Beyond the Blue Event Horizon h-2 Page 15

  Lurvy could not understand the words, but two years on Gateway had made her cosmopolitan. She gasped, “I-I think that’s Japanese! And those look like haiku! Wan, what are the Heechee doing with books in Japanese?”

  He said in a superior tone, “These are not really the Old Ones, Lurvy, they are only copies of other books. The good ones are all like that. Tiny Jim says that all the tapes and books of the Dead Men, all the Dead Men, even the ones that are no longer here, are stored in these. I read them all the time.”

  “My God,” said Lurvy. “And how many times have I had one of those in my hands and not known what it was for?”

  Paul shook his head wonderingly. He reached into the glowing image and pulled the fan out of its tulip. It came away easily; the picture vanished and voice stopped in mid-syllable, and he turned the scroll over in his hands. “That beats me,” he said. “Every scientist in the world has had a go at these things. How come nobody ever figured out what they were?”

  Wan shrugged. He was no longer angry; he was enjoying the triumph of showing these people how much more than they he knew. “Perhaps they are stupid too,” he shrilled. Then, charitably, “Or perhaps they merely have only the ones that no one can understand-except perhaps the Old Ones, If they ever bothered to read them.”

  “Have you got one of those handy, Wan?” Lurvy asked.

  He shrugged petulantly. “I never bother with those,” he explained. “Still, if you do not believe me-“ He rummaged around in the heaps, his expression making it clear that they were wasting time with things he had already explored and found without interest. “Yes. I think this is one of the worthless ones.”

  When he slipped it into the tulip, the hologram that sprang up was bright-and baffling. It was as hard to read as the play of colors on the controls of a Heechee spacecraft. Harder. Strange, oscillating lines that twined around each other, leaped apart in a spray of color, and then drew together again. If it was written language, it was as remote from any Western alphabet as cuneiform. More so. All Earthly languages had characteristics in common, if only that they were almost all represented by symbols on a plane surface. This seemed meant to be perceived in three dimensions. And with it came a sort of interrupted mosquito-whine of sound, like telemetry which, by mistake, was being received on a pocket radio. All in all, it was unnerving.

  “I did not think you would enjoy it,” Wan observed spitefully. “Turn it off, Wan,” Lurvy said; and then, energetically, “We want to take as many of these things as we can. Paul, take off your shirt. Load up as many as you can and take them back to the Dead Men’s room. And take that old camera, too; give it to the bioassay unit, and see if it can make anything out of the Heechee blood.”

  “And what are you going to do?” Paul asked. But he had already slipped off his blouse and was filling it with the glittery “books”.

  “We’ll be right along. Go ahead, Paul. Wan? Can you tell which are which-I mean, which are the ones you don’t bother with?”

  “Of course I can, Lurvy. They are very much older, sometimes a little chipped-you can see.”

  “All right. You two, take off your top clothes too-as much as you need to make a carrying-bag out of. Go ahead. We’ll be modest some other time,” she said, slipping out of her coverall. She stood in bra and panties, tying knots in the arms and legs of the garment. She could fit at least fifty or sixty of the fans in that, she calculated-with Wan’s tunic and Janine’s dress they could carry at least half of the objects away. And that would be enough. She would not be greedy. There were plenty more on the Food Factory, anyway-although probably they were the ones Wan had brought there, and thus only the ones he had found he could understand. “Are there readers on the Food Factory, Wan?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Why else would I bring books there?” He was sorting irritably through the fans, muttering to himself as he tossed the oldest, “useless” ones to Janine and Lurvy. “I am cold,” he complained.

  “We all are. I wish you’d worn a bra, Janine,” she said, frowning at her sister.

  Janine said indignantly, “I wasn’t planning to take my clothes off. Wan’s right. I’m cold, too.”

