everybody had left something else out in interstellar s.p.a.ce. Was it possible that somewhere in the down-deep hidden part of my mind, what was driving me out and on was the hope that somehow, somewhere, I might find that misplaced thing again? I knew what the thing was. I knew where I had left it. What I didn't know was what I would do with it-or, more accurately, her-if I found her again.

And then I felt a sort of quivery not-quite-pain in my middle. It had nothing to do with my two point three meters of new gut. What it had to do with was the hope, or the fear, that somehow Gelle-Klara Moynlin might indeed turn up in my life again. There was more emotion left over there than I had realized. It made my eyes tear, so the spidery launch structure out the window seemed to ripple in my sight.

But there were no tears in my eyes.

And it wasn't an optical illusion. "My G.o.d!" I shouted. "Essie!" And she hurried over to stand beside me and look at the tiny flare of light from a capsule on the launch run, and the shaking, shuddering of the whole thread-thin structure. Then there was the noise-a single faint blast like a distant cannon shot, and then the lower, slower, longer thunder of the immense loop tearing itself apart. "My G.o.d," Essie echoed faintly, clutching my arm. "Terrorist?"