When Estrella and the others challenged him, he insisted he was all right. "Sleep badly for reason of having no good sleeping grasses, merely. In regard to sleeping bag, what I declare is, étui. Better than nothing? Perhaps. Arguable. However, assuredly less good than nearly any other possible thing." To show that that subject was finished he turned his narrow head and stared up at the ship. "In any event," he said, "on next attempt will surely achieve purpose, as person named Achiever would properly achieve." He gave them a thin-lipped grin to show that he had just made a joke.
Salt was not in a joking mood. "This cannot occur," she declared. "You don't remember? Ship was made obedient to machine commands by means of servomodule, not persons. You could not operate same."
He gave her a superior look. "Not correct. Have spoken of this with Raafat Gerges. Wan has since nullified machine override. Reason due no doubt to keep Raafat or other such person from flying it away."
Stan straightened up. "So if you could get into the ship you could fly it?"
"Mean exactly this, yes."
But Salt was flapping her bony fingers at him. "Nevertheless," she said sharply. "Never-the-damn-less. May not survive a second punishment. No. If person is to make additional attempt I am to be that person."
"Are not!" Achiever roared. "Are carrying child of mine, which cannot be risked! I firmly and irrevocably order this to you!"
"But it can't be you, either,' Estrella put in. "You tried it once, and the second time could kill you. Right?" She was looking for confirmation at Stan and a couple of the Old Ones' handlers, who had been drawn to the discussion.
Most of them were nodding, but not Stan. He took a deep breath. "I'll do it," he said.
Estrella gave him a horrified look, but again it was Achiever who demurred. "How foolish you are," he said, flapping his bony fingers at Stan. "What is point of entering ship? To bring same down here so we can enter and depart this planet. Who can do this? Trained pilot can do this. No other person can. Are you trained pilot? You are not, apart from childish task of sitting in spacecraft others have programmed when coming to Core. Especially have you piloted spacecraft of this new and quite fast model? No. Have not. Therefore have no hope of achieving."
While Achiever was laying down his logical proofs, one of the Old Ones' handlers, Geoffrey, was listening intently. "I'm a pilot," he said.
Achiever gave him an unbelieving look. "You? Pilot of spacecraft?"
"Well, no, I never actually piloted any spacecraft," Geoffrey conceded. "I flew our ultralight back in the Maasai Mara, though." ("Hah," Achiever sneered.) "Well, that's not all. When I was a kid I was going to go to Gateway, only this job came along and I didn't. But I studied for it."
"Studied operation of spacecraft?" Achiever asked skeptically.
"Sure. Well, sort of. There was a vid game about Gateway, you know—you got in the ship, and you took off, and flew to some planet. They said it was really realistic. I played it a lot."
Achiever said, "Hah!" again, but this time with less force. He studied Geoffrey's face for some moments before, at last, saying, "Tell of this game. Describe for me layout and purpose of controlling implements. And do so quickly and in detail."
For the next four days Achiever was constantly drilling Geoffrey in how to use the ship's controls in the unlikely event that he ever did get his hands on them. Stan eavesdropped on as much of it as he could, trying to relate what Achiever was talking about to his memory of their old Five. More complicated, sure, he thought. But not hopelessly so.
Then, on the fourth day, Geoffrey began the climb.
Every person in the compound—human, Heechee, Old One—was watching. As Geoffrey at last stood up and began that final run across the rocks at the top of the mountain, Stan, for one moment, allowed himself a dizzying feeling of hope....
Blighted, of course. As with Achiever, Geoffrey's arms suddenly flew wildly about. He dropped to the ground and did not move.
The handling machines had him halfway down the slope before Stan and Grace Nkroma and the others could reach him. It was too late. "He's dead," Grace said, straightening up. "That does it."
Achiever bobbed his head. "All greatly unfortunate," he said, "but next time—"
Grace gave him a look between sorrow and rage. "There won't be a next time! Not ever!" she snapped. "That's over!"
III
Then, for a time, things began to look a little better for the castaways. Not actually good, no. But not quite as bad.
The first sign came after Wan's visits to his Old Ones had dwindled almost to nothing. Perhaps that was what made the simulations a little braver. When one of the handling machines appeared with something on its back the captives found it was a gift for them.
What kind of a gift was another question. "Is that a school desk?" Grace asked.
"I think it's the kind the Heechee use sometimes. It's got one of those flowerpot things on the back."
"So what does it do?"
Though Stan and the other humans puzzled over the desk, its secrets remained unlearned until Achiever turned up. "Oh, how fractionally witted you all are," he remarked, and Stan was reminded that, although Heechee didn't smile very well, their sneer was nearly perfect. "Simply step back. Farther. Now, you see." When he twiddled with something under the ledge of the desk there was a faint click and a nearly silent hiss as three racks of prayer fans rolled themselves out from storage. Achiever glanced at them and saw no reason to alter his look of disdain. "How outmoded! Simply resembling those of my childhood or somewhat more recent, before adoption of faster, smaller, more capacious recording systems invented Outside. However, may be of use. You are familiar with method for same?"
They were. Grace especially; before Achiever had finished speaking she had already picked a fan at random and slipped it into the receptacle. An image at once sprang into light. Image of what, though?—poster, advertising sign, title page of a book? They all crowed around to study it, and Estrella was the first to speak. "It's printing," she said.
"But not English printing," Stan added, his mouth ajar in concentration. "I think—yeah, maybe it's Russian. There was this Russian embassy kid in school with me and he had magazines that looked like this. He tried to teach me the alphabet...." He was tracing some of the letters with a finger. "I think that's a T ... and an O ... that next thing is an L ... the C is an S ... another T and an O—Oh, cripes," he said, suddenly grinning. "You know what we've got here? I think it's probably the Russian-language works of Leo Tolstoy."
Estrella wrinkled her nose. "And how are we going to read them, would you say?"
Stan would not be discouraged. "There are lots of other fans. Let's look!"
There were indeed lots of others, twenty-two by count. Fifteen unfortunately were in the same undecipherable Russian, but seven were more useful.
Whichever of Wan's long-ago organic servitors had assembled them, she—it had to have been a she—had obviously been young, lonely and foreign-born. The Russian-language fans were—well, Russian. Stan concluded, by his best attempt at phonetic reconstruction, that a wide spectrum of Russian literature was represented, though the only other author he was reasonably sure of identifying was Solzhenitsyn. Some were even poetry, or looked that way in the manner they were set on their pages. Some were not books at alclass="underline" they were ballet performances (beautiful), or plays (as incomprehensible as the texts), or musical numbers (splendid, at least where nobody was singing in Russian).