  “It’s only for a little while. Hurry it up, Wan. You too, Janine, let’s see how fast we can pick out the Heechee ones.” They had her coverall nearly full, and Wan, scowling and dignified in his kilt, was beginning to stuff the fans into his. It would be possible, Lurvy calculated, to wrap a few dozen more in the kilt. After all, he had a breechcloth under it. But they were really doing very well. Paul had already taken at least thirty or forty. Her coverall seemed able to hold nearly seventy-five. And, in any event, they could always come back another time for the rest, if they chose,

  Lurvy did not think she would choose to do that. Enough was enough. Whatever else they might do in Heechee Heaven, they had already acquired one priceless fact. The prayer fans were books! Knowing that that was so was half the battle; with that certainty before them, scientists would surely be able to unlock the secret of reading them. If they could not do it from scratch, there were the readers on the Food Factory; if worst came to worst they could read every fan before one of Vera’s remotes, encode sound and image, and transmit the whole thing to Earth. Perhaps they could wrench a reading machine loose and bring it back with them. . . . And back they would go, Lurvy was suddenly sure. If they could not find a way to move the Food Factory, they would abandon it. No one could fault them. They had done enough. If there was a need for more, other parties could follow them, but meanwhile-Meanwhile they would have brought back richer gifts than any other human beings since the discovery of the Gateway asteroid itself! They would be rewarded accordingly, there was no question of that-she even had Robinette Broadhead’s word. For the first time since they had left the Moon on the searing chemical flame of their takeoff rockets, Lurvy let herself think of herself not as someone who was striving for a prize, but as someone who had won. And how happy her father would be. . .

  “That’s enough,” she said, helping Janine grip the spilling sack of prayer fans. “Let’s take them right to the ship.”

  Janine hugged the clumsy bundle to her small breasts and picked up a few more with a free hand. “You sound as if we’re going home,” she said.

  “Maybe so,” Lurvy grinned. “Of course, we’ll have to have a conference and decide-Wan? What’s the matter?”

  He was at the door, his shirtful of fans under an arm. And he looked stricken. “We waited too long,” he whispered, peering down the corridor. “There are Old Ones by the berryfruit.”

  “Oh, no.” But it was true. Lurvy peered cautiously out into the corridor and there they were, staring up at the camera Paul had fixed to the wall. One reached up and effortlessly pulled it loose while she watched. “Wan? Is there another way home?”

  “Yes, through the gold, but-“ His nose was working. “I think there are some there, too. I can smell them and, yes, I can hear them!” And that was true, too; Lurvy could hear a faint sound of mellow, chirrupy grunts, from where the corridor bent.

  “We don’t have a choice,” she said. “There are only two of them back the way we came. We’ll take them by surprise and just push our way through. Come on!” Still carrying the tapes, she hustled the others ahead of her. The Heechee might be strong, but Wan had said they were slow. With any luck at all-They had no luck at all. As they reached the opening she saw that there were more than two, half a dozen more, standing around and looking toward them in the entrances to the other corridors. “Paul!” she shouted at the camera. “We’re caught! Get in the ship, and if we don’t get away-“ And she could say no more, because they were upon her; and, yes, they were strong!

  They were hustled up through half a dozen levels, their captors one to each arm, stolidly chirping at each other, ignoring their struggles and their words. Wan did not speak. He let them pull him as they would, all the way up to a great open spindleshaped volume, where another dozen Old Ones waited and a huge blue-lit machine sat silent behind them
. Did the Heechee believe in sacrifice? Or perform experiments on captives? Would they wind up as Dead Men themselves, rambling and obsessed, ready for the next batch of visitors? Lurvy looked upon all of these as interesting questions, and had no answers for any of them. She was not yet afraid. Her feelings had not caught up with the facts; it was too recently that she had allowed herself to feel triumph. The realization of defeat would have to wait.

