After a time he concluded that no one was near. He did not remove his books or other possessions from the ship. He resolved to stay ready to flee at a moment’s notice, but he decided to explore. Once before, long ago, some other person had been at the outpost, and he believed it had been a female. Tiny Jim had helped him identify the garment then. Perhaps he should ask Tiny Jim for advice now? Munching on a berryfruit, he handed himself easily along the rails toward the dreaming room, where the pleasure couch lay surrounded by the book machines.
And stopped.
Had that been a sound? A laugh, or a cry, from far away?
He threw the berryfruit away and stood for a moment, all his senses tensely extended. The sound was not repeated. But there was something-a smell, very faint, quite pleasant, quite strange. It was not unlike the smell in the garment he had found, and carried around for many days until the last vestige of scent was gone from it and he put it back where it was found.
Had that person come back?
Wan began to shake. A person! It had been a dozen years since be had smelled or touched a person! And then only his parents. But it might not be a person, it could be something else. He launched himself toward the dock where that other person had been, craftily avoiding the main passages, hurling himself down narrower, less direct ways where he did not think any stranger was likely to go. Wan knew every inch of the outpost, at least as far within it as it was possible to travel without coming to the dead-end locked walls that he did not know how to open. It took him only a few minutes to reach the place where he had carefully rearranged the debris left by the outpost’s one visitor.
Everything was there. But not, he saw, as he had left it. Some things bad been picked up and dropped again.
Wan knew he had not done that. Apart from the discipline he had always imposed upon himself, of leaving the outpost exactly as he had found it, so that no one could ever know he was there, this time he had been especially careful to arrange the litter precisely as it had been left. Someone else was on the outpost.
and he was many minutes away from his ship.
Cautiously but quickly he returned to the docks on the other side, pausing at every intersection to look and smell and listen. He reached his ship and hovered at the hatch, indecisively. Run or explore?
But the smell was stronger now, and irresistible.
Step by step he ventured down one of the long, dead-end corridors, ready to retreat instantly.
A voice! Whispering, almost inaudible. But it was there. He peered around a doorway, and his heart pounded. A person! Huddled against a wall, with a metal object at its lips, staring at him in terror. The person cried out at him: “Don’t you come any closer!” But he could not have if he had wanted to; he was frozen. It was not merely a person. It was a female person! The diagnostic signs were clear, as Tiny Jim had explained them to him: two swellings at the chest, a swelling around the hips and a narrowing at the waist, a smooth brow with no bulges over the eye sockets-yes, female! And young. And dressed in something that revealed bare legs and, oh, bare arms; smooth hair tied behind the head in a long tail, great eyes staring at him.
Wan responded as he had learned to respond. He fell gently to his knees, opened his garment and touched his sex. It had been several days since he had masturbated, and with no such stimulus as this; he was erect at once and shuddering with excitement.
He hardly noticed the noises behind him as three other persons came racing up. It was not until he was finished that he stood up, adjusted his clothing and smiled politely to them where they were ranged around the young female, talking excitedly and almost hysterically among themselves. “Hello,” he said. “I am Wan.” When they did not respond, he repeated the greeting in Spanish and Cantonese, and would have gone on to his other languages except that the second female person stepped forward and said:
“Hello, Wan. I’m Dorema Herter-Hall—they call me ‘Lurvy’. We’re very glad to see you.”
In all of Wan’s fifteen years there had never been twelve hours as exciting, as frightening and as heart-stoppingly thrilling, as these. So many questions! So much to say and to hear. So shuddery-pleasant to touch these other persons, and to smell their smells and feel their presence. They knew so incredibly little, and so astonishingly much-did not know how to get food from the lockers, had not used the dreaming couch, had never seen an Old One or talked with a Dead Man. And yet they knew of spaceships and cities, of walking under an open sky (“sky”? it took a long time for Wan to grasp what they were talking about) and of Making Love. He could see that the younger female was willing to show him more of that, but the older one did not wish her to; how strange. The older male did not seem to make love with anyone; even stranger. But it was all strange, and he was expiring of the delights and terrors of so much strangeness. After they had talked for a long time, and he had shown them some of the tricks of the outpost, and they had shown him some of the wonders of their ship (a thing like a Dead Man, but which had never been alive; pictures of people on Earth; a flush toilet) after all these wonders, the Lurvy person had commanded that they all rest. He had at once started toward the dreaming couch, but she had invited him to stay near them and he could not say no, though all through the sleep he woke from time to time, trembling and sniffing and staring around in the dim blue light.
So much excitement was bad for him. When they were all awake again he found himself still shaking, his body aching as though he had not slept at all. No matter. The questions and the chatter began again at once:
“And who are the Dead Men?”
“I don’t know. Let us ask them? Perhaps-sometimes they call themselves ‘prospectors’. From a place called ‘Gateway’.”
“And this place they are in, is it a Heechee artifact?”
“Heechee?” He thought; he had heard the word, long ago, but he did not know what it meant. “Do you mean the Old Ones?”
“What do the Old Ones look like?” And he could not say in words, so they gave him a sketch pad again and he tried to draw the big waggling jaws, the frowsty beards, and as each sketch was finished they snatched it up and held it before the machine they called “Vera”.
“This machine is like a Dead Man,” he offered, and they flew in with questions again:
“Do you mean the Dead Men are computers?”
“What is a ‘computer’?”
And then the questions would go the other way for a while, as they explained to him the meaning of “computer”, and presidential elections, and the 130-day fever. And all the while they were roaming the ship, as he explained to them what he knew of it. Wan was becoming very tired. He had had little experience of fatigue, because in his timeless life when he was sleepy he slept and did not get up until he was rested. He did not enjoy the feeling, or the scratchiness in his throat, or the headache. But he was too excited to stop, especially when they told him about the female person named Trish Bover. “She was here? Here in the outpost? And she did not stay?”
“No, Wan. She didn’t know you would come. She thought if she stayed she would die.” What a terrible pity! Although, Wan calculated, he had only been ten years old when she came, he could have been a companion for her. And she for him. He would have fed her and cared for her and taken her with him to see the Old Ones and the Dead Men, and been very happy.
“Then where did she go?” he asked.
For some reason, that question troubled them. They looked at each other. Lurvy said after a moment, “She got in her ship, Wan.”
“She went back to Earth?”
“No. Not yet. It is a very long trip for the kind of ship she had. Longer than she would live.”
The younger man, Paul, the one who coupled with Lurvy, took over. “She is still traveling, Wan. We don’t know where exactly. We are not even sure she is alive. She froze herself.”