“Why should I?” Wan demanded.
Patiently, Paul coaxed: “Because in that way you can make up for the fever. I don’t think you understand how important you are, Wan. The knowledge in your head might mean saving people from starvation. Millions of lives, Wan.”
Wan frowned over that concept for a moment, but “millions” was meaningless to him as applying to human beings-he had not yet adjusted to “five”. “You make me angry,” he scolded.
“I don’t mean to, Wan.”
“It is not what you mean to, it is what you do. You have just told me that,” the boy grumbled spitefully. “All right. What do you want?”
“We want you to tell us everything you know,” Paul said promptly. “Oh, not all at once. But as you remember. And we want you to go through this whole Food Factory with us and explain everything in it-as far as you can, I mean.”
“This place? There is nothing here but the dreaming room, and you won’t let me use that!”
“It is all new to us, Wan.”
“It is nothing! The water does not run, there is no library, the Dead Men are hard to talk to, nothing grows! At home I have everything, and much of it is working, so you can see for yourself.”
“You make it sound like heaven, Wan.”
“See for yourself! If I can’t dream, there is no reason to stay here!”
Paul looked at the others, perplexed. “Could we do that?”
“Of course! My ship will take us there-not all of you, no,” Wan corrected himself. “But some. We can leave the old man here. There is no woman for him, anyway, so there is no pairing to destroy. Or even,” he added cunningly, “only Janine and I can go. Then there will be more room in the ship. We can bring you back machines, books, treasures-“
“Forget that, Wan,” Janine said wisely. “They’ll never let us do that.”
“Not so fast, my girl,” her father said. “That is not for you to decide. What the boy is saying is interesting. If he can open the gates of heaven for us, who are we to stand outside in the cold?”
Janine studied her father, but his expression was bland. “You don’t mean you’d let Wan and me go there alone?”
“That,” he said, “is not the question. The question is, how can we most rapidly complete this God-bedamned mission and return to our reward. There is no other.”
“Well,” said Lurvy after a moment, “we don’t have to decide that right now. Heaven will wait for us, for all our lives.”
Her father said, “That is true, yes. But, expressed concretely, some of us have less lives to wait than others.”
Every day new messages came in from Earth. Infuriatingly, these related only to a remote past, before Wan, irrelevant to everything they were doing or planning now: Submit chemical analyses of this. X-ray that. Measure these other things. By now the slow packets of photons that transmitted the word of their reaching the Food Factory had arrived at Downlink-Vera on Earth, and perhaps replies were already on their way. But they would not arrive for weeks. The base at Triton had a smarter computer than Vera, and Paul and Lurvy argued for transmitting all their data there for interpretation and advice. Old Peter rejected the idea with fury. “Those wanderers, gypsies? Why should we give them what costs us so much to get!”
“But nobody’s questioning us, Pa,” Lurvy coaxed. “It’s all ours. The contracts spell it all out.”
“No!”
So they fed all that Wan told them into Shipboard-Vera, and Vera’s small, slow intelligence painfully sorted the bits into patterns. Even into graphics. The external appearance of the place Wan had come from-it was probably not a very good likeness, because it was apparent that Wan had not had the curiosity to study it very closely. The corridors. The machines. The Heechee themselves; and each time Wan offered corrections:
“Ah, no. They both have beards, males and females. Even when they are quite young. And the breasts on the females are-“ He held his hands just below his rib cage, to show how low they swung. “And you do not give them the right smell.”
“Holos don’t smell at all, Wan,” said Paul.
“Yes, exactly! But they do, you see. In rut, they smell very much.”
And Vera mumbled and whined over the new data, and shakily drew in the new revisions. After hours of this, what had been a game for Wan turned into drudgery. When he began saying, “Yes, it is perfect, that is exactly how the Dead Men’s room looks,” they all understood that he was merely agreeing with anything that would stop the boredom for a while, and gave him a rest. Then Janine would take him for a wander through the corridors, sound and vision pickups strapped to her shoulder, in case he said something of value or pointed out a treasure, and they spoke of other things. His knowledge was as astonishing as his ignorance. Both were unpredictable.
It was not only Wan that needed study. Every hour Lurvy or old Peter would come up with a new idea for diverting the Food Factory from its programmed drive, so that they could try to accomplish their original purpose. None worked. Every day more messages came in from Earth. They were still not relevant. They were not even very interesting; Janine let a score of letters from her pen-pals stay in Vera’s memory without bothering to retrieve them, since the messages she was getting from Wan filled her needs. Sometimes the communications were odd. For Lurvy, the announcement that her college had named her its Woman of the Year. For old Peter, a formal petition from the city he had been born in. He read it and burst into laughter. “Dortmund still wishes me to run for Burgermeister! What nonsense!”
“Why, that’s really nice,” Lurvy said agreeably. “It’s quite a compliment.”
“It is quite nothing,” he corrected her severely. “Burgermeister! With what we have I could be elected president of the Federal Republic, or even-“ He fell silent, and then said gloomily, “If, to be sure, I ever see the Federal Republic again.” He paused, looking over their heads. His lips worked silently for a moment, and then he said: “Perhaps we should go back now.”
“Aw, Pop,” Janine began. And stopped, because the old man turned on her the look of an alpha wolf on a cub. There was a sudden tension among them, until Paul cleared his throat and said:
“Well, that’s certainly one of our options. Of course, there’s a legal question of contract-“
Peter shook his head. “I have thought of that. They owe us so much already! Simply for stopping the fever, if they pay us only one percent of the damage we save it is millions. Billions. And if they won’t pay-“ He hesitated, and then said, “No, there is no question that they won’t pay. We simply must speak to them. Report that we have stopped the fever, that we cannot move the Food Factory, that we are coming home. By the time a return message can arrive we will be weeks on our way.”
“And what about Wan?” Janine demanded.
“He will come with us, to he sure. He will be among his own kind again, and that is surely what is best for him.”
“Don’t you think we ought to let Wan decide that? And what happened to sending a bunch of us to investigate his heaven?”
“That was a dream,” her father said coldly. “Reality is that we cannot do everything. Let someone else explore his heaven, there is plenty for all; and we will be back in our homes, enjoying riches and fame. It is not just a matter of the contract,” he went on, almost pleadingly. “We are saviors! There will be lecture tours and endorsements for the advertising! We will be persons of great power!”
“No, Pop,” Janine said, “listen to me. You’ve all been talking about our duty to help the world-feed people, bring them new things to make their lives better. Well, aren’t we going to do our duty?”
He turned on her furiously. “Little minx, what do you know about duty? Without me you would be in some gutter in Chicago, waiting for the welfare check! We must think of ourselves as well!”