  The Old Ones chirruped to each other, gesticulating toward the prisoners, the corridors, the great silent machine, like a battle tank without guns. Like a nightmare. Lurvy could not understand any of it, even though the situation was clear enough. After minutes of jabber they were pushed into a cubicle, and found in it-astonishingly!---quite familiar objects. Behind the closed door Lurvy shuffled through them-clothing; a chess set; long desiccated rations. In the toe of one shoe was a thick roll of Brazilian currency, more than a quarter of a million dollars of it, she guessed. They had not been the first captives here! But in none of the rubble was anything like a weapon. She turned to Wan, who was pale and shaking. ‘What will happen?” she demanded.

  He waggled his head like an Old One. It was the only answer he could give. “My father-“ he began, and had to swallow before he could go on. “They captured my father once and, yes, truly, they let him go again. But I do not think that is a rule, since my father told me I must never let myself be caught.”

  Janine said, “At least Paul got away. Maybe-maybe he can bring help. . . .” But she stopped there, and did not expect an answer. Any hopeful answer would have been fantasy, defined by the four years it would take another vessel like theirs to reach the Food Factory. If help came, it would not be soon. She began to sort through the old clothing. “At least we can get something on,” she said. “Come on, Wan. Get yourself dressed.”

  Lurvy followed her example, and then stopped at a strange sound from her sister. It was almost a laugh! “What’s so funny?” she snapped.

  Janine pulled a sweater over her head before she answered. It was too big, but it was warm. “I was just thinking about the orders we got,” she said. “To get Heechee tissue samples, you know? Well, the way it worked out-they got ours instead. All of them.”

  8 Schwarze Peter

  When the shipboard computer’s mail bell rang, Payter woke quickly and completely. It was an advantage of age that one slept shallowly and woke at once. There were not many advantages. He got up, rinsed his mouth, urinated into the sanitary, washed his hands, and took two food packets with him to the terminal. “Display the mail now,” he ordered, munching on something that tasted like sour rye bread but was meant to be a sweet roll.

  When he saw what the mail was, his good mood passed. Most of it was interminable mission orders. Six letters for Janine, one each for Paul and Dorema, and for himself only a petition addressed to Schwarze Peter and signed by eight hundred and thirty school-children of Dortmund, begging him to return and become their Burgermeister. “Dumb head!” he scolded the computer. “Why do you wake me for this trash?” Vera did not answer, because he did not give her time to identify him and rummage through her slow magnetic bubbles to locate his name.

  Long before then, he was complaining, “Also this food is not fit for pigs! Attend to it at once!”

  Poor Vera erased the attempt to interpret his first question and patiently attended to the second. “The recycling system is below optimal mass levels,” she said,”. . . Mr. Herter. In addition, my processing routines have been subject to overload for some time. Many programs have been deferred.”

  “Do not defer the food question any more,” he snarled, “or you will kill me, and there’s an end to it.” He gloomily commanded display of the mission orders while he forced himself to chew the remainder of his breakfast. The orders rolled for ten solid minutes. What marvelous ideas they had for him, back on Earth! And if only there were a hundred of him, perhaps they could do one one-hundredth of the tasks proposed. He allowed the end of it to run unwatched, while he carefully shaved his pink old face and brushed his sparse hair. And why was the recycling system depleted, so that it could not function properly? Because his daughters and their consorts had removed themselves and thus their useful by-products, as well as all the water Wan had stolen from the system. Stolen! Yes, there was no other word for it. Also they had taken the mobile bio-assay unit, so that there was only the sampler in the sanitary to monitor his health, and what could that tell of fever or arrhythmic heart, if he should have either? Also they had taken all but one of the cameras, so that he must carry that one with him wherever he went. Also they had taken-They had taken themselves, and Schwarze Peter, for the first time in his life, was wholly alone.

  He was not only alone, he was powerless to change it. Family came back, they would do so in their own good time and not before. Until then he was a reserve unit, a pillbox soldier, a standby program. He was given excessive tasks to do, but the real center of action was somewhere else.

