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4
Aboard the S. Ya.

1908 light-years from Earth my friend—former friend—about to be friend again, Audee Walthers, was remembering my name again, and not too favorably. He was coming up against a rule I had made.

I mentioned that I owned a lot of things. One of the things I owned was a share in the biggest space vehicle known to mankind. It was one of the bits and pieces of gadgetry the Heechee had left behind in the solar system, floating out beyond the Oort comet cloud until it got discovered. Discovered by human beings, I mean—Heechee and australopithecines don't count. We called it Heechee Heaven, but when it occurred to me that it would make a marvelous good transport for getting some of those poor people away from the Earth, which couldn't support them, to some hospitable other planet that could, I persuaded the other shareholders to rename it. After my wife: the S. Ya. Broadhead it was called. So I put up the money to refit it for colonist-carrying, and we started it off on round trips to the best and nearest of those places, Peggys Planet.

This put me into another of those situations where conscience and common sense came into conflict, because what I really wanted was to get everybody to a place where they could be happy, but in order to get it done, I had to be able to show a profit. Thus Broadhead's Rules. They were pretty much the same rates as for the Gateway asteroid, years ago. You had to pay your way there, but you could do it on credit if you were lucky enough to have your name come up in the draw. Getting back to Earth, however, was strictly cash. If you were a land-grant colonist, you could reassign your sixty hectares to the company and they would give you a return ticket. If you didn't have the land anymore because you'd sold it, or traded it, or lost it shooting craps, you had two choices. You could pay for a return ticket in cash. Or you could stay where you were.

Or, if you happened to be a fully qualified pilot, and if one of the ship's officers had made up his mind to stay on Peggys, you could work your way back. That was Walthers's way. What he would do when he got back to Earth he didn't know. What he knew for sure was that he could not stay in that empty apartment after Dolly left, and so he sold off their furnishings for whatever he could get, in the minutes between shuttle flights, made his deal with the S. Ya.'s captain, and was on his way. It struck him as queer and unpleasant that the thing that had seemed so impossible when Dolly asked for it suddenly became the only thing he could do when she left him. But life, he had discovered, was often queer and unpleasant.

So he came aboard the S. Ya. at the last minute, shaking with fatigue. He had ten hours before his first duty shift, and he slept it all. Even so, he was still groggy, and maybe a little numbed with trauma, when a fifteen-year-old failed colonist came to bring him coffee and escort him to the control room of the interstellar transport S. Ya. Broadhead, née Heechee Heaven.

How huge the damn thing was! From outside you couldn't really tell, but those long passages, those chambers with ten-tiered bunk beds, now empty, those guarded galleries and halls with unfamiliar machines or the stubs of places where the machines had been taken away—such vastness was no part of Walthers's previous experience of spacecraft. Even the control room was immense; and even the controls themselves were duplicated. Walthers had flown Heechee vessels—that was how he'd got to Peggys Planet in the first place, piloting a converted Five. The controls here were almost the same, but there were two sets of them, and the transport could not be flown unless both sets were manned. "Welcome aboard, Seventh." The tiny Oriental-looking woman in the left-hand seat smiled. "I'm Janie Yee-xing, Third Officer, and you're my relief. Captain Amheiro will be here in a minute." She didn't offer her hand or even lift either of them from the controls before her. That much Walthers had expected. Two pilots on duty at all times meant two pilots' hands on the controls; otherwise the bird did not fly. It wouldn't crash, of course, because there was nothing for it to crash into; but it wouldn't maintain course and acceleration, either.

Ludolfo Amheiro came in, a plump little man with gray sideburns with nine blue bangles on his left forearm—not many people wore them anymore, but Walthers knew that each one represented a Heechee-vessel flight in the days when you never knew where your ship was taking you; so here was a man with experience! "Glad to have you aboard, Walthers," he said perfunctorily. "Do you know how to relieve the watch? There's nothing to it, really. If you'll just put your hands on the wheel over Yee-xing's—" Walthers nodded and did as he was ordered.

Her hands felt warm and soft as she slipped them carefully out from under his, then slid her pretty bottom off the pilot's seat to allow Walthers to occupy it. "That's all there is, Walthers," said the captain, satisfied. "First Officer Madjhour will actually fly the vessel"—nodding to the dark, smiling man who had just moved into the right-hand seat—"and he'll tell you what's necessary for you. You get a pee break of ten minutes each hour . . . and that's about it. Join me for dinner tonight, will you?"

