Question. Shell missions?
Professor Hegramet. There are at least four recorded missions that didn’t go as far as another star, but went clear out of the solar system. Out where the shell of comets hangs out, you know, half a light-year or so away. The missions are marked as failures, but I don’t think they are. I’ve been pushing the Board to give science bonuses for them. Three seemed to wind up in meteorite swarms. The other came out at a comet, all hundreds of A.U. out. Meteorite swarms, of course, are usually the debris of old, dead comets.
Question. Are you saying the Heechee ate comets?
Professor Hegramet. Ate the things comets are made out of. Do you know what they are? Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen — the same elements you ate for breakfast. I think they used comets for feedstocks to manufacture what they ate. I think one of those missions to the cometary shell is sooner or later going to turn up a Heechee food factory, and then maybe we won’t have anybody ever starving anywhere anymore.
After a moment Sigfrid says, “It’s all right for you to cry if you want to, Rob,” which is the way that I suddenly realize that that’s what I’m doing.
“Jesus,” I say, and blow my nose into one of the tissues that he always keeps handy right next to the mat. He waits.
“Only I did get out,” I say.
And Sigfrid does something else I had never expected from him; he permits himself a joke. “That,” he says, “is pretty obvious, from the fact that you’re here.”
“This is bloody exhausting, Sigfrid,” I say.
“I am sure it is for you, Rob.”
“I wish I had a drink.”
Click. “The cabinet behind you,” says Sigfrid, “that has just opened contains some rather good sherry. It isn’t made from grapes, I’m sorry to say; the health service doesn’t go in for luxuries. But I don’t think you’ll be aware of its natural-gas origins. Oh, and it is laced with just a dollop of THC to soothe the nerves.”
“Holy Christ,” I say, having run out of ways of expressing surprise. The sherry is all he says it is, and I can feel the warmth of it expanding inside me.
“Okay,” I say, setting the glass down. “Well. When I got back to Gateway they’d written the expedition off. We were almost a year overdue. Because we’d been almost inside the event horizon. Do you understand about time dilation? . . . Oh, never mind,” I say, before he can answer, “that was a rhetorical question. What I mean is, what happened was the phenomenon they call time dilation. You get that close to a singularity and you come up against the twin paradox. What was maybe a quarter of an hour for us was almost a year by clock time — clock time on Gateway, or here, or anywhere else in the nonrelativistic universe, I mean. And—”
I take another drink, then I go on bravely enough:
“And if we’d gone any farther down we would have been going slower and slower. Slower, and slower, and slower. A little closer, and that fifteen minutes would have turned out to be a decade. A little closer still, and it would have been a century. It was that close, Sigfrid. We were almost trapped, all of us.
“But I got out.”
And I think of something and look at my watch. “Speaking of time, my hour’s been up for the last five minutes!”
“I have no other appointments this afternoon, Rob.”
I stare. “What?”
Gently:
“I cleared my calendar before your appointment, Rob.”
I don’t say “Holy Christ” again, but I surely think it. “This makes me feel right up against the wall, Sigfrid!” I say angrily.
“I am not forcing you to stay past your hour, Rob. I am pointing out that you have that option if you choose.”
I mull that for a while.
“You are one brassbound ringding of a computer, Sigfrid,” I say. “All right. Well, you see, there was no way we could get out considered as a unit. Our ships were caught, well inside the of point of no return, and there just ain’t no way home from there. But Danny A., he was a sharp article. And he knew all about the holes in the laws. Considered as a unit, we were stuck.
“But we weren’t a unit! We were two ships! And each of those came apart into two other ships! And if we could somehow transfer acceleration from one part of our system to the other and you know, kick part of us deeper into the well and at the same kick the other part up and out — then part of the unit could get free!”
Long pause.
“Why don’t you have another drink, Rob?” says Sigfrid courteously. “After you finish crying, I mean.”
Chapter 30
Fear! There was so much terror jumping around inside my skin that I couldn’t feel it anymore; my senses were saturated with it; I don’t know if I screamed or babbled, I only did what Danny A. told me to do. We’d backed the two ships together and linked up, lander-to-lander, and we were trying to manhandle gear, instruments, clothes, everything that moved out of the first ship into whatever corners we could find of the second, to make room for ten people where five were a tight fit. Hand to hand, back and forth, we bucket-brigaded the stuff. Dane Metchnikov’s kidneys must have been kicked black-and-blue; he was the one who was in the landers, changing the fuel-metering switches to blow every drop of hydrox at once. Would we survive that? We had no way of knowing. Both our Fives were armored, and we didn’t expect to damage the Heechee-metal shells. But the contents of the shells would be us, all of us in the one of them that went free — or we hoped would go free — and there wasn’t really any way to tell whether we could come free in the first place, or whether what would come free would be nothing but jelly, anyway. And all we had was minutes, and not very many of them. I guess I passed Klara twenty times in ten minutes, and I remember that once, the
Dear Voice of Gateway:
On Wednesday of last week I was crossing the parking lot at the Safeway Supermarket (where I had gone to deposit my food stamps) on the way to the shuttle bus to my apartment, when I saw an unearthly green light. A strange spacecraft landed nearby. Four beautiful, but very tiny, young women in filmy white robes emerged and subjected me helpless by means of a paralyzing ray. They kept me prisoner on their craft for nineteen hours. During that time they subjected me to certain indignities of a sexual nature which I am honor-bound not to reveal. The leader of the four, whose name was Moira Glow-Fawn, stated that, like us, they have not succeeded in fully overcoming their animal heritage. I accepted their apology and agreed to deliver four messages to Earth. Messages One and Four I may not announce until the proper time. Message Two is a private one for the manager of my apartment project. Message Three is for you at Gateway, and it has three parts: 1, there must be no more cigarette smoking; 2, there must be no more mixed schooling of boys and girls at least until the second year of college; 3, you must stop all exploration of space at once. We are being watched. first time, we kissed. Or aimed at each other’s lips, and came close enough. I remember the smell of her, and once lifting my head because the musk oil was so strong and not seeing her, and then forgetting it again. And all the time, out of one viewscreen or another, that immense broad, baleful blue ball hung flickering outside; the racing shadows across its surface that were phase effects made fearful pictures; the gripping grab of its gravity waves tugged at our guts. Danny A. was in the capsule of the first ship, watching the time and kicking bags and bundles down to the lander hatch to pass on, through the hatch, through the landers, up to the capsule of the second ship where I was pushing them out of the way, any which way, just to make room for more. “Five minutes,” he’d yell, and “Four minutes!” and “Three minutes, get the goddamn lead out!” and then, “That’s it! All of you! Drop what you’re doing and come on up here.” And we did. All of us. All but me. I could hear the others yelling, and then calling to me; but I’d fallen behind, our own lander was blocked, I couldn’t get through the hatch! And I tugged somebody’s duffelbag out of the way, just as Klara was screaming over the TBS radio, “Rob! Rob, for God’s sake, get up here!” And I knew it was too late; and I slammed the hatch and dogged it down, just as I heard Danny A.’s voice shouting, “No! No! Wait…