  In his long life Payter had taught himself to be patient, but he had never taught himself to enjoy it. It was maddening to be forced to wait! To wait fifty days for an answer from Earth to his perfectly reasonable proposals and questions. To wait almost as long for his family and that hooligan boy to get to where they were going (if they ever did) and report to him (if they should happen to choose to). Waiting was not so bad if one had enough of a life left to wait in. But how much, realistically, had he? Suppose he had a stroke. Suppose he developed a cancer. Suppose any part of the complicated interactions that kept, his heart beating and his blood flowing and his bowels moving and his brain thinking broke down in any place. What then?

  And some day they surely would, because Payter was old. He had lied about his age so many times that he was no longer sure of what it was. Not even his children knew; the stories he told about his grandfather’s youth were really about his own. Age in itself did not matter. Full Medical could deal with anything, repair or replace, as long as it was not the brain itself that was damaged-and Payter’s brain was in the best of shape, because had it not schemed and contrived to get him here?

  But “here” there was no Full Medical, and age began to matter a great deal.

  He was no longer a boy! But once he had been, and even then he had known that somehow, some day, he would possess exactly what he owned now: the key to heart’s desire. Burgermeister of Dortmund? That was nothing! Skinny young Peter, shortest and youngest in his unit of the Hitler Youth but their leader all the same, had promised himself he would have much more. He had even known that it would turn out to be something like this, some grand futuristic pattern would emerge, and he alone would be able to find the handle to wield it, like a weapon, like an axe, like a scythe, to punish or reap or remake the world. Well, here it was! And what was he doing with it? He was waiting. It had not been like that, in the boyhood stories by Juve and Gail and Dominik and the Frenchman, Verne. The people in them did not waste themselves so spinelessly.

  But what, after all, was one to do?

  So while he waited for that question to answer itself, he kept up his daily rounds. He ate four light meals a day, every other one of CHON-food, methodically dictating to Vera his impressions of taste and consistency. He ordered Vera to design a new mobile bio-assay out of what odds and ends of sensor instrumentation could be spared, and worked at building it as she found time to complete parts of the design. He worked out ten minutes each morning with the weights, half an hour every afternoon with bending and stretching. He methodically walked every pathway in the Food Factory, with his hand-held camera pointed into every cranny. He composed long letters of complaint to his masters on Earth, cagily arguing the merits of aborting the mission and returning to Earth as soon as he could summon the family back, and actually transmitted one or two of them. He wrote fierce and peremptory directives to his lawyer in Stuttgart, in code, arguing his position, demanding a revision to the contract. And most of all, he schemed. And about the Traumeplatz most of all.

  It was seldom out of
his thoughts, this dreaming place with its startling potential. When he was depressed and fretful, he thought how rightly it would serve Earth if he were to repair it and call Wan back to give them their fevers once again. When he was charged with force and determination he went to look at it, lid hanging from an ornamental projection on one wall, the joints and fasteners always with him in his coverall pouch. How easy it would be to bring in a cutting torch and lop it free, cram the ship full of that, and the communications system for the Dead Men, and whatever other goods and treasures he could find; and then cast loose in the rocket for Earth, start the long, slow downward spiral that would bring him-what would it bring him? God in heaven, what would it not! Fame! Power! Prosperity! All the things that were his due-yes, and his rightful property, too, if he only got back in time to enjoy them.

  It made him ill to think about it. All the time the clock was ticking, ticking. Every minute he was one minute closer to the end of his life. Every second spent waiting was a second stolen from the happy time of greatness and luxury that he had earned. He forced himself to eat, sitting on the edge of his private and looking longingly at the ship’s controls. “The food has not improved, Vera!” he called accusingly.

  The confounded thing did not answer. “Vera! You must do something about the food!” It still did not answer, not for several seconds.

  And then only, “One moment, please. . . Mr. Herter.” It was enough to make one sick. In fact, he did feel somewhat sick, he realized. He gazed with hostility at the dish he had been doggedly forcing down, supposed to be a sort of schnitzel, or as close to it as Vera’s limited recombinant capacities would allow, but tasting of whisky or sauerkraut, or both at once. He set it on the floor.