Then, after a while, we began developing our own routines. I played my tapes, Dred watched his pornodisks, Ham unrolled a flexible piano keyboard and played electronic music into earplugs (even so, some of it leaked out if you listened hard, and I got terribly, terribly sick of Bach, Palestrina and Mozart). Sam Kahane gently organized us into classes, and we spent a lot of time humoring him, discussing the nature of neutron stars, black holes and Seyfert galaxies, when we were not reviewing test procedures before landing on a new world. The good thing about that was that we managed not to hate each other for half an hour at a time. The rest of the time — well, yes, usually we hated each other. I could not stand Ham Tayeh’s constant shuffling of the cards. Dred developed an unreasoning hostility toward my occasional cigarette. Sam’s armpits were a horror, even in the festering reek of the inside of the capsule, against which the worst of Gateway’s air would have seemed a rose garden. And Klara — well, Klara had this bad habit. She liked asparagus. She had brought four kilos of dehydrated foods with her, just for variety and for something to do; and although she shared them with me, and sometimes with the others, she insisted on eating asparagus now and then all by herself. Asparagus makes your urine smell funny. It is not a romantic thing to know when your darling has been eating asparagus by the change in air quality in the common toilet.
A NOTE ON STELLAR BIRTH
Dr. Asmenion. I suppose most of you are here more because you hope to collect a science bonus than because you’re really interested in astrophysics. But you don’t have to worry. The instruments do most of the work. You do your routine scan, and if you hit anything special, it’ll come out in the evaluation when you’re back.
Question. Isn’t there anything special we should look out for?
Dr. Asmenion. Oh, sure. For instance, there was a prospector who cleaned up half a million, I think, by coming out in the Orion Nebula and realizing that one part of the gas cloud was showing a hotter temperature than the rest of it. He decided a star was being born. Gas was condensing and beginning to heat up. In another ten thousand years there’ll probably be a recognizable solar system forming there, and he did a special scan mosaic of that whole part of the sky. So he got the bonus. And now, every year, the Corporation sends that ship out there to get new readings. They pay a hundred-thousand dollar bonus, and fifty thousand of it goes to him. I’ll give you the coordinates for some likely spots, like the Trifid nebula, if you want me to. You won’t get a half million, but you’ll get something.
And yet — she was my darling, all right, she really was. We had not just been screwing in those endless hours in the lander; we had been talking. I have never known the inside of anyone’s head a fraction as well as I came to know Klara’s. I had to love her. I could not help it, and I could not stop. Ever.
On the twenty-third day I was playing with Ham’s electronic piano when I suddenly felt seasick. The fluctuating gray force, that I had come hardly to notice, was abruptly intensifying.
I looked up and met Klara’s eyes. She was timorously, almost weepily smiling. She pointed, and all up through the sinuous curves of the spiral of glass, golden sparks were chasing themselves like bright minnows in a stream.
We grabbed each other and held on, laughing, as space swooped around us and bottom became top. We had reached turnaround. And we had margin to spare.
Chapter 15
Sigfrid’s office is of course under the Bubble, like anybody else’s. It can’t be too hot or too cold. But sometimes it feels that way. I say to him, “Christ, it’s hot in here. Your air conditioner is malfunctioning.”
“I don’t have an air conditioner, Robbie,” he says patiently. “Getting back to your mother—”
“Screw my mother,” I say. “Screw yours, too.”
There is a pause. I know what his circuits are thinking, and I feel I will regret that impetuous remark. So I add quickly, “I mean, I’m really uncomfortable, Sigfrid. It’s hot in here.”
“You are hot in here,” he corrects me.
“What?”
“My sensors indicate that your temperature goes up almost a degree whenever we talk about certain subjects: your mother, the woman Gelle-Klara Moynlin, your first trip, your third trip, Dane Metchnikov and excretion.”
“Well, that’s great,” I yell, suddenly angry. “You’re telling me you spy on me?”
“You know that I monitor your external signs, Robbie,” he says reprovingly. “There is no harm in that. It is no more significant than a friend observing that you blush or stammer, or drum your fingers.”
“So you say.”
