My deepest love to all three of you. If you can, send me a holo of the cherry blossoms-they are in bloom soon, are they not? One loses sense of Home time here!
Or you can take a shot at the bonuses: a hundred million dollars if you find an alien civilization, fifty million for the first crew to locate a Heechee ship bigger than a Five, a million bucks to locate a habitable planet.
Seems funny that they would only pay a lousy million for a whole new planet? But the trouble is, once you’ve found it, what do you do with it? You can’t export a lot of surplus population when you can only move them four at a time. That, plus the pilot, is all you can get into the largest ship in Gateway. (And if you don’t have a pilot, you don’t get the ship back.) So the Corporation has underwritten a few little colonies, one’s very healthy on Peggy and the others are spindly. But that does not solve the problem of twenty-five billion human beings, most of them underfed.
You’ll never get that kind of bonus on a rerun. Maybe you can’t get some of those bonuses at all; maybe the things they’re for don’t exist.
It is strange that no one has ever found a trace of another intelligent creature. But in eighteen years, upwards of two thousand flights, no one has. There are about a dozen habitable planets, plus another hundred or so that people could live on if they absolutely had to, as we have to on Mars and on, or rather in, Venus. There are a few traces of past civilizations, neither Heechee nor human. And there are the souvenirs of the Heechee themselves. At that, there’s more in the warrens of Venus than we’ve found almost anywhere else in the Galaxy, so far. Even Gateway was swept almost clean before they abandoned it.
Damn Heechee, why did they have to be so neat?
So we gave up on the rerun deals because there wasn’t enough money in them, and put the special finders’ bonuses out of our heads, because there’s just no way of planning to look for them.
And finally we just stopped talking, and looked at each other, and then we didn’t even look at each other.
No matter what we said, we weren’t going. We didn’t have the nerve. Klara’s had run out on her last trip, and I guess I hadn’t ever had it.
“Well,” said Klara, getting up and stretching, “I guess I’ll go up and win a few bucks at the casino. Want to watch?”
I shook my head. “Guess I’d better get back to my job. If I still have one.”
So we kissed good-bye at the upshaft, and when we came to my level I reached up and patted her ankle and jumped off. I was not in a very good mood. We had spent so much effort trying to reassure ourselves that there weren’t any launches that offered a promise of reward worth the risks that I almost believed it.
Of course, we hadn’t even mentioned the other kind of rewards: the danger bonuses.
You have to be pretty frayed to go for them. Like, the Corporation will sometimes put up half a million or so incentive bonus for a crew to take the same course as some previous crew tried and didn’t come back from. Their reasoning is that maybe something went wrong with the ship, ran out of gas or something, and a second ship might even rescue the crew from the first one. (Fat chance!) More likely, of course, whatever killed the first crew would still be there, and ready to kill you.
Then there was a time when you could sign up for a million, later they raised it to five million, if you would try changing the course settings after launch.
The reason they raised the bonus to five million was that crews stopped volunteering when none of them, not one of them, ever came back. Then they cut it out, because they were losing too many ships, and finally they made it a flat no-no. Every once in a while they come up with a bastard control panel, a snappy new computer that’s supposed to work symbiotically with the Heechee board. Those ships aren’t good gambling bets, either. There’s a reason for the safety lock on the Heechee board. You can’t change destination while it’s on. Maybe you can’t change destination at all, without destroying the ship.
I saw five people try for a ten-million-dollar danger bonus once. Some Corporation genius from the permanent-party was worrying about how to transport more than five people, or the equivalent in cargo, at once. We didn’t know how to build a Heechee ship, and we’d never found a really big one. So he figured that maybe we could end-run around that obstacle by using a Five as a sort of tractor.
So they built a sort of space barge out of Heechee metal. They loaded it with scraps of junk, and ran a Five out there on lander power. That’s just hydrogen and oxygen, and it’s easy enough to pump that back in. Then they tied the Five to the barge with monofilament Heechee metal cables.
Vessel 5-2, Voyage 08D33. Crew L. Konieczny, B. Konieczny, P. Ito, F. Lounsbury, A. Akaga.
Transit time out 27 days 16 hours. Primary not identified but probability high as star in cluster 47 Tucanae.
Summary: “Emerged in free-fall. No planet nearby. Primary A6, very bright and hot, distance approximately 3.3 A.U.
“By masking the primary star we obtained a glorious view of what seemed to be two or three hundred nearby very bright stars, apparent magnitude ranging from 2 to -7. However, no artifacts, signals, planets or landable asteroids were detected. We could remain on station only three hours because of intense radiation from the A6 star. Larry and Evelyn Konieczny were seriously ill on the return trip, apparently due to radiation exposure, but recovered. No artifacts or samples secured.”
We watched the whole thing from Gateway on PV. We saw the cables take up slack as the Five put a strain on them with its lander jets. Craziest-looking thing you ever saw.
Then they must have activated the long-range start-teat.
All we saw on the PV was that the barge sort of twitched, and the Five simply disappeared from sight.
It never came back. The stop-motion tapes showed at least the first little bit of what happened. The cable truss had sliced that ship into segments like a hard-boiled egg. The people in it never knew what hit them. The Corporation still has that ten million; nobody wants to try for it anymore.
I got a politely reproachful lecture from Shicky, and a really ugly, but brief, P-phone call from Mr. Hsien, but that was all. After a day or two Shicky began letting us take time off again.
I spent most of it with Klara. A lot of times we’d arrange to meet in her pad, or once in a while mine, for an hour in bed. We were sleeping together almost every night; you’d think we would have had enough of that. We didn’t. After a while I wasn’t sure what we were copulating for, the fun of it or the distraction it gave from the contemplation of our own self-images. I would lie there and look at Klara, who always turned over, snuggled down on her stomach, and closed her eyes after sex, even when we were going to get up two minutes later. I would think how well I knew every fold and surface of her body. I would smell that sweet, sexy smell of her and wish — oh, wish! Just wish, for things I couldn’t spell out: for an apartment under the Big Bubble with Klara, for an airbody and a cell in a Venusian tunnel with Klara, even for a life in the food mines with Klara. I guess it was love. But then I’d still be looking at her, and I would feel the inside of my eyes change the picture I was seeing, and what I would see would be the female equivalent of myself: a coward, given the greatest chance a human could have, and scared to take advantage of it.