They could have gone to one of the other sectors. Even eight-year-old Sneezy had done it many times, alone or with classmates. But there was nothing in either of the other sectors that was not duplicated in their own, and the children there were strangers.
There was no rule against Sneezy going almost anywhere he liked, in fact, with companions or without-at least, if you didn’t count the forbidden cubicles on the outer perimeter where the Dream Seats were constantly manned. Sneezy wasn’t forbidden to play in dangerous areas. There weren’t any dangerous areas. In the huge Watch Wheel there were certainly places where truly dangerous amounts of energy were deployed without warning-for signal bursts, for spin regulation, for mass shifting-but there was no employment of energy anywhere on the Wheel that was not constantly monitored by unflagging machine inteffigences, and often enough by stored dead human or Heechee intelligences as well. And of course there was no danger from people. There were no kidnapers or rapists on the Wheel. There were no uncapped wells to fall into or forests to get lost in. There were groves of trees here and there, sure, but none that even an eight-year-old could not see his way out of from its very center. If any child got lost even for a moment, he had but to ask the nearest workthing for directions and be set at once on his way. That is, a human child would do that. A Heechee child like Sneezy didn’t even need to find a workthing, because he could simply inquire of the Ancient Ancestors in his pod.
The Watch Wheel was so safe, . in fact, that most of the children, and even some of the grown-ups that served it, sometimes forgot what supreme danger they were watching for.
So they had to be reminded. Even for the children there were the frequent Drills-especially for the children, because when and if the watchers in the Dream Seats ever found what they were watching for, as some day they surely would, the children would have to take care of themselves. No adult would then be able to take care of them. Even the workthings would be busy, their programs instantly switched to analysis and communication and data storage. The children would have to find an approved place to hide-to stay out of the way, really-and cower in it until they were told they could come out again.
There were precedents for this sort of thing. In the middle of the twentieth century, schoolkids in America and the Soviet Union had had to learn to leap under their desks, lie prone, clasp their hands over the backs of their necks, and sweat with fear-if they failed in any of this, their teachers told them, the nuclear bombs would French-fry them.
For the children on the Watch Wheel the stakes were higher. It was not only their own lives that might be lost. If they caused trouble, what might be lost was, perhaps, everything.
So when there was a Drill they, too, sweated with fear.
At least, they usually did. But now and then there was a Class Two Drill.
“Class Two” meant only that routine precautions were to be taken because a supply ship was coming in. Class Two Drills were not scary at all-at least, they were not if you didn’t think the thing through. (If you did, it was frightening to realize that the Watch Wheel had to shut down all its normal activities, while even the off-duty Watchers hurried into the extra Dream Seats, to make sure that some undesired thing was not showing up under cover of that very desired thing, a supply ship.)
There was no school on the days when a supply ship came in. There was no work done anywhere on the Wheel (always excepting the Dream Seats), because everybody wduld be too busy with the ship docking. Those families who had served their time and were ready to be rotated would be packing, and gathering at the dock to get their first sight of the ship that would take them back to the warmly inviting huddle of stars that was the Galaxy. And everybody else would be getting ready to oversee offloading the supplies and the new personnel.
By the time Sneezy got to the schoolhall corner he had already eaten his sandwich, and Harold was waiting. “You’re late, Dopey!” the human boy snapped.
“They didn’t sound the sighting signal yet,” Sneezy pointed out, “so we aren’t late for anything.”
“Don’t argue! That’s a baby thing to do. Come on.”
Harold led the way. He assumed that was his right. He was not only older than Sneezy (at least in personal time, though actually, in terms of the great, ever-expanding clock of the universe, Sneezy had been born several weeks before Harold’s great-great-grandfather), but he out-massed Sneezy three to one, forty kilograms of Harold to not much more than fifteen for the youthful, skeletally skinny Heechee boy. Harold Wroczek was a tall child with pale hair and blueberry-colored eyes. But he was not much taller than Sneezy, whose people were all emaciated and elongated by human standards.
To Harold’s annoyance, the other thing he was not more of than Sneezy was strong. Under that dry, leathery Heechee skin were powerful tendons and muscles. Though Harold tried to climb the handholds to the docking levels faster than Sneezy, the Heechee boy kept up easily. He was off the top of the ladder before Harold was, so Harold panted up to him: “You watch it, Dopey! Don’t get in the way of the work-things!”
Sneezy didn’t bother to answer. Not even a two-year-old on the Wheel would have been stupid enough to get in the way on such an occasion. The ships came only four or five times in a standard year. They didn’t linger. They didn’t dare to, and no one dared delay them.
So as soon as the boys were in the huge spindle-shaped space of Bay 2, they retreated as close to a wall as they could, well away from the scurrying carrythings and the grown-ups arriving to watch the ship come in.
All the landing docks, Bay 2 included, were on the inside of the Wheel. Its external shell was transparent at that point, but there wasn’t anything to be seen through it yet except the inside curve of the Wheel itsell with the other two landing docks, identical to the one they were in but empty, peering in at them.
“I can’t see the ship,” Harold complained.
Sneezy didn’t answer. The only answer was to say that of course Harold could not, since the ship was still approaching faster than the speed of light, but Harold had explained often enough to Sneezy that he didn’t enjoy the dumb Heechee habit of giving answers everybody knew to questions that weren’t really meant to be answered.
Traffic to the Wheel was almost all one-way, except for people. The human and Heechee complement were sent back when their tours of duty were over, usually roughly the equivalent of three standard Earth years. Then they went back to the Galaxy and their homes, wherever those might be. Most went to Earth, quite a few to Peggys Planet, others to one of the habitats. (Even the Heechee usually went to some human planet or place rather than back to their real homes in the core, because of time dilation and mostly because there was too much need for Heechee in one capacity or another outside it.) But supplies never went back. Machinery, instruments, parts, recreational materials, medical outfits, food-they stayed. When the items were consumed or broken or outmoded (or when the food supplies passed through the bodies of Wheel inhabitants to become excrement), they were recycled or simply retained as extra mass for the Wheel. Extra mass was a good thing. The more mass the Watch Wheel had, the less it would be affected by movements inside it, and so the less energy would have to be expended to keep it spinning straight and true.