“I do say that, Rob. I tell you this because I think you should know that these subjects are charged with some emotional overload for you. Would you like to talk about why that might be?”
“No! What I’d like to talk about is you, Sigfrid! What other little secrets are you holding out on me? Do you count my erections? Bug my bed? Tap my phone?”
“No, Rob. I don’t do any of those things.”
“I certainly hope that’s the truth, Sigfrid. I have my ways of knowing when you lie.”
Pause. “I don’t think I understand what you are saying, Rob.”
“You don’t have to,” I sneer. “You’re just a machine.” It’s enough that I understand. It is very important to me to have that little secret from Sigfrid. In my pocket is the slip of paper that S. Ya. Lavorovna gave me one night, full of pot, wine, and great sex. One day soon I will take it out of my pocket, and then we will see which of us is the boss. I really enjoy this contest with Sigfrid. It gets me angry. When I am angry I forget that very large place where I hurt, and go on hurting, and don’t know how to stop.
Chapter 16
After forty-six days of superlight travel the capsule dropped back into a velocity that felt like no velocity at all: we were in orbit, around something, and all the engines were still.
We stank to high heaven and we were incredibly tired of one another’s company, but we clustered around the viewscreens locked arm to arm, like dearest lovers, in the zero gravity, staring at the sun before us. It was a larger and oranger star than Sol; either larger, or we were closer to it than one A.U. But it wasn’t the star we were orbiting. Our primary was a gas-giant planet with one large moon, half again as big as Luna.
Neither Klara nor the boys were whooping and cheering, so I waited as long as I could and then said, “What’s the matter?”
Klara said absently, “I doubt we can land on that.” She did not seem disappointed. She didn’t seem to care at all.
Sam Kahane blew a long, soft sigh through his beard and said: “Well. First thing, we’d better get some clean spectra. Rob and I will do it. The rest of you start sweeping for Heechee signatures.”
“Fat chance,” said one of the others, but so softly that I wasn’t sure who. It could even have been Klara. I wanted to ask more, but I had a feeling that if I asked why they weren’t happy, one of them would tell me, and then I wouldn’t like the answer. So I squeezed after Sam into the lander, and we got in each other’s way while we pulled on our topgear, checked our life-support systems and comms, and sealed up. Sam waved me into the lock; I heard the flash-pumps sucking the air out, and then the little bit left puffed me out into space as the lock door opened.
For a moment I was in naked terror, all alone in the middle of no place any human being had ever been, terrified that I’d forgotten to snap my tether. But I hadn’t had to; the magnetic clamp had slipped itself into a lock position, and I came to the end of the cable, twitched sharply, and began more slowly to recoil back toward the ship.
Before I got there Sam was out, too, spinning toward me. We managed to grab each other, and began setting up to take photographs.
Sam gestured at a point between the immense saucer-shaped gas-giant disk and the hurtfully bright orange sun, and I visored my eyes with my gauntlets until I saw what he was indicating: M-31 in Andromeda. Of course, from where we were it wasn’t in the constellation of Andromeda. There wasn’t
anything in sight that looked like Andromeda, or for that matter like any other constellation I have ever seen. But M-31 is so big and so bright that you can even pick it out from the surface of the Earth when the smog isn’t too bad, whirlpool-lens-shaped fog of stars. It is the brightest of the external galaxies, and you can recognize it fairly well from almost anywhere a Heechee ship is likely to go. With a little magnification you can be sure of the spiral shape, and you can double-check by comparing the smaller galaxies in roughly the same line of sight.
While I was zeroing in with M-31, Sam was doing the same with the Magellanic clouds, or what he thought were the Magellanic clouds. (He claimed he had identified S Doradus.) We both began taking theodolitic shots. The purpose of all that, of course, is so that the academics who belong to the Corporation can triangulate and locate where we’ve been. You might wonder why they care, but they do; so much that you don’t qualify for any scientific bonus unless you do the full series of photos. You’d think they would know where we were going from the pictures we take out the windows while in superlight travel. It doesn’t work out that way. They can get the main direction of thrust, but after the first few light-years it gets harder and harder to track identifiable stars, and it’s not clear that the line of flight is a straight line; some say it follows some wrinkly configuration in the curvature of space.
