There were five of the Grantlands—two brothers, their wives, and the eldest son of one of the couples. They reached a globular cluster—ten thousand old stars, mostly red, mostly sliding toward the sunset at the lower right side of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram as they aged. The cluster was in the galactic halo and, of course, the trip was a long one. None of them survived. The trip took 314 days, and all of them were alive at the time of arrival (but existing on scant rations). They took their pictures. The last of them, the young second wife of one of the brothers, died thirty-three days into the return trip; but the pictures they had taken survived.
The three Schoen sisters were no luckier. They didn’t come back at all, either. Again, their ship did, but thoroughly racked and scorched, and of course their bodies inside were barely, recognizable.
But they, too, had taken a few pictures before they died. They had been in a reflection nebula—after analysis it was determined that it was the Great Nebula in Orion, actually visible to the naked eye from Earth. (American Indians called it “the smoking star.”) The Schoen sisters must have known they were in trouble as soon as they came out of drive, because they weren’t really in space anymore. Oh, it was close to a vacuum—as people on Earth measure a vacuum—but there were as many as three hundred atoms to the cubic centimeter, hundreds of times as many as there should have been in interstellar space.
Still, they looked around, and they started their cameras—just barely. They didn’t have much time.
There are four bright young stars in the Orion Nebula, the so-called Trapezium; it is in such nebulae that gas clouds fall together and are born as stars. Astronomers conjectured that the Heechee knew this, and the reason the ship had been set to go there was that Heechee astronomers had been interested in studying the conditions that lead to star formation.
But the Heechee had set that program half a million years before.
A lot had happened in those half million years. There was now a fifth body, an “almost” star, in the Orion Nebula, formed after the Heechee had taken their last look at the area. The new body was called the Becklin-Neugebauer object; it was in its early hydrogen-burning stage, less than a hundred thousand years old. And it seemed that the Schoen sisters had the bad luck to come almost inside it.
MISSION NAKED BLACK HOLE
The crew was William Sakyetsu, Marianna Morse, Hal M’Buna, Richard Smith, and Irina Malatesta. All of them had been Out before—Malatesta had done it five times—but luck hadn’t favored any of their ventures. None of them had yet made a big enough score to pay their Gateway bills.
So for their mission they were careful to choose an armored Five with a record of success. The previous crew in that ship had earned a “nova” science bonus in it, managing to come close enough to a recurring nova to get some good pictures, though not so close that they didn’t live through the experience. They had collected a total of seven and a half million dollars in bonus money and had gone back to Earth, rejoicing. But before they left they gave their ship a name. They called it Victory.
When Sakyetsu and the others in his crew got to their destination they looked for the planet—or the star, or the Heechee artifact, or the object of any interesting sort—that might have been its target.
They were disappointed. There wasn’t anything like that to be found anywhere around. There were stars in sight, sure. But the nearest of them was nearly eight light-years away. By all indications they had landed themselves in one of the most boringly empty regions of interstellar space in the galaxy. They could not find even a nearby gas cloud.
They didn’t give up. They were experienced prospectors. They spent a week checking out every possibility. First, they made sure they hadn’t missed a nearby star: with interferometry they could measure the apparent diameter of some of the brighter stars; by spectral analysis they could determine their types; combining the two gave them an estimate of distance.
Their first impression had been right. It was a pretty empty patch of sky they had landed in.
There was, to be sure, one really spectacular object in view—the word Marianna used was “glorious”—a globular cluster, with thousands of bright stars interweaving their orbits in a volume a few hundred light-years across. It was certainly spectacular. It dominated the sky. It was much nearer to them than any such object had ever been to a human eye before. But it was still at least a thousand light-years away.
A globular cluster is an inspiring sight. It was a long way from Sakyetsu and his ship Victory, but by the standards of Earthly astronomers that was nothing at all. Globular clusters live on the outer fringe of the galaxy. There aren’t any in the crowded spiral-arm regions like the neighborhood of Earth. There are almost none less than twenty thousand light-years from Earth, and here was one a twentieth as far—and thus, by the law of inverse squares, four hundred times as bright. It was not an unusually large specimen, as globular clusters go; the big ones run upward of a million stars, and this one was nowhere near that. It was big enough to be exciting to look at, all the same.
But it was neither big enough nor near enough for Victory’s instruments to reveal any more than Earth’s own orbiting observatories, with their far more powerful mirrors and optical systems, had seen long ago.
So there was very little chance that the instruments on Victory could earn them any kind of decent bonus. Still, those instruments were all they had. So the crew doggedly put them to work. They photographed the cluster in red light, blue light, ultraviolet light, and several bands of the infrared. They measured its radio flux in a thousand frequencies, and its gamma rays and X-rays. And then, one sleeping period, while only Hal M’Buna was awake at the instruments, he saw the thing that made the trip worthwhile.
His shout woke everybody up. “Something’s eating the cluster!”
