Mendoza was not the only one to find a planet that looked nice but turned out to be poison. One pleasing-looking planet was well vegetated, but the vegetation was all toxicodendrons. They were far worse than Earth’s poison ivy. The slightest touch meant blisters, agonizing itching pain, and anaphylactic shock. On the first mission to it everyone who landed on its surface died of allergic reactions, and only the crew member who stayed with the ship in orbit was able to get back to Gateway.
But once in a while—oh, very seldom—there was a good one.
The happiest of all, in the first decade of Gateway’s operation, was the mission of Margaret Brisch, usually called “Peggy.”
Peggy Brisch went out in a One. She found what was really another Earth. In fact, in some ways it was nicer than Earth ever was. Not only were there no toxicodendrons to kill anyone who touched, or any nearby star with lethal radiation, there were not even any large, dangerous animals.
There was only one thing wrong with Peggy’s Planet. It would have been an ideal place to take Earth’s overflow population, if only it hadn’t been located a good nineteen hundred light-years away.
There was no way to get to it except on a Heechee ship. And the largest Heechee ship carried only five people.
The colonization of Peggy’s Planet would have to wait.
First and last, the Gateway prospectors found more than two hundred planets with significant life. It drove the taxonomists happily crazy. Generations of doctoral candidates had dissertation material that could not fail to win their degrees, and hard work simply to find names for the thirty or forty million new species the prospectors found for them.
They didn’t have that many names to spare, of course. The best they could do was assign classification numbers and note the descriptions. There was no hope of establishing genera or even families, although all the descriptions were fed into the databanks and a lot of computer time went into trying to discover relationships. The best descriptions were generic; DNA, or something like it, was pretty nearly universal. The next best were morphological. Most living things on Earth share such common architectural features as the rod (indispensable for limbs and bones in general) and the cylinder (internal organs, torsos, and so on), because they provide the most strength and carrying capacity you can get for the money. For the same reasons, so did most of the galaxy’s bestiary. Not always, though. Arcangelo Pelieri’s crew found a mute world, full of soft-bodied things that had never developed bones or chitin, soundless as earthworms or jellyfish. Opal Cudwallader reached a planet where, the scientists deduced, repeated extinctions had kept knocking off land animals as they developed. Its principal creature, like Earthly pinnipeds and cetaceans, was a former land-dweller returned to the sea, and nearly everything else was related. It was as though Darwin’s finches had colonized an entire planet.
And so on and so on, until the explorers began to think they had found every possible variation on water-based, oxygen-breathing life.
Perhaps they almost had.
But then they found the Sluggards—the same race the Heechee had known as the Slow Swimmers—and took another look at the hitherto unimagined possible flora and fauna of the gas giants.
So they had been wrong in their basic assumption that life required the chemistry of a solid planet to evolve. That was a shock to their scientists . . . but not nearly the shock that came a bit later, when they discovered that life didn’t require chemistry at all.
Planets were nice, and pictures of stars were nice, but what everyone really wanted were some more samples of Heechee technology. There wasn’t any doubt that there was some of the stuff waiting to be found—somewhere. The ships proved that. The little morsels picked up in the tunnels of Venus had proved it even earlier. But they just whetted the human appetite for more of these wonders.
Fourteen months after the program officially started, a mission got lucky. Their ship was what was generally called a Five, but the system had not yet begun to operate in a standardized way. This time only four volunteers went along. They were officially chosen by the four Earth powers that had established the Gateway Corporation (the Martians took an interest later), and so they were an American, a Chinese, a Soviet, and a Brazilian. They had learned from the experience of Colonel Kaplan and others who had gone before. They brought along enough food, water, and oxygen to last them for six months; they were taking no chances this time.
As it happened, they didn’t need all those provisions. Their ship brought them back in forty-nine days, and they didn’t come back empty-handed. Their destination had turned out to be an orbit around a planet about the size of the Earth. They had managed to make the lander work, and three of them had actually used it to set foot on the surface of the planet.
For the first time in human history, men walked on the surface of a heavenly body that was not part of the Sun’s entourage.
First impressions were a bit disappointing. The four-power party discovered quickly enough that the planet had had some bad times. Its surface was seared, as though by great heat, and parts of it made their radiation detectors squeal. They knew they could not stay there long. But a mile or less from the lander, down a barren slope from the mountaintop mesa where they had landed, they found some rock and metal formations that looked artificial, and poking around them they dug up three items they thought worth bringing home. One was a flat tile with a triangular design still visible on its glazed surface. The second was a ceramic object about the size of a cigar, with thread markings—a bolt? The third was a yard-long metal cylinder, made of chromium and pierced with a couple of holes; it could have been a musical instrument, or part of a machine—even a Hilsch tube.
Whatever they were, they were artifacts.
When the four-power crew proudly displayed their trophies back on the Gateway asteroid, they created an immense stir. None of the three looked like a major technological breakthrough. Nevertheless, if such things could be found, then there were certainly others—and no doubt things that would be of a lot more practical value.
That was when the interstellar gold rush began in earnest.
PART SEVEN: HEECHEE TREASURE
It was a long time before anyone got that lucky again. Overall, the statistics on missions out of the Gateway asteroid showed that four out of five trips came back with nothing to show but some pictures and instrument readings. Fifteen percent never came back at all. It was only one ship out of twenty that brought back any tangible piece of Heechee technology, and most of those things were only curiosities—but the very few that were more than curiosities were treasures beyond price.
They were few and far between, to be sure. The exploration of Venus had shown that was probable, for in all the hundreds of miles of Heechee tunnels under the surface of the planet Venus no more than a dozen gadgets had been found. To be sure, some of those meant big profits for those who learned to copy them. The anisokinetic punch was a marvel. Hammer it on one end, and the force of the blow came out at the side. What was even more marvelous was that scientists managed to figure out how it worked, and its principle had applications in every area of construction, manufacture, and even home repair. The fire-pearls were a mystery. So were the so-called prayer fans.