The other thing he had done was to turn Gateway itself into a backwater. There would be no more random flying to God knew where. There would be no more flying to anywhere at all until the big brains who planned Gateway missions decided how to use all this new data. Meanwhile, there was nothing at all. Everything was on hold. The scores of would-be explorers had nothing to do but grit their teeth and practice patience.
In the mess hall Tan nibbled at his meal, glowering. "So what's our plan supposed to be now?'' he demanded.
Stan swallowed his mouthful of vegetarian lasagna. "We wait. What else can we do? This can't last forever. The ships are still there! Sooner or later they'll start up again, and then maybe we'll have a chance at going on a different kind of mission. Better! Knowing where we're going before we start! Maybe even knowing that we'll live to come back!"
Tan gazed around the mess hall, where a couple of dozen other would-be adventurers were as subdued as themselves. "Maybe," he said.
"At least we're not using up capital," Stan pointed out. The Gateway Corporation had elected to show that it had a heart. No per diems would be charged until further notice, so at least their clocks were not running out.
"The bastards can afford it," Tan grumbled.
Of course the bastards could afford it. The bastards were the Gateway Corporation, and they owned a piece of every discovered piece of Heechee treasure. The Corporation was owned—on paper—by a consortium of the world's governments, but it was just about as true to say that the world's governments were owned by Gateway Corp. After due deliberation, the Corporation decided it could even afford to donate a little something for their efforts to Tan, Stan and Estrella.
They found out about it when, for lack of anything better to do, Tan and Stan were nursing their weak, but more or less drinkable, coffees in the Blue Hell, watching the other prospectors gamble away their no longer needed per diems. Estrella was perched beside them, as always studying something or other from her pocket plate. This time, Stan saw wonderingly, she was studying music, and she fingered the air as she read. "Do you play?" he asked, surprised.
She flushed. "A little. On the flute," she said.
"Well, why didn't you say so? Maybe the three of us can play together sometime. What do you think, Tan?"
Tan wasn't listening. He nudged Stan. "Here come the big shots," he said as Hector Montefiore sailed in, along with two or three others of the permanent party. They were obviously looking for action, and Stan was not pleased to see that Montefiore was coming in their direction. He did not care for Hector Montefiore. He liked him even less when the man slapped his shoulder and patted Estrella on the rump. "Congratulations," he boomed. "Getting ready to celebrate, are you?"
"Celebrate what?" Tan demanded.
The fat man gave him a look of surprise. "Your science bonus, of course. Didn't you know? Well, check it out, for Christ's sake! Who knows, then you might loosen up and buy me a drink!"
He didn't wait for it, though; he went off, chuckling, while the three of them bent over Estrella's plate as she switched to the status reports.
And, yes, their names were there. "Not bad," Tan said, when he saw the amount.
Estrella shook her head. "Divided among the three of us, not all that good, either," she said practically. "Are you willing to settle for a little money?"
"A little money would be enough for me to go home and buy my own van, so I could go into business for myself," Tan said stiffly.
"If that is what you wish. It isn't, for me. I didn't come all this way to spend the rest of my life struggling to stay alive in a one-room condo with Basic Medical and no future. Anyway, Hector says there will surely be more missions soon. Missions of a different kind, where we will know where we will be going."
Stan gave her a thoughtful look. "How do you know what Hector says?" he asked, surprising himself by the tone of his own voice. He almost sounded jealous.
Estrella shrugged. "He likes me," she said, as though that explained everything.
"He likes everybody," Tan sneered. "Boys, girls, sheep, he doesn't care, as long as it has a hole in it."
Estrella gazed at him for a moment in silence. "He has not got into any of mine," she said finally. "Let's talk sensibly. What do you want to do? Take your share and go home? Or wait for something worthwhile?"
They waited. While they waited they watched the unfolding story of what Robinette Broadhead had discovered on the news.
And what had he not! Strange, semi-human creatures that at first everyone thought, heart-stoppingly, might actually be Heechee, but were not. (They were, it seemed, relatives of primitive pre-humans called australopithecines, captured by the Heechee on Earth millennia ago and transported to one of their space outposts for study.) There were a clutch of surviving—well, sort of surviving—lost Gateway prospectors, too, their ships taken to this place by the luck of the draw and unable to leave. Now the marooned prospectors were more or less dead, but also more or less still alive, preserved in some bizarre sort of Heechee machinery. There was the half-wild living human boy named Wan, descendant of other Gateway castaways and now, somehow, through some Heechee wizardry that broadcast his yearnings and hatreds to the entire solar system, the source of the Wrath of God. (A boy's wet dreams, costing so many lives!) And—the final secret Broadhead had learned—now he even knew where the Heechee had fled to! They had holed up inside an immense black hole in the Galaxy's Core, and they were still there, all of them!
It was one wonder after another. Everyone was talking about it—well, everyone but Estrella, it seemed to Stan. For whatever reason, she was spending more and more time with the permanent party and less with her old shipmates. Stan didn't approve. "She shouldn't do that," he told Tan seriously. "They mean her no good."
Tan laughed coarsely. "Depends on what you think 'good' is. Montefiore has his own ideas. But don't worry about Estrella," he advised. "That one'll take good care of her maidenhead."
Stan did worry, though. He told himself that what Estrella did was none of his business, but he thought about her a lot as the days passed.
The nine-bangle Englishwoman came back safe and sound in her One, having earned not only a tenth bangle but, at last, a stake. She had roamed a tunnel on a world not much kindlier than Mercury, wearing a space suit that kept her in air but didn't keep out the blazing heat that radiated from the tunnel walls. Pushed to the limit she had scoured the empty corridors until she found—something; no one was sure what. Possibly it was a game, something like a 3-D version of Go. Or it might have been some sort of computing machine, like an abacus, or even a musical instrument. At any rate her bonus was enough to pay her way back to a decent retirement in the little village in Sussex she had come from. She even bought coffees for the boys before she left, listening to them tell her about all the amazing things that had happened while she was gone. "Heigh-ho," she said, grinning the grin of someone who no longer had to worry about such things, "sounds like fun and games, doesn't it? Well, good luck to you! Don't give up. You never know, you might hit a good one yet."
Tan looked sourly after her as she made the payback rounds, buying drinks for everyone who had bought them for her. "I doubt it," he said, half under his breath.
"You've been doubting it ever since we got here," Stan said in irritation, though the fact was that he was beginning to doubt it, too. It might have turned into a really serious argument, but that was when Estrella appeared in the entrance, looking around for them.