Tarsheesh was hurtling toward them around the rim of the lake. As soon as he came close, Tan called, "Are we making too much noise?"
Tarsheesh grabbed a bracket and stopped himself, panting in excitement. "Noise? No! It is the news that just came! You haven't heard? The Herter-Hall party has reached the object in the Oort cloud, and it is big, and it is Heechee, and it is still working!"
There hadn't been that much excitement in Gateway in years. The Herter-Hall mission—the Broadhead-financed human-built rocket ship that had been chugging its way up to the Oort cloud for as long as Stan could remember—had indeed found something that made it all worthwhile. Hanging out there was nothing less than a whole working Heechee orbiter, the size of an ocean liner, of a kind never seen before! The thing was not simply dead in its orbit there, it actually manufactured food! CHON-food, they called it, made mostly out of the basic elements that were in the comets of the Oort cloud, C(arbon), H(ydrogen), O(xygen), N(itrogen). And that antique Heechee creation was still doing it, after all those hundreds of thousands of years. And if they could bring it to a near-Earth orbit, as the Herter-Hall people were trying to do, and if they could feed it with comets and things as they entered the lower solar system, why, hunger for the human race might one day be over!
They speculated enviously on what that could be worth to the Herter-Hall family and to Robinette Broadhead himself, as backer of the expedition. "Billions," Stan said profoundly, and Tan gave him a look of scorn.
"Only billions? For a thing like that?"
"Billions of American dollars, you cow. Many billions for all of them, so Robinette Broadhead can add more billions to the billions he already owns. So you see, old Tan, what one lucky find can do?"
Tan did see. So did everybody else. When they checked the listings every one of the few missions offered had been snapped up. "Not even a One left! Nothing at all," Tan complained. "And yet they take money out of our balance every day, even when there is nothing for us to sign up for."
So they did. And kept on doing it, one day, and then another day, and then another. The boys followed the mission listings obsessively, but without much luck. A One showed up, then two more—both of them also Ones, and taken as soon as they appeared. Tan groaned when he saw the notice that the third ship was filled, because the name on the roster was his friend Tarsheesh. "I was hoping the three of us could ship together," he said, angry. "He wouldn't wait!"
Stan couldn't blame him. He even toyed with the thought of taking a One himself, leaving Tan behind. But then no more Ones showed up, either, so he didn't have to deal with that strain on his conscience.
There was a little traffic in the other direction. Two or three ships straggled back from their missions. All Ones, and mostly duds of one kind or another. And then a lordly Five made it back, and this one had had success. Well, some success. Not the dazzling kind, but not bad. They had reached an airless moon of a gas-giant planet they couldn't identify. It had Heechee artifacts, all right. They could see a domed Heechee-metal structure, and things nearby that looked sort of like they had been tractored vehicles, but they could only look. They couldn't touch. Their ship had no equipment to let them get out and move around in vacuum. The pictures they did come back with earned them enough of a bonus to retire to, respectively, Cincinnati, Johannesburg, Madrid, Nice and Mexico City, and their Five was thus open for anyone who cared to take it.
Not right away, of course. The elderly Englishwoman with the nine Out bangles caught Tan and Stan as they were leaving the mess hall, giddy with excitement. "There's your best bet, ducks! They'll clean it up and put in fresh stores, and then they'll send it right back to make the finds—this time with space suits and handling equipment aboard. Oh, it'll take a while. A fortnight or so, I imagine, but wait for it! Good color, too—but we don't want everyone to know, so, remember, softly-softly-catchee-monkey!" And hurried happily off to tell her secret to anyone else with the price of a cup of coffee.
Of course, the secret wasn't worth much more than that, especially to two young men who didn't have a fortnight or so to spare.
Then, without warning, a Five did appear on the list. It didn't do Stan and Tan any good, though. The listing appeared while they were asleep, and by the time they saw it the crew roster was long since filled.
What made it worse was that every day, every day of those few remaining days, there were fresh bulletins from the people who were making it really big, the Herter-Hall party on the Food Factory in the Oort. The Herter-Halls were strapping ion rockets onto the object to nudge it out of orbit and back toward Earth. Then further news: the object wouldn't be nudged. Somehow it counteracted the force applied, they couldn't say how. Then they found indications that there was someone else aboard. Then—oh, miraculous event!—they met that someone. And he was a human boy, with the human name of Wan! And he seemed to have a Heechee ship of his own that he used to commute between the Food Factory and some even larger, more complex Heechee vessel. A vast one, stuffed with Heechee machines of all kinds, and still working!
Tan was surly with envy, Stan little better. Snapping at each other, they parked themselves in front of the mission screen, taking turns to pee, refusing sleep. "The very next one," Tan vowed. "Three or Five, we will be on it!"
Stan concurred. "Damn right we will! We may not make trillions, like these people, or even billions, but we'll make something out of it, and we won't let anything get us away from this screen—"
But then something did.
Stan stopped in the middle of his vow, suddenly stricken. His eyes burned. His throat was suddenly agonizingly raw. His head pounded, and he could hardly breathe.
It was the Wrath of God again. Not exactly the same as before. Worse. Stan felt his whole body burning with fever. He was sick. Tan was in equal distress. Sobbing, his hands to his temples and curled up like a baby in the womb, he was floating away, the holdfast forgotten. It wasn't just sickness, either. Under the malaise was the familiar desperate sexual yearning, the loneliness, the unfocused, bitter anger....
And it went on, and on....
And then, without warning, it was over.
Stan reached out to catch Tan's flailing arm and dragged him back to a holdfast. "Jesus," he said, and Tan agreed.
"That was a pisser." And then, urgently, "Stan! Look!"
He was staring at the mission monitor. Gateway's computers, unaffected by whatever it was that drove every human momentarily mad, had been carrying out theirs programmed routine. Something new was posted on the screen:
Mission 2402
Armored Three, immediate departure
"Let's take it!" Tan yelled.
"Of course," Stan said, already logging in. In a moment their names appeared on the roster:
Mission 2402
Armored Three, immediate departure
Stanley Avery
Oltan Kusmeroglu
Rapturously the two boys pounded each other's arms and backs. "We made it!" Tan shouted.
"And just in time," Stan said, pointing. "Look at that!" Only seconds later another name had appeared:
Mission 2402
Armored Three, immediate departure