The thing at which Tan had had no practice at all was being confined in a tiny space with nothing to do. "I wish we had at least brought our damn instruments," he growled to Stan, who shrugged.
"No room," he said.
Estrella looked up from her plate. "We could play a few hands of poker," she offered. Tan, his lips pressed tightly together, shook his head. "Or," she added, "we could just talk. There is so much I don't know about you guys. Oltan? What was your life like in Istanbul?"
He declined to be cheered up. "I drove a van for a living," he said sourly. "I lived with my mother and father and my kid sister, Naslan, and I had five, actually five, regular girlfriends, who were very fond of me and extremely obliging. What else is there to tell?"
She nodded as though that were a pleasing answer and turned to Stan. "How about you?"
Stan did his best to cooperate. "My father was a code clerk at the American consulate, a very well-paid job, when he met my mother. She was Turkish, but Christian—a Methodist, like him. I was born in the hospital at the embassy in Ankara, which was American soil so I would be born as an American, like you."
That made her smile. "Not much like me."
"You mean the well-paid part? That was only when I was little. My mother died when I was seven, and after that—" He shrugged without finishing the sentence, not willing to tell her about his father's steady decline to drunkeness.
Tan, listening without patience, straightened up and pushed himself away. "I have to pee," he said.
Stan looked after him, then back to Estrella. "And you?" he said, over the plashing sounds from the crapper. "You said you were a butcher?"
She reached up to stroke her left, off-center cheekbone. "Until the accident, yes. In Montana. I'm a mixture, too, Stan. My father was Basque, mostly. My mother was Navajo, with a little Hopi, but a big woman, and strong. There was no work around the Four Corners so they managed to get up to Montana to work in the corrals. You know the bison ranches in America?"
"Oh, yes. Well, sort of. I read stories when I was little. Before I thought of Gateway I thought it would be great to be a cowboy, sitting around the campfire at night, herding the bison across the prairies'."
That time she laughed out loud. "You don't herd bison, Stan. They won't let you. You let them run free, because the prairie grasses are all they need to eat anyway. Then, when they're old enough for slaughter, you lay a trail of something they like to eat even better than the prairie grasses. That takes them right into the corrals, that have a three-meter steel-plate fence all around them, because the bison can jump right over anything smaller. They can run fast, too, a hundred kilometers an hour. And then, one by one, handlers like my parents let them into the chutes to the slaughterhouse. And then the pistoliers shoot them in the head with a big gun that has a kind of a piston, goes right into the brain and comes out again, ready for the next one. When they're dead the belt carries them to me, to slit their throats. Then I clamp on the irons from the overhead tracks and they're picked up so the blood can drain, and taken to the coolers before they're cut into steaks and roasts. Each bison has nearly fifty liters of blood, which goes into the tank below—what doesn't go onto me."
Tan had come out of the head, fastening his clothes as he listened. "Yes, Estrella," he said argumentatively, "but you said a bull stepped on you and broke your head. How does a dead bison step on you?"
"It wasn't a dead one," she said shortly.
"But if the pistolier shot it in the head—"
"This time he shot it only in the shoulder. It was very alive when it came to me, and very angry."
"It sounds like a nasty accident," Stan offered.
"No. It wasn't an accident. He did it on purpose. He was a man with pricks in his eyes, too, Tan, and when I would not go to bed with him he taught me a lesson."
Twentieth day. Twenty-first day. They didn't play cards much anymore, because they couldn't concentrate. They didn't even talk much. They had already said everything they could say to each other about their hopes, and none of them wanted to speak their fears out loud. Their nerves were taut with the itch of a gambler with a ticket on a long-shot that is coming up fast in the stretch, but maybe not quite fast enough. Finally Estrella said firmly, "There is no use fidgeting around. We should sleep as much as we can.
Stan knew that was wise. They would need all their strength and alertness to do whatever there was to be done when they were—there. Wherever "there" turned out to be.
The wise advice was hard to follow, though. Hard as it was for Stan to make himself fall asleep, it was even harder for him to make himself stay that way. He woke frequently, counting the time by minutes as the twenty-first day passed and the twenty-second began.
Then none of them could sleep at all. Looking at the time every few seconds. Arguing fiercely about at what hour and what minute turnaround had come, and thus at what minute and hour they would arrive....
And then they did arrive. They knew it when the coil winked out.
And, at once, every instrument on the ship went wild.
The readings were preposterous. They said their Three was immersed in a tenuous plasma, hotter than the Sun, drenched with death-dealing radiation of all kinds, and then Stan understood why their Three was armored.
This was no planet to make them rich with its abandoned trove of Heechee treasures. There wasn't even a star close enough to matter. "Get us the hell out of here!" Tan was bellowing, and Estrella shrilled:
"No, take readings first! Pictures! Make observations!"
But there was nothing to observe beyond what the instruments had told them already. When Stan closed his hand on the go-teat Estrella didn't object anymore, but only wept.
The flight back was no longer than the flight out, but it seemed interminable. They could not wait for it to be over, and then, when it was, the bad news began.
The ancient Oriental woman who climbed aboard their Three as soon as it docked listened to their story with half an ear. It was the instrument readings that interested her, but she absently answered a few questions. "Yes," she said, nodding, "you entered a supernova remnant. The Heechee were very interested in stars that were about to explode; many courses led to where they could observe one. But in the time since, of course, some of those stars have actually exploded. Like yours. And all that is left is a nebula of superheated gases. It is a good thing for you that your Three was armored."
Estrella was biting her lower lip. "Do you think there will be a science bonus, at least?"
The old woman considered. "Perhaps. You would have to ask Hector Montefiore. Nothing very big, though. There is already a large body of data about such objects."
The three looked at each other in silence. Then Stan managed a grin. "Well, guys," he said, "it's like my father used to say. When you fall off your horse, the best thing to do is get right back on again."
The woman peered at them. "What is this talk of horses?"
"He means," Estrella explained, "we will all ship out on another mission the first chance we get."
"Oh," the old woman said, looking surprised, "you were Out when it happened, weren't you? You didn't hear. They've solved the guidance problem. There are no more missions. The Gateway exploration program has been terminated."
V
Terminated! Gateway terminated? No more missions? No more of those scared, valiant Gateway prospectors daring everything to fly out on magic-mystery flights to pick over the tantalizing scraps the long-ago Heechee had left behind when they went away—whenever they went, and wherever it was they went to?
It was all Robinette Broadhead's doing again. While Estrella and the boys were Out, things had gone crazy at the Food Factory his people had discovered, and at some other fabulous Heechee ship that was nearby. Broadhead had flown there solo to straighten it out, and had succeeded. And in the process had not only elevated the value of his already sky-high fortune to incalculable heights with this fabulous new cache of Heechee wonders, but in the process had learned the secret of controlling Heechee spacecraft.