And the invitation was reinforced by a smile from Third Officer Janie Yee-xing; and it was astonishing to Walthers, as he turned to listen to his instructions from Ghazi Madjhour, to realize that it had been all of ten minutes since he had thought of gone-away Dolly.

It was not quite as easy as that. Piloting was piloting. You didn't forget it. But navigation was something else. Especially as a lot of the old Heechee navigation charts had been unraveled, or at least partly unraveled, while Walthers was flying shepherds and prospectors around Peggy's.

The star charts on the S. Ya. were far more complicated than the ones Audee had used on the trip out. They came in two varieties. The most interesting one was Heechee. It had queer gold and gray-green markings that were only imperfectly understood, but it showed everything. The other, far less detailed but a lot more useful to human beings, was human-charted and English-labeled. Then there was the ship's log to check, as it automatically recorded everything the ship did or saw. There was the whole internal system display—not the pilot's concern, of course, except that if something went wrong the pilot needed to know about it. And all of this was new to Audee.

The good part of that was that learning the new skills kept Walthers busy. Janie Yee-xing was there to teach him, and that was good, too, because she kept his thoughts busy in a different way . . . except in those bad times just before he fell asleep.

Since the S. Ya. was on a return trip it was almost empty. More than thirty-eight hundred colonists had gone out to Peggys Planet. Coming back, there were hardly any. The three dozen human beings in the ship's crew; the military detachments maintained by the four governing nations of the Gateway Corp; and about sixty failed immigrants. They were the steerage. They had impoverished themselves to go out. Now they glumly bankrupted themselves to get back to whatever desert or slum they had fled, because, when push came to shove, they couldn't quite hack pioneering in a new world. "Poor bastards," Walthers said, circling to pass a work party of them cleaning air filters at a slave's torpid pace; but Yee-xing would have none of that.

"Don't waste your pity on them, Walthers. They had it made and they chickened out." She snarled something in Cantonese at the work party, who resentfully moved minutely faster for a moment.

"You can't blame people for being homesick."

"Home! God, Walthers, you talk as if there was a 'home' left—you've been out in the boonies too long."

She paused at the junction of two corridors, one glowing blue with tracings of Heechee metal, the other gold. She waved at the party of armed guards in the uniforms of China, Brazil, the United States, and the Soviet Union. "Do you see them fraternizing?" she demanded. "Used to be they didn't take this seriously. They'd pal around with the crew, they never carried weapons, it was just an all-expense-paid cruise in space for them. But now." She shook her head and reached out abruptly to grab Walthers's arm as he started to get closer to the guards. "Why don't you listen to me?" she demanded. "They'll give you hell if you try to go in there."

"What's in there?"

She shrugged. "The Heechee stuff they didn't take out of the ship when they converted it. That's one of the things they're guarding—although," she added, her voice lower, "if they knew the ship better they'd do a better job. But come on, we go this way."

Walthers followed willingly enough, grateful for the sightseeing tour as much as for their destination. The S. Ya. was far the biggest ship he, or any other human being, had ever seen, Heechee-built, very old—and still, in some ways, very puzzling. They were halfway home, and Walthers had not yet explored a quarter of its mazy, glowing corridors. The part he had especially not explored was Yee-xing's private cabin, and he was looking forward to that with the interest of any ten-day virgin. But there were distractions. "What's that?" he asked, pausing at a pyramidal construction of green-glowing metal in an alcove. A heavy steel grating had been welded in front of it to keep prying hands off.

"Beats me," said Yee-xing. "Nobody else knows, either—that's why they've left it here. Some of the stuff can be cut out and moved easily, some gets wrecked—now and then if you try to remove something, it blows up in your face. Here, right down this little alley. This is where I live."

Neat, narrow bed, pictures of an old Oriental couple on the wall—Janie's parents?—sprays of flowers on the wall chest; Yee-xing had made the place her own. "On return trips, that is," she explained. "On the way out this is the captain's cabin, and the rest of us sleep on cots in the pilot room." She tugged at the cover on the bed, which was already quite straight. "There's not much chance to fool around on outgoing trips," she said meditatively. "Would you like a glass of wine?"

