It seemed that only the One he had found the planet in would take him back. That didn’t work, either. Before he could requisition it and ship out again someone else had taken his One—on a one-way trip.
All Wu had, then, was the two little boxes, but it was their contents that bought him a home in Shensi province. One of them contained heater coils. They weren’t operating, but they were close enough to working condition so that human scientists managed to tinker them going. (Later on better and bigger ones were found on Peggy’s Planet, but Wu’s were still the first.) The other box contained a set of gauges for measuring microwave flux.
Scientists puzzled over the gauges very diligently, but they asked the wrong questions. What they labored to ascertain was how they worked. It did not occur to any of them, just then, to wonder why the Heechee were so curious about millimeter microwave flux. If it had it might have saved a lot of people a lot of unnecessary confusion.
It was in a tunnel on an otherwise unprepossessing planet that one prospector found the first specimen of the Heechee tunneling machine. It was in a tunnel on the Luna-like satellite of a distant gas giant planet that another found the “camera” that the so-called “fire-pearls” served as “film.” And it was in a tunnel that Vitaly Klemenkov found the little device that sparked a whole new industry—and earned him only a pittance.
Klemenkov’s is a kind of hard-luck story. What he found was what human scientists came to call a “piezophone.” Its main operating part was a diaphragm made out of the same material as the “blood-diamonds” that had littered the tunnel of Venus and many others. The material was piezoelectric: when squeezed it produced an electric current, and vice versa. Of course, there were plenty of blood-diamonds around, though no one had known before Klemenkov that they were basically raw material for piezoelectric devices. Klemenkov had visions of untold riches. Unfortunately, the main communications laboratories on Earth, subsidiaries of the cable and telephone and satellite corporations, developed the Heechee model into something they could manufacture themselves. Klemenkov took it to court, naturally—but who could fight the lawyers of the biggest corporations in the world? So he settled for a small royalty—hardly more, in fact, than an average emperor’s income.
There was one other splendidly productive variety of place to find Heechee treasures. But no one knew that at first, although if they had thought of the example of Gateway itself they might have deduced it, and certainly no one knew that these rich lodes were, actually, traps. A woman named Patricia Bover was the first Gateway prospector to report finding one—and, as was so often the case, it did her little good.
MISSION FOOD FACTORY
Patricia Bover set out in a One. She had no idea where she was going. She was pleased that it was a relatively short trip—turnaround in seven days, destination in fourteen—and astonished when her instruments told her that the tiny, distant star that was the nearest to her was actually the old familiar Sun.
She was in the Oort cloud of comets, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, and she was docking on what was clearly a Heechee artifact. A big one: it was eight hundred feet long, she estimated, and it was like nothing anyone had ever before reported finding.
When Bover got into the thing and looked around, she realized she was rich. The thing was absolutely stuffed with machines. She had no idea what they did, but there were so many of them that she had no doubt at all that some of them, maybe many of them, would be as valuable as any heater or tunneler or anisokinetic punch.
The bubble burst when she found out she couldn’t get back to Gateway. Her ship wouldn’t move. No matter what she did to the controls it remained inert. It not only would not automatically return her to her port of origin, it wouldn’t go anywhere at all.
Patricia Bover was stuck, some billions of miles from Earth.
As it turned out, the artifact was still operating; in a part of it that Pat Bover never saw, it was actually still producing food, half a million years after it was left there by the Heechee, out of the raw materials of the comets themselves—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, the basic elements that make up most of human diet and body. If Pat had known that—if she had forced herself to investigate the thing—she might have lived quite long while there. (Though not long enough for anyone to get there to rescue her, of course.)
She didn’t know that, though. What she knew was that she was in serious trouble. What she did was send a long radio message to Earth, twenty-five light-days away, explaining where she was and what had happened. Then she got into her lander and launched it in the general direction of the Sun. She took a knockout pill and crawled into the freezer . . . and died there.
She knew the odds were against her. She wasn’t properly frozen for any hope of revival, and anyway the chances were small that anyone would ever find her frozen body and try to revive it. And, as a matter of fact, no one ever did.
The Food Factory wasn’t the only Heechee artifact in space which doubled as a trap for the unwary. There were altogether twenty-nine of these large objects—they were called “collection traps"—somewhere in the galaxy. Patricia Bover’s ill-fated find in the Oort cloud wasn’t the only artifact the Heechee had left up and running. It wasn’t even the only one to which a Gateway spaceship had a preprogrammed course. There was that other orbiting parking garage for spaceships that the Heechee had left around another star, far away—almost as big as Gateway; humans called it Gateway Two.
And then there was Ethel’s Place.
Ethel’s Place was discovered by an early one-woman mission. (The woman’s name was Ethel Klock.) Then it was rediscovered by a group of Canadians in an armored Three; and re-rediscovered by another One, whose pilot was a man from Cork, Ireland, named Terrance Horran. The Canadians didn’t just discover the artifact. They also discovered Ethel Kiock, because she was there when they arrived. When Horran arrived he discovered them all, and later parties kept on discovering those who had come before, because they all stayed right there. As with Pat Bover on the Food Factory, it was a one-way destination for them all. There wasn’t any return. The boards on all the ships nulled themselves on arrival.
They had no way of getting off the artifact.
That was a great pity in the minds of all of them, because Ethel’s Place was a wonder. It was an object about the size of a cruise liner, but without any engines of any kind that they could discover. It had food machines, and air and water regenerators, and lights; and they were all still operating, even after all the millennia that had passed. The Heechee machines were built to last. Moreover, there were a lot of astronomical instruments on Ethel’s Place, and they were working, too.
The castaways had plenty of time to investigate their new home. They had nothing else to do. The food machines fed them; their lives were not threatened. They actually made quite a self-sufficient little colony. They might even have made it a permanent one, with generations of settlers coming along, if Klock had not been past the age of childbearing by the time the Canadians got there, or if the later arrivals had included any females.
They realized early that Ethel’s Place was a kind of astronomical observatory. What the observatory had been put there to observe was obvious at once. Ethel’s Place was in orbit at a distance of about a thousand AU (which is to say, about five light-days) from a rather spectacular pair of astronomical objects. Binary stars weren’t particularly interesting. This pair was unique. One of them was a fairly standard kind of star, though a rarish one—a hot, pulsating, super-giant specimen of the young and violent class called type F. That by itself would have been worth a little bonus money—if they had had any way of reporting it—but its companion was a lot stranger. The type—F star had a tilted ring of hot gas around it, suggesting that it was still in the process of reaching its final stage of starhood. The companion was all gas, and not very hot gas, at that—an immense, nearly transparent disk of the stuff.