Anyway, the bigheads use everything they can get — including a measure of how far the Magellanic clouds have rotated, and in which direction. Know why that is? Because you can tell from that how many light-years away we are from them, and thus how deep we are into the Galaxy. The clouds revolve in about eighty million years. Careful mapping can show changes of one part in two or three millions — say, differences in ranging of 150 light-years or so.
What with Sam’s group-study courses I had got pretty interested in that sort of thing. Actually taking the photos and trying to guess how Gateway would interpret them I almost forgot to be scared. And almost, but not quite, forgot to worry that this trip, taken at so great an investment in courage, was turning out to be a bust.
But it was a bust.
Ham grabbed the sphere-sweep tapes from Sam Kahane as soon as we were back in the ship and fed them into the scanner. The first subject was the big planet itself. In every octave of the electromagnetic spectrum, there was nothing coming out of it that suggested artifactual radiation.
So he began looking for other planets. Finding them was slow, even for the automatic scanner, and probably there could have been a dozen we couldn’t locate in the time we spent there (but that hardly mattered, because if we couldn’t locate them they would have been too distant to reach anyway). The way Ham did it was by taking key signatures from a spectrogram of the primary star’s radiation, then programming the scanner to look for reflections of it. It picked out five objects. Two of them turned out to be stars with similar spectra. The other three were planets, all right, but they showed no artifactual radiation, either. Not to mention that they were both small and distant.
Which left the gas-giant’s one big moon.
“Check it out,” Sam commanded.
Mohamad grumbled, “It doesn’t look very good.”
“I don’t want your opinion, I only want you to do what you’re told. Check it out.”
“Out loud, please,” Klara added. Ham looked at her in surprise, perhaps at the word “please,” but he did what she asked.
Classifieds.
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DO YOU have a sister, daughter, female friends back on Earth? I’d like to correspond. Ultimate object matrimony. 86-032.
He punched a button and said: “Signatures for coded electromagnetic radiation.” A slow sine curve leaped onto the scanner’s readout plate, wiggled briefly for a moment, and then straightened to an absolutely motionless line.
“Negative,” said Ham. “Anomalous time-variant temperatures.”
That was a new one on me. “What’s an anomalous time-variant temperature?” I asked.
“Like if something gets warmer when the sun sets,” said Klara impatiently. “Well?”
But that line was flat, too. “None of them, either,” said Ham. “High-albedo surface metal?”
Slow sine wave, then nothing. “Hum,” said Ham. “Ha. Well, the rest of the signatures don’t apply; there won’t be any methane, because there isn’t any atmosphere, and so on. So what do we do, boss?”
Sam opened his lips to speak, but Klara was ahead of him. “I beg your pardon,” she said tightly, “but who do you mean when you say ’boss’?”
“Oh, shut up,” Ham said impatiently. “Sam?”
Kahane gave Klara a slight, forgiving smile. “If you want to say something, go ahead and say it,” he invited. “Me, I think we ought to orbit the moon.”
“Plain waste of fuel!” Klara snapped. “I think that’s crazy.”
“Have you got a better idea?”
“What do you mean, ’better’? What’s the point?”
“Well,” said Sam reasonably, “we haven’t looked all over the moon. It’s rotating pretty slow. We could take the lander and look all around; there might be a whole Heechee city on the far side.”
“Fat chance,” Klara sniffed, almost inaudibly, thus clearing up the question of who had said it before. The boys weren’t listening. All three of them were already on their way down into the lander, leaving Klara and me in sole possession of the capsule.
Klara disappeared into the toilet. I lit a cigarette, almost the last I had, and blew smoke plumes through the expanding smoke plumes before them, hanging motionless in the unmoving air. The capsule was tumbling slightly, and I could see the distant brownish disk of the planet’s moon slide upward across the viewscreen, and a minute later the tiny, bright hydrogen flame of the lander heading toward it. I wondered what I would do if they ran out of fuel, or crashed, or suffered some sort of malfunction. What I would have to do in that case was leave them there forever. What I wondered was whether I would have the nerve to do what I had to do.
It did seem like a terrible, trivial waste of human lives.
What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?
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 id
ea.”
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.”