That wasn’t a new idea. As far back as the middle twentieth century scientists had been listening for signals from other civilizations in space and trying to calculate the probability of ever hearing one. A fellow named Stephen Dole had calculated that there ought to be some 63,000,000 life-sustaining planets in the galaxy; later scientists, on tougher assumptions, cut the expected number down much lower—but hardly any of them were willing to put it at zero. Almost everybody agreed there ought to be some—and, in fact, Gateway prospectors did keep turning up planets where things did live. And if there was life of any kind, it seemed a reasonable bet that sooner or later some of that life would evolve toward intelligence . . .
But where were they?
PART EIGHT: LOOKING FOR COMPANY
Ultimately a couple of lucky breaks did begin to turn up a few such interesting discoveries, though they were very sparse and slow in coming. The first definite signs of an alien intelligence (not counting the Heechee themselves, of course) were detected by a three-person crew from Pasadena, California, Earth. They came out of faster-than-light drive in orbit around a promising-looking sun (it was identified as a G-4, pretty close to Earth’s own primary in type and suitability), and discovered quickly that there was a good-sized planet right in the middle of the habitability zone.
The trouble was, the planet was a mess. Most of one hemisphere was a patchwork of bare rock plains, punctuated with volcanoes, and the thing was hot. It didn’t have much in the way of oceans. It didn’t even have anything like as much of an atmosphere as its mass and constitution would have predicted. However, what it did have was a dam. A big one.
The dam was on the less ruined side of the planet. Even so, it was not at all in good shape. It wasn’t a very high-tech dam, for that matter—half a kilometer of rock piled across a valley. It had once been a river valley, no doubt, but there was nothing left of the river at all. There wasn’t much left of the dam, for that matter. But what there was could not have been natural. Someone had piled those rocks in that place for a definite purpose.
Martin Scranton and his two sisters tried to land on the planet. They made a landing, all right, but the heat sensors in their lander began to squawk warnings as soon as they touched down; the surface even around the dam was hotter than the boiling point of water. They did, they thought, see traces of what might have been other stone structures on a few mountaintops, but nothing in recognizable shape.
Back on the Gateway asteroid, the scientists decided that that planet had had some bad luck—bad enough to be struck by some wandering body, probably something the size of Callisto; the impact had boiled off the seas, buried much of the planet under molten rock, driven the atmosphere into space—and, oh, yes, certainly, killed every organic thing that had ever inhabited it.
So Scranton hadn’t found intelligent life. He did claim that he had at least found a place where intelligent life had once been. The Gateway Corporation couldn’t call it a success, in terms of the discovery bonus offered. But still. They took a long time to think it over, then paid half the bonus for a good try.
The first living nonhuman intelligent race the human explorers found didn’t count. They weren’t all that nonhuman, and they weren’t all that intelligent, either. (For that matter, they weren’t even discovered by a Gateway ship; the people who found them were moping around the extremes of Earth’s own solar system in a primitive Earth-designed rocket ship. ) What these particular “aliens” were were the remote descendants of a tribe of Earthly australopithecines, and the place they were found was on the big Heechee ship (or artifact), orbiting out in Sol’s Oort cloud of comets, called “Heechee Heaven.”
Of course, as we have seen, those old australopithecines hadn’t gotten there by themselves. The Heechee had taken them away for breeding stock, in that long-ago visit to prehuman Earth. Then they had left them to the care of machine nursemaids—for half a million years and more.
The second race of aliens was better. It took a long time before they were found, but they were clearly the real thing at last. They were definitely intelligent—they proved it by traveling through interstellar space on their own! But they were a bit of a disappointment, all the same. They certainly weren’t much fun to talk to.
They weren’t exactly found by a Gateway prospector, either—the whole Gateway Corporation was pretty nearly history by the time these folks got discovered. It still existed, of course. But Gateway no longer was where the action was, for by then human beings had learned to copy a lot of Heechee technology and were venturing into new areas of the galaxy on their own.
At that point, one interstellar ship, on what had become a fairly routine cruise, detected an unfamiliar vessel. It turned out to be a photon-sail ship, slowly chugging along between stars on a voyage of centuries.
That certainly was not Heechee technology! Nor was it human, not even australopithecine: the long-awaited truly alien race had at last been located!
But actually they had been discovered quite a while earlier, it turned out—by the Heechee themselves, in fact. The sailboat people were the descendants of what the Heechee had called the “Slow Swimmers” and human beings came to know as the “Sluggards.” They were definitely alien, and definitely not Heechee, and definitely intelligent.
That was all they had to recommend them, though. The Sluggards were sludge dwellers. They lived in wandering arcologies in a semifrozen mush of methane and other gases, and, although they had really and truly managed to launch those photon-sail spaceships, they didn’t have many other attractive qualities. The worst thing was that they were terribly slow. Their metabolisms ran at the pace of free-radical reactions in the icy slush they lived in, and so did their thoughts, and their speech. It took a long time before any human beings were able to establish any sort of useful communication with the snail’s-pace Sluggards . . . and by then, as it turned out, it didn’t really matter.
MISSION STINKPOT
The four people on this mission spent a lot of time, and a lot of money, in court. What they were doing there was trying to win a suit against the Gateway Corporation for that ten-million-dollar bonus. They thought they had a pretty good case.
They didn’t have a very good planet, though. Certainly it wasn’t an attractive one. It was small and it was hot; its sun was a red dwarf, only a quarter of an AU away. And the planet really stank. That was what gave it its name.
The planet was also largely covered with water—not sparkling tropical seas but a sluggish ocean that bubbled methane into an atmosphere that was already mostly methane. You couldn’t breathe the stuff. You wouldn’t have wanted to if you could, because of the stink, and there was absolutely nothing of interest anywhere on the planet’s few dry-land surfaces.
That wasn’t good news for the people in the ship, but it wasn’t absolutely crushing, either. As it happened, they had made some unusual preparations before they left Gateway, and thus they were equipped for more than the casual touchdown-and-lookaround of your average Gateway crew.
They were a family, and they came from Singapore. They were Jimmy Oh Kip Fwa, his wife Daisy Mek Tan Dah, and their two young daughters, Jenny Oh Sing Dut and Rosemary Oh Ting Lu. The Oh family was very old in Singapore. They had once been very rich, with a family fortune that had been made out of underwater mining. When Malaysia took the island over and expropriated all its industries the Ohs stopped being rich, but they had wisely socked away enough in Switzerland and Jakarta to finance their fares to Gateway, with enough left over to bring along some extra equipment. It was gear for underwater exploration. As Jimmy Oh told his family, “The Ohs made a lot of money out of sea-bottoms once. Maybe we can do it again.”