---------------------------------------- MISSION REPORT
Vessel 1-8, Voyage 013D6. Crew F. Ito. Transit time 41 days 2 hours. Position not identified. Instrument recordings damaged. Transcript of crewman's tape follows: "The planet seems to have a surface gravity in excess of 2.5, but I am going to attempt a landing. Neither visual nor radar scanning penetrates the clouds of dust and vapor. It really is not looking very good, but this is my eleventh launch. I am setting the automatic return for 10 days. If I am not back by then with the lander I think the capsule will return by itself. I wish I knew what the spots and flares on the sun meant." Crewman was not aboard when ship returned. No artifacts or samples. Landing vehicle not secured. Vessel damaged. ----------------------------------------
couldn't feel it at all, it was only light. Sometimes they'd have me come in there in the dark and something warm and cuddly would take me in its arms and whisper to me. I didn't like that. I was crazy, but I wasn't that crazy. Sigfrid is still waiting, but I know that he won't wait forever. Pretty soon he's going to start asking me questions, probably about my dreams. "Have you had any dreams since I last saw you, Rob?" I yawn. The whole subject is very boring. "I don't think so. Nothing important, I'm sure." "I'd like to hear what they were. Even a fragment." "You're a pest, Sigfrid, do you know that?" "I'm sorry you feel I'm a pest, Rob." "Well. . . I don't think I can remember even a fragment." "Try, please." "Oh, cripes. Well." I get comfortable on the couch. The only dream I can think of is absolutely trivial, and I know there's nothing