Which reminded Stan of an unsolved puzzle. "But you weren't all that poor, were you? I mean, personally. Like when you had your, uh, accident. If that had happened to Tan, or almost anybody else I knew, there wouldn't have been any big payoff to finance your going to Gateway. Did you have Full Medical or something?"
She laughed, surprised. "We had no medical at all. What I had was my brother." Who, she said, let it be known that he was going to kill the pistolier. Whose sister's husband was a clerk in the slaughterhouse's accounts department. Who had juggled the books to pay them off, just to save his brother-in-law's worthless life. "It was supposed to be a death benefit, but I double-crossed them. I lived. Then, when I was well enough to travel, I took the rest of the money and used it to come to Gateway."
She looked so sad when she was telling about it that Stan couldn't help kissing her, which before long led to more of that pleasurable love-making. And why not? After all, they were really on a sort of honeymoon cruise, weren't they?
The days passed, ten, twelve, twenty. They slept holding each other tight, and never seemed to tire of it. It was a little cramped, to be sure. But the one-size-fits-all sleep sacks were constructed to be long enough for a stringbean Maasai or a corpulent Bengali, and skinny Stan and slim Estrella could fit inside together well enough for lovers. Sometimes they played music together, weird combinations of Stan's trumpet and the flute Estrella produced from her bags. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they played cards or read or just sat companionably together in silence. And sometimes Stan pulled out the recorded Message to the Heechee—the reason they were on this trip in the first place—and they played it for themselves and wondered what the Heechee (if any) would make of it.
This Message had been cobbled together in a hurry by God knew who—some of the big brains in the Gateway Corp, no doubt, and no doubt with Robinette Broadhead leaning over their shoulder. It didn't have any narration; the Heechee were not likely to understand any human language. Its only sound was music, first Tschaikowsky's somber "Pathetique" in its entirety, then, to show that humans had more than one musical mood, Prokoviev's jokey, perky Classical Symphony.
But mostly the Message was pictures: the empty Heechee tunnels on Venus; the nearly equally empty corridors on Gateway, when human beings first got there; a crew of prospectors warily climbing into an early Five; another crew, travel-stained, coming out of a Three bearing prayer fans and other Heechee gadgets; a picture of the pinwheel of the Galaxy, seen from above, with an arrow showing Earth's position in the Orion Arm; a slowly spinning globe of the Earth itself; quick flashes of human cities—New York, Tokyo, Sao Paolo, Rome; shots of people doing things— painting landscapes, running a tractor, peering through a telescope, masked around a hospital birthing bed where a new baby was coming into the world; then things that neither Estrella nor Stan had ever seen before. There was a series of pictures of an enormous floating object, then of a huge spindle-shaped chamber, blue Heechee metal walls and a strange, huge machine squatting on tractor treads in the middle of it. "The Food Factory and that other thing Broadhead discovered," Estrella guessed. Then the object's internal passageways, their walls Heechee metal that glowed in several colors, and a couple of—they both caught their breaths— queer, hairy creatures that looked almost human, and had to be the primitives Broadhead had discovered there. And, at the last, the shot of the Galaxy again, with a tiny image of a Heechee Five that was probably meant to be their own craft, slowly moving from the Orion arm to the Core.
When the showing was over—for the fourth or fifth time—Stan was thoughtfully rubbing the place where his wispy mustache had been until Estrella had teased him into shaving it off. They had been watching with their arms around each other. He yawned, which made her yawn, too, because they had both been getting sleepy. She moved slightly for a better fit, but not away, as she saw that he was staring at their stacked piles of supplies.
"What is it, Stan?" she asked.
He said pensively, "This is, what, the thirty-fifth day we've been out?"
She counted on her fingers. "Yes, something like that. Maybe the thirty-fourth. What about it?"
He sighed. "It's just that it looks like a long flight. I don't know if anybody's gone this far before."
She tried to reassure him. "Sometimes short flights take a long time, and the other way around, too. With Heechee ships you never can tell."
"I guess," he said, turning his head to kiss her ear in the way she liked. She wriggled companionably and put up her lips, and that was better than reassurance.
For Stan was happy with Estrella, who not only shared his sleeping pod but never, ever reminded him he was only a teenaged boy. He thought about it drowsily. He had never been happier in his life than he was this minute. So why worry about how long the trip would take? He didn't want it to end at all, would have been content if it had lasted a very long time indeed....
But it didn't.
It ended that day, almost at that very moment, when kissing had turned to caressing but before they began to take each other's clothes off, and it ended in a startling way.
The great drive coil gave them no warning. It was that other thing, the squat, domed gadget whose purpose had never been explained to them in any terms that made sense. It opened up. It extruded a crystalline corkscrew thing that began to mutter and glow, then growl, then begin to scream on a rising pitch until they could hear it no more, as the glow brightened, Fat, silent sparks showered all over them, making them wince—in surprise, not pain, because the sparks could not be felt. Then at last the drive coil got into the act, beginning to glow and brightening to an eye-hurting incandescent white, with revolving barber-pole stripes of hot red and chrome yellow. It began to shudder. Or the ship did; Stan couldn't tell which because he was shaking too, in a way that was frighteningly unlike anything he had felt before. He wasn't sleepy anymore as they clung to each other....
Then, without warning, everything stopped.
Estrella pulled herself free and turned on the outside eyes. Behind them was a scary spread of mottled pale blue. Before them, a sky of unbelievable stars, so many of them, so bright. And, very near, a large metallic dodecahedron, twelve symmetrical sides, each with a little dimple in its center. Their ship plunged at breakneck speed into one of the dimples and nestled there. Before Stan or Estrella could move, the port was opened from outside.
Something that looked like a furry, animated skeleton was glaring in at them. "I think it must be a Heechee," Estrella whispered numbly.
And, of course, it was. And that was the beginning of the longest, the unbelievably longest, day in Stan's life.
VII
Nothing in Stan's previous seventeen years of life had taught him how to greet an alien creature from another planet. He fell back on memories of the comic magazines of his childhood. He raised his hands above his head and declaimed: "We come in peace!"