“Suit up,” I ordered Janine, preventing her from saying whatever inflammatory remark was in her mind. She obviously had decided to be placatory for the moment, because she did as she was told without comment. We checked each other’s seals, let Lurvy and Payter double-check us, crowded one by one into the exit and swung out into space on our tethers. The first thing we both did was look toward home-not very satisfying; the sun was only a bright star and I couldn’t see the Earth at all, though Janine usually claimed she could.. The second thing was to look toward the Food Factory, but I couldn’t see anything there. One star looks a lot like another one, especially down to the lower limits of brightness when there are fifty or sixty thousand of them in the sky.
Janine worked quickly and efficiently, tapping the bolts of the big ionthrusters strapped to the side of our ship while I inspected for tightness in the steel straps. Janine was really not a bad kid. She was fourteen years old and sexually excitable, true, but it was not at all her fault that she had no satisfactory person to practice being a woman on. Except me and, even less satisfactorily, her father. Everything checked out, as of course we bad been pretty sure it would. She was waiting by the stub of the big telescope’s mounting by the time I finished, and a measure of her good humor was that she didn’t even say anything about who let it crack loose and float away in the crazy time. I let her go back in the ship first. I took an extra couple of minutes to float out there. Not because I particularly enjoyed the view. Only because those minutes in space were about the only time I had had in three and a half years to be anything approaching alone.
We were still moving at better than three kilometers a second, but of course you couldn’t tell that with nothing around to compare. It felt a lot as though we weren’t moving at all. It had felt that way, a lot, for all of the three and a half years. One of the stories we had all been hearing for all that time from old Peter-he pronounces it “Pay-ter”-was about his father, the S.S. Werewolf. The werewolf couldn’t have been more than sixteen when The Big One ended. His special job was transporting jet engines to a Luftwaffe squadron that had just been fitted out with ME210s. Payter says his daddy went to his death apologizing for not getting the engines up to the squadron in time to cream the Lanes and the B-17s and change the outcome of the war. We all thought that was pretty funny-anyway, the first time we heard it. But that wasn’t the real funny part The real funny part was how the old Nazi freighted them. With a team. Not horses. Oxen. Not even pulling a wagon-it was a sledge! The newest, up to the minute, state of the art jet turbines-and what it took to get them operational was a tow-headed kid with a willow switch, ankle deep in cowflop.
Hanging there, creeping through space, on a trip that a Heechee ship could have done in a day-if we had had one, and could have made it do what we wanted it to-I felt a kind of a sympathy with Payter’s old man. It wasn’t that different with us. All we were missing was the cowflop.
Day 1284. The course change went very smoothly, after we all struggled into our life-support systems and wedged ourselves into our acceleration seats, neatly fitted to our air and vital-signs packs. Considering the tiny delta-V involved, it was hardly worth the effort. Not to mention that there wouldn’t be much use in life-support systems if anything went wrong enough for us to need them, five thousand A.U.s from home. But we did it by the book, because that was the way we had been doing it for three and a half years.
And-after we had turned, and the chemical rockets had done their thing and stopped and let the ionthrusters take over again, and after Vera had fumbled and clucked and hesitantly announced that it looked all right, as far as she could tell, of course pending confirmation some weeks later from Earth-we saw it! Lurvy was the first one out of her seat and at the visuals, and she snapped it into focus in a matter of seconds.
We hung around, staring at it. The Food Factory!
It jiggled annoyingly in the speculum, hard to keep in focus. Even an ion rocket contributes some vibration to a spaceship, and we were still a long way off. But it was there. It gleamed faintly blue in the darkness punctuated by stars, strangely shaped. It was the size of an office building and more oblong than anything else. But one end was rounded, and one side seemed to have a long, curved slice taken out of it. “Do you think it’s been hit by something?” Lurvy asked apprehensively.
“Ah, not in the least,” snapped her father. “It is how it was constructed! What do we know of Heechee design?”
“How do you know that?” Lurvy asked, but her father didn’t answer that; didn’t have to, we all knew that he had no way to know, was only speaking out of hope, because if it was damaged we were in trouble. Our bonuses were good just for going out there, but our hopes for real payoff, the only kind of payoff that would pay for seven round-trip years of misery, rested on the Food Factory being operable. Or at least studyable and copyable. “Paul!” Lurvy said suddenly. “Look at the side that’s just turning away-aren’t those ships?”
I squinted, trying to make out what she saw. There were half a dozen bulges on the long, straight side of the artifact, three or four smallish ones, two quite large. They looked like pictures I had seen of the Gateway asteroid, right enough, as far as I could tell. But- “You’re the ex-prospector,” I said. “What do you think?”
“I think they are. But, my God, did you see those two end Ones? They were huge. I’ve been in Ones and Threes, and I’ve seen plenty of Fives. But nothing like that! They’d hold, I don’t know, maybe fifty people! If we had ships like that, Paul-If we had ships like that-“
“If, if,” snarled her father. “If we had such ships, and if we could make them go where we wanted, yes, the world would be ours! Let us hope they still work. Let us hope any part of it works!”
“It will, Father,” caroled a sweet voice from behind us, and we turned to see Janine, propped with one knee under the digester hose, holding out a squeeze bottle of our best home-made genuine recycled grain neutral spirits. “I’d say this really calls for a celebration.” She smiled.
Lurvy looked at her thoughtfully, but her control was in good shape and she only said, “Why, that’s a nice idea, Janine. Pass it around.”
Janine took a ladylike small swig and handed it to her father. “I thought you and Lurvy might like a nightcap,” she said, after clearing her throat-she had just graduated to drinking the hard stuff on her fourteenth birthday, still did not like it, insisted on it only because it was an adult prerogative.
“Good idea,” Payter nodded. “I have been up now for, what is it, yes, nearly twenty hours. We will all need our rest when we touch down,” he added, handing the bottle to my wife, who squeezed two ounces into her well-practiced throat and said:
“I’m not really sleepy yet. You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to play Trish Bover’s tape again.”
“Oh, God, Lurvy! We’ve all seen it a zillion times!”
“I know, Janine. You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to, but I kept wondering if one of those ships was Trish’s and-Well, I just want to look at it again.”
Janine’s lips thinned, but the genes were strong and her control was as good as her sister’s when she wanted it to be-that was one of the things we were measured on, before they signed us for the mission. “I’ll dial it up,” she said, pushing herself over to Vera’s keyboard. Payter shook his head and retired to his own private, sliding the accordion-pleated barrier into place to shut us out, and the rest of us gathered around the console. Because it was tape we could get visual as well as sound, and in about ten seconds it crackled on and we could see poor, angry Trish Bover talking into the camera and saying the last words anybody would ever hear from her.