The third thing was that half a dozen of the new Heechee clustered around him, twittering and jabbering so fast that he could not make out the words. Finally he understood that they were asking him to hold still. He gave the best imitation he could of the Heechee upper-arm shrug of assent, wondering what he was being asked to hold still for.
It turned out to be a complete physical examination. They had his clothes off in no time, and in less time still they were poking, prodding, peering. Slipping tiny, soft probes into ears and nostrils and anus. Nicking off imperceptibly tiny specimens of skin and hair and toenails and mucus. None of it was painful, but it was so damn undignified.
And already, Audee knew, a lot of time had passed back on Earth. The clock that ticked so slowly in the core was spinning away days and months at a click in the outside Galaxy.
The last thing that happened, or almost the last, was the most surprising of all.
When they had finished giving him the most complete physical examination any human being had ever had in so short a time, they allowed him to dress again. Then a short, pale female Heechee touched his shoulder reassuringly. Speaking slowly and carefully, as to a cat, she said, “We have finished with your Ancient Ancestor. You may have it back now.”
“Thank you,” Audee growled, snatching the pod away from her.
“Twice will tell you what you must do next.” The female Heechee smiled-the cheek-writhing that was the Heechee smile, of course.
“I bet she will,” Audee said bitterly, strapping on the pod and bending down.
Twice sounded exhausted. She had been drained dry, and it had been an ordeal for her; then she had been pumped full of instructions, and that wasn’t easy, either. “You are to make a speech,” she announced at once. “Don’t try to speak our tongue; you don’t do it well enough—”
“Why not?” demanded Audee, surprised; actually, he thought he had a pretty good accent by now, for a human.
“You only know the language of Do, not the language of Feel,” Twice explained, “and this is a matter of great emotional importance to all of us. So speak in English; I’ll translate for the audience.”
Audee scowled. “What audience?”
“Why, all the Heechee, of course. You must tell them in your own words that humans are going to help the Heechee deal with the problem of the Foe.”
“Oh, hell,” Audee exploded, cursing his undignified position, bent double to be near the pod; cursing the Foe; cursing the stupid impulse that had made him volunteer in the first place. “I hate making speeches! Anyway, what can I tell them that you don’t all already know?”
“Nothing, of course,” Twice agreed. “But it will be good if they hear it from you.”
So for the next ten minutes or so (while months and years were speeding by), Audee made his speech.
In a way it was a relief, because all the dozens of Heechee backed away from him to make a space; he saw several of them pointing objects at him and deduced that the objects were some sort of cameras. In another way, that time was worst of all, because as he was talking it occurred to him that Heechee were literal and when Twice said “all the Heechee” she undoubtedly meant all the Heechee. Billions of them! All looking with terror and fascination at, and making critical judgments on, this frightening alien, him!
They were indeed looking at him. All of them. All of the billions upon billions of them inside the core. Children in their schoolhalls and nurseries, workers stopped at their tasks, old ones, young ones-dead ones, too, for the massed minds of the Ancient Ancestors would not miss an experience like this. On the domed-in surface of planets, in the habitats in space, from the departing ships climbing up to their ordeal of passage through the Schwarzschild barrier . . . all of them were watching.
Audee had stage fright beyond belief.
He did it, though. He said, “I, uh, I—” And then he took a deep breath and started again. “I’m, ah, that is-I’m just one person, see, and I can’t speak for everybody. But I know what people are like—human people, I mean. And we’re not going to run away and hide like you guys. No offense. I mean, I know you can’t help it—”
He shrugged and shook his head. “I’m sorry if I’m hurting your feelings,” he said, forgetting the cameras, forgetting the billions and billions in the audience. “I just want to tell it like it is. We’re used to struggling, you see. We thrive on it. We catch on quick-look at the way we’ve learned how to do everything you can do, a lot of the time better. Maybe we can’t do anything about the Foe, but we’re sure going to try. I don’t mean I’m promising that-I don’t have any right to promise anything for anybody but me. All I mean is, I know that. That’s all, and,” he finished, “thanks a lot for listening.”
He stood there, obstinately smiling in silence, until the Heechee with the cameras at last, reluctantly, began to put them down.
A buzz of conversation broke out; Audee could not tell what they were saying, because none of them were saying it to him. But then the female Heechee who had given Twice back to him bent down to her pod for a moment and then approached. She said:
“I have this to say, Audee Walthers Third. I have consulted the Ancient Ancestors about the translation and I have it right, so I will say it in English.”
She took a breath, moved her razor-thin lips silently for a second in rehearsal, and then, shaking her wrists at him as she spoke, she said:
“Courage is not wisdom.
“Wisdom is appropriate behavior.
“Courage is sometimes suicide.
“That is how the Ancestors told me to say to you what I want to say.”
Audee waited for a second, but there didn’t seem to be any more. So he said, “Thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.”
Audee took his time about it, too. He had been a long time being poked and prodded and put on display, and besides the fact that his bladder was full, he wanted to be by himself for a minute. He took off his pod and left it outside the door, because he didn’t even want Twice with him just then.
As he was filling the tulip-shaped toilet receptacle with urine, as he was washing his hands, as he was peering at his face in the rotating mirror, he was thinking. There was a current beating time in his head to a different tempo. It had taken him ten seconds to get inside and close the door-outside nearly half a million seconds had passed, at the ratio of something like forty thousand to one. Five seconds to open his fly. A minute, maybe, to urinate. Two more minutes to wash his hands and look at his face in the mirror.
He tried to calculate: What did all that add up to? The numbers eluded him; out of weeks of habit he kept trying to convert them into Heechee arithmetic and failing; but surely, he thought, something like eight or nine months on the outside had gone by just while he was having a pee.
It added a curious dimension to the act of relieving his bladder to reflect that, while he was doing it, a child could have been conceived and born in the outside world.
He opened the door and announced, “I want to go home.”
Captain burrowed his way through the crowd to confront him. “Yes, Audee?” he asked, shaking his wrists in the negative; in this case it meant failure to understand, but Audee took it as refusal.
“No, I mean it,” Audee said firmly. “I want to go back before everybody I know is a candidate for a retirement home.”
“Yes, Audee?” said Captain again. Then he reflected. “Oh, I see,” he said. “You have been thinldng that we wanted you to remain here for an extended period. That won’t be necessary. You have been seen. The information has been spread. Other human beings will be coming before long, prepared for a longer stay.”