Marianna Morse was the first to get to the screens with him, but the whole crew flocked to see. The fuzzy circle of the cluster wasn’t a circle anymore. An arc had been taken out of its lower rim. It looked like a cookie a child had bitten into.
But it wasn’t a bite.
As they watched, they could see the differences. The stars of the cluster weren’t disappearing. They were just, slowly, moving out of the way of—something.
“My God,” Marianna whispered. “We’re in orbit around a black hole.”
Then they cursed the week they had wasted, because they knew what that meant. Big money! A black hole. One of the rarest objects (and, therefore, one of the most highly rewarded in science bonuses) in the observable universe—because black holes are, intrinsically, unobservable.
A black hole isn’t “black,” in the sense that a dinner jacket or the ink on a piece of paper is black. A black hole is a lot blacker than that. No human being has ever seen real blackness, because blackness is the absence of all light. It can’t be seen. There is nothing to see. The blackest dye reflects a little light; a black hole reflects nothing at all. If you tried to illuminate it with the brightest searchlight in the universe—if you concentrated all the light of a quasar on it in a single beam—you would still see nothing. The tremendous gravitational force of the black hole would suck all that light in and it would never come out again. It can’t.
It is a matter of escape velocity. The escape velocity from the Earth is seven miles a second; from a neutron star as much as 120,000 miles per second. But the escape velocity from a black hole is greater than the speed of light. The light doesn’t “fall back” (as a rock thrown up from Earth at less than escape velocity will fall back to the ground). What happens to the light rays is that they are bent by the gravitational pull. The radiation simply circles the black hole, spiraling endlessly, never getting free.
And when a black hole passes in front of, say, a globular cluster, it doesn’t hide the cluster. It simply bends the cluster’s light around it.
If Victory’s crew had wasted seven days, they still had five days’ worth of supplies left before they had to start back to Gateway. They used them all. They
took readings on the black hole even when they couldn’t see it…and when at last they got back to Gateway they found that one, just one, of their pictures had paid off.
They shared a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus simply for the pictures of the globular cluster. But the one picture that they hadn’t even noticed when they took it—a split-second frame, taken automatically when no one happened to be watching the screen—showed what happened when the black hole occluded a bright B-4 star, a few hundred light-years away. That star hadn’t moved up or down. By chance it had passed almost exactly behind the black hole. Its light had spread to surround the hole, like a halo; and that gave them a measure of the hole’s size…
And then, long after they were back in Gateway, the research teams that studied their results awarded them another half a million, and the information that they were very lucky.
Marianna Morse had wondered about that: Why had the Heechee used an armored Five to visit this harmless object? Answer: It hadn’t always been harmless.
Most black holes are not safe to visit. They pull in gases in accretion rings, and the acceleration of the gases as they fall produces a hell of radiation. Once this one had, but that was a long time ago. Now it had eaten all the gases in its neighborhood. There was nothing left to fall and so generate the synchrotron flux of energy that might fry even an armored Five if it lingered too long nearby…and so the crew of Victory, without knowing it at the time, had had an unexpected stroke of luck. They arrived at the neighborhood of their black hole after its lethal feeding frenzy had ended, and so they had come back alive.
In its first twenty years the Gateway Corporation handed out more than two hundred astronomical science bonuses, for a total of nearly one billion dollars. It paid off on double stars and supernova shells; it paid off on at least the first examples of every type of star there was.
There are nine members of the catalogue of star types, and they are easily remembered by the mnemonic “Pretty Woman, Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me,” which runs the gamut from youngest to longest-living stars. The stellar classes from A down to the dim, small, cool Ms didn’t earn any special science bonuses unless there was something truly remarkable about them, because they were too common. The vast majority of stars were dim, small, and cool. Contrariwise, the Os and Bs were hot young stars, and they always got bonuses because they were so few. But the Gateway Corporation awarded double bonuses on the P and W classes: P for gas clouds just condensing into stars, W for the hot, frightening Wolf-Rayet type. These were new stars, often immense ones, that could not be approached safely within billions of miles.
All those lucky prospectors collected science bonuses. So did the ones who happened to find themselves near known objects, at least if they were the first to claim the rewards. Wolfgang Arretov was the first to arrive near the Sirius system, and Earthly astronomers were delighted. The stars Sirius A and B (“Bessel’s satellite”) had been studied intensively for centuries, because the primary star is so bright in Earthly skies. Arretov’s data confirmed their deductions: Sirius A at 2.3 solar masses, B only about one—but a white dwarf with a surface temperature over twenty thousand degrees. Arretov got half a million for letting the astronomers know they had been right all along. Later, Sally Kissendorf got a hundred thousand for the first good pictures of the tiny (well-three solar masses, which is not real tiny; but just about invisible next to its huge primary) companion of Zeta Aurigae. She would have gotten more if the companion had happened to flare while she was nearby, but that might not have been worth her while, since it was very likely she could not have survived the experience. Matt Polofsky’s picture of little Cygnus A only got him fifty thousand dollars, though—red dwarf stars simply weren’t that interesting. Even well-studied nearby ones. And Rachel Morgenstern, with her husband and their three grown children, shared half a million for the Delta Cepheid shots. Cepheids aren’t all that rare, but the Morgensterns happened to be there just when the star’s surface layers were losing transparency through compression.