"I certainly would," said Walthers. And so he sat down and had the wine, and then he had the share of a joint with pretty Janie Yee-xing, and by and by had the other refreshments the tiny cabin had to offer, which were excellent in quality and satisfying to his soul, and if he thought at all of lost Dolly in the next half hour or so it was not at all with jealousy and rage, but almost with compassion.

***

There was plenty of room to fool around on return trips, it turned out, even in a cabin no bigger than the one Horatio Hornblower had occupied centuries before. And the wine was Peggys Planet's best, but when they had finished emptying the bottle, and themselves, the cabin began to seem a lot smaller and there was still an hour or more before their shifts began. "I'm hungry," Yee-xing announced. "I've got some rice and stuff here, but maybe—"

It was not a time to push his luck, although a home-cooked meal sounded good. Even rice and stuff. "Let's go to the galley," said Walthers, and, in no particular hurry, they wandered hand in hand back to the working part of the ship. They paused at a junction of corridors, where the long-gone Heechee had, for reasons of their own, planted little clusters of shrubs and bushes—not, no doubt, the same ones that were still growing there. Yee-xing paused to pick a bright blue berry.

"Look at that," she said. "They're all ripe, and the deadbeats don't even pick them."

"You mean the returning colonists? But they pay their way—"

"Oh, sure," she said bitterly. "No pay, no fly. But when they get back they'll go right on welfare, because what else is there for them?"

Walthers sampled one of the juicy, thin-skinned fruits. "You don't like the returnees very much."

Yee-xing grinned. "I don't keep that a secret very well, do I?" But the grin faded. "In the first place, there's nothing for them to go home to—if they had a decent life, they wouldn't have left it. In the second place, things have got a lot worse since they left. More terrorist trouble. More international friction—why, there are countries that are building up their armies again! And in the third place, they're not only going to suffer from all that; they're part of the cause of it. Half the goons you see here will be in some terror group in a month—or supporting one, anyway."

They strolled onward, and Walthers said humbly, "It's true I've been away a long time, but I did hear that things are getting nasty—bombings and shootings."

"Bombings! If that's all there was! They've got a TPT now! You go back to the Earth system now, and you never know when you're going to be right off your rocker without warning!"

"TPT? What's a TPT?"

"Oh, my God, Walthers," she said earnestly, "you have been away a long time. What they used to call the Craziness, don't you remember? It's a telempathic psycho-kinetic transceiver, one of those old Heechee things. There are about a dozen of them around, and the terrorists have one!"

"The Craziness," Walthers repeated, scowling, as a memory tried to work its way up out of his subconscious.

"Right. The Craziness," said Yee-xing, with gloomy satisfaction. "I remember when I was a kid in Kanchou, my father came home with his head ail bloody because somebody had jumped out of the top story of the glass factory. Right on top of my father! Crazy as a bedbug! And it was all the TPT."

Walthers nodded without answering, his face drawn. Yee-xing looked at him in puzzlement, then waved at the guards ahead of them, "That's what they're protecting mostly," she said, "because there's still one on the S. Ya. Too damn many of them around! And they thought of protecting them a little too late, because now there's a bunch of terrorists that have a Heechee Five, and they've got a TPT in it, and somebody who's really crazy. Lunatic, I mean! When he gets on that thing and you feel him in your head it's so creepy and awful—Walthers, is something the matter?"

He stopped at the entrance to the gold-lit corridor, the four guards looking at him with curiosity. "The Craziness," he said. "Wan! This used to be his ship!"

"Well, sure it was," the girl said, frowning. "Listen, we were going to get something to eat. We'd better do it," She was getting worried. Walthers's jaw was set, the muscles around his face contracted. As much as anything, he looked like somebody who was expecting to be punched in the face, and the guards were getting curious. "Come on, Audee," she said pleadingly.

Walthers stirred and looked at her. "You go ahead," he said. "I'm not hungry anymore."

Wan's ship! How strange, Walthers thought, that he had not made the connection before. But of course it was so.

Wan had been born in this very vessel, long before it was renamed the S. Ya. Broadhead, long before the human race even knew it existed . . . unless you considered a few dozen remote descendants of Australopithecus afarensis human. Wan had been born to a pregnant female Gateway prospector. Her husband was lost on one mission, herself stranded on another. She hung on to life for his first few years and then left him orphaned. Walthers could not easily imagine what Wan's infancy was like—tiny child in this vast, almost empty vessel, no company but savages and the computer-stored analogs of dead space prospectors. One of whom, no doubt, had been his mother. It called for pity. . .

Walthers had no pity to give. Not to Wan, who had borrowed his wife. Not, for that matter, to the same Wan who had found the machine they called the TPT—short for "telempathic psychokinetic transceiver," as the thick tongue of the bureaucracy had relabeled it. Wan himself had only called it a dream couch, and the rest of the human race had called it the Fever, the terrible, cloudy obsessions that had infected every human alive when silly young Wan, discovering a couch, had found that it gave him some sort of contact with some sort of living beings. He did not know that the same process gave them some sort of contact with him, and so his teen-aged dreams and fears and sexual fantasies invaded ten billion human brains . . . Perhaps Dolly should have made the connection, but she had been a small child when it happened.

Walthers had not. He remembered, and it gave him a fresh reason to hate Wan.

He could no longer remember that recurrent worldwide madness very clearly, could hardly imagine how devastating its effects had been. He did not even try to imagine Wan's idle, lonely childhood here, but present Wan, cruising around the stars on his mysterious quest, his only company Walthers's fugitive wife—that, all of that, Walthers could imagine all too clearly.

In fact, he spent nearly all of the hour available to him, before his shift began, in imagining it, before it occurred to him that he was wallowing in self-pity and volunteered humiliation and that was really, after all, no way for a grown human being to behave.

He showed up on time. Yee-xing, there in the pilot room before him, said nothing but looked faintly surprised. He grinned at her in the changeover and set in to work.

Although the actual piloting of the ship amounted to not much more than holding on to the controls and letting the vessel fly itself, Walthers kept himself busy. His mood had changed. The vastness of the vessel he had under his fingertips was a challenge. He watched Janie Yee-xing as, with knees and toe-tips and elbows, she worked the auxiliary controls that displayed course and position and ship's state and all the other data that a pilot didn't really need to know to fly the beast but ought to go to the trouble of finding out if he wanted to call himself a pilot. And he did the same. He summoned up the course display and checked the position of the S. Ya., tiny glowing gold dot along a thin blue line nineteen hundred light-years long; he

verified that the position was right by calculating angles to the red-glowing marker stars along the route; he frowned at the handful of "Stay Away!" markings, where black holes and gas clouds posed a threat—none of them anywhere near their course, it appeared—and he even called up the great Heechee sky chart that displayed the entire Galaxy, with other members of the Local Group hanging on its fringes. Several hundred very bright human beings and thousands of hours of machine-intelligence time had gone into unraveling the Heechee chart code. There were parts that were not understood yet, and Walthers studied, frowning, the handful of points in all that area where the blinking, multicolored halos that meant "Here there be danger" were doubled and tripled. What could be so dangerous that the Heechee charts fairly screamed with panic?

There was still a lot to learn! And, Walthers thought to himself, no better place to learn it than on this ship. His job was strictly temporary, of course. But if he did good work . . . if he showed willingness and talent . . . if he ingratiated himself with the captain . . . why then, he thought, when they reached Earth, and the captain had to face the job of hiring a new Seventh Officer, what better candidate than Audee Walthers?

When the shift was over, Yee-xing came across the ten-meter space separating the two pilot positions and said, "As a pilot, you're looking pretty good, Walthers. I was a little worried about you."

He took her hand and they headed for the door. "I guess I was in a bad mood," he apologized, and Yee-xing shrugged.

"First girl friend always catches all the crap after a divorce," she observed. "What did you do, plug in one of our head-shrinker programs?"

"I didn't have to. I just—" Walthers hesitated, trying to remember just what he had done. "I guess I just talked to myself a little. The thing about having your wife walk out on you," he explained, "is that it makes you feel ashamed. I mean, besides jealous, and angry, and all that other stuff. But after I stewed around for a while it occurred to me that I hadn't done anything much to be ashamed of. The feeling didn't belong to me, you see?"

"And that helped?" she demanded.

"Well, after a while it did." And, of course, the sovereign antidote for woman-induced pain was another woman, but he didn't want to say that to the antidote.

"I'll have to remember that, next time I get dumped. Well, I guess it's about bedtime . . ."

He shook his head. "It's early yet, and I'm all charged up. What about that old Heechee stuff? You said you knew a way past the guards."

She stopped in the middle of the passage to study him. "You sure have your ups and downs, Audee," she said. "But why not?"

The S. Ya. was double-hulled. The space between the hulls was narrow and dark, but it could be entered. So Yee-xing led Walthers through narrow passages close to the skin of the great spacecraft, through a maze of empty colonists' bunks, past the crude, huge kitchen that fed them, into a space that smelled of stale garbage and ancient rot—into a vast, ill-lit chamber. "Here they are," she said. Her voice was lowered, although she had promised him they were too far from the guards to be overheard. "Put your head close to that sort of silvery basket—you see where I'm pointing?—but you don't touch it. That's important!"

"Why is it important?" Walthers stared around at what looked like the Heechee equivalent of an attic. There were at least forty devices in the chamber, large and small, all of them firmly linked to the structure of the ship itself. There were big ones and little ones, spherical ones with splayed mountings joining the deck, squarish ones that glowed in the blue and green colors of the metal. Of the woven metal shroud Janie Yee-xing was indicating, there were three, all exactly alike.

"It's important because I don't want my ass kicked off this ship, Audee. So pay attention!"

"I am paying attention. Why are there three of them?"

"Why did the Heechee do anything? Maybe all these things were spares. Now here's the part you have to listen to. Put your head close to the metal part, but not too close. As soon as you start feeling things that don't come out of you, that's dose enough. You'll know when. But don't get any closer, and above all don't touch, because this is a two-way thing. As long as you're just satisfied with sort of general feelings, nobody will notice. Probably. But if they do notice, the captain will have us both walking the plank, you understand?"

"Of course I understand," Walthers said, a little annoyed, and moved his head within a dozen centimeters of the silvery mesh. He twisted around to look at Yee-xing. "Nothing," he said.

"Try a little closer."

It was not very easy to move your head a centimeter at a time when it was bent at a strange angle and you didn't have anything to hold on to, but Walthers tried to do as instructed—

"That's it!" Yee-xing cried, watching his face. "No closer, now!"

He didn't answer. His mind was filled with the barest suspicion of sensations—a confused mumble of sensations. There were dreams and daydreams, and someone's desperate shortness of breath; there was someone's laughter, and someone, or actually what seemed to be three couples of someones, engaged in sexual activity. He twisted to grin at Janie, started to speak—

And then, suddenly, there was something else there.

Walthers froze. From Yee-xing's description he had expected a sort of sense of company. The presence of other people. Their fears and joys and hungers and pleasures—but the "they" was always human.

This new thing was not.

Walthers moved convulsively. His head touched the mesh. All the sensations became a thousandfold clearer, like the focusing of a lens, and he felt the new and distant presence—or presences?—in a different and immediate way. It was a distant, slippery, chilling sensation, and it did not emanate from anything human. If the sources had depressions or fantasies Walthers could not comprehend them. All he could feel was that they were there. They existed. They did not respond. They did not change.

If you could get inside the mind of a corpse, he thought in panic and revulsion, this was how it might feel—

—All this in a moment, and then he was aware that Yee-xing was tugging at his arm, shouting in his ear: "Oh, damn you, Walthers! I felt that! So did the captain and everybody on this God-damned ship. Now we're in trouble!"

As soon as his head came away from the silvery mesh the sensation was gone. The gleaming walls and shadowy machines were real again, with Janie Yee-xing's furious face thrust into his. In trouble? Walthers found himself laughing. After the chill, slow hell he had just glimpsed, nothing human could seem like trouble. Even when the four-power guard came boiling in, weapons drawn, shouting at them in four languages, Walthers almost welcomed them.

For they were human, and alive.

The question that was digging at his mind was the one that anybody would have asked himself: Had he tuned in somehow on the cryptic, hidden Heechee?

If so, he told himself, shuddering, heaven help the human race.