And then there were all the missions that wound up in Oort clouds.
Oort clouds are masses of comets that orbit a star very far out—the Oort in Earth’s system doesn’t get going until you’re half a light-year from the Sun. There are lots of comets in your average Oort cloud. Trillions of them. They generally mass as much as the aggregate of a star’s planets, and almost every star has an Oort.
They seemed to fascinate the Heechee.
In Gateway’s first twenty years of operation, no fewer than eighty-five missions wound up in an Oort cloud and returned to tell of it.
That was a big disappointment to the prospectors involved, because the Gateway Corporation stopped paying bonuses for Oort data after the tenth such mission. So those prospectors who came back from an Oort complained a lot. They couldn’t understand why the Heechee had targeted so many missions to the dumb things.
And, naturally, they had no idea how lucky they really were, because it was a long time before anyone found out that, for an astonishing reason, most Oort missions never got back to the Gateway asteroid at all.
That billion dollars in astronomical science bonuses was welcome enough to the prospectors who got a share of it. But, really, it was chicken feed. What the Gateway Corporation was formed for was profit. The prospectors had come to the asteroid for the same reason, and big profit didn’t come from taking instrument readings on something millions of miles away. The big bucks came from finding a planet, and landing on it—and bringing back something that made money.
Neither the Gateway Corporation nor the individual prospectors had much choice about that. Making a profit was the basic rule of survival, and neither the prospectors nor the Corporation made the rules. Those rules were made by the nature of the world they came from.
PART FIVE
THE
HOME
PLANET
Homo sapiens evolved on the planet Earth, and the process of evolution made it certain that every human trait was custom-engineered to fit Earth’s conditions, like a key in a lock. With three billion years of Darwinian selection to make the fit perfect, life on Earth should have been pretty nearly heaven for its human inhabitants.
It wasn’t. Not anymore, for rich Earth was getting close to filing for bankruptcy. It had spent its wealth.
Oh, there were many millionaires on Earth. Billionaires, too; people with more money than they could spend, enough to hire a hundred servants, enough to own a county for a backyard, enough to pay for Full Medical insurance coverage, so that for all their long lives they would have at their command the most wonderful of all the wonderful medical, pharmaceutical, and surgical techniques to keep them healthy, and to make those lives very long. There were hundreds of thousands of the very rich, and many millions of the more or less well to do…
But there were ten billion others.
There were the ones who scratched out a living by farming on Asian plains and African savannahs; they made a crop when rain fell and wars stayed away and marauding insect pests devoured some other countryside than their own, and when the crop failed they died. There were the ones who lived in the barricaded slums of the big cities (the word “ghetto” was no longer a metaphor), or the barrios outside Latin metropolises, or the teeming warrens of the urban areas of the Orient. These people worked when they could. They lived on charity when there was any charity to be had. They lived at the bottom of the food chain—rice and beans, yams and barley; or, if they had the money to pay for it, single-cell proteins from the fossil-fuel conversions of the food mines—and they were very likely to be hungry throughout every hour of every day of their lives. Which were short. The poor people couldn’t afford the medical plans. If they were very lucky there might be a free clinic, or a cheap doctor, to hand out pills and take out an appendix. But when one of their organs wore out they had only two alternatives. They managed to get along without it; or they died. The poor people could never afford organ transplants. They were lucky if they weren’t c
aught in a dark alley some night and themselves converted into transplants for some richer person, by some more desperate one.
So there were two kinds of human beings on Earth. If you owned a few thousand shares of PetroFood or Chemways you didn’t lack for much—not even health, because then you could afford Full Medical. But if you didn’t…
If you didn’t, the next best thing was to have a job. Any kind of a job.
Having a job was a dream of Utopia for the billions who had none, but for those who did have employment their work was generally a demeaning kind of drudgery that drowned the spirit and damaged the health. The food mines employed many, dipping fossil fuels out of the ground and breeding edible single-cell protein creatures on their hydrocarbon content. But when you worked at a food mine you breathed those same hydrocarbons every day—it was like living in a closed garage, with motors running all the time—and you probably died young. Factory work was better, a little, although the safest and most challenging parts of it were generally done by automatic machines for economic reasons; because they were more expensive to acquire, and to replace when damaged, than people. There was even domestic service as a possible career. But to be a servant in the homes of the wealthy was to be a slave, with a slave’s intimate experience of luxury and plenty, and a slave’s despair at ever attaining those things for himself.
Still, the ones who had even those jobs were lucky, for family agriculture was just a way of slowing down starvation, and in the developed world unemployment was terribly high. Especially in the cities. Especially for the young. So if you were one of the really rich, or even just one of the well-to-do, splurging on a trip to New York or Paris or Beijing, you usually saw the poor ones only when you walked out of your hotel, between police barricades, and into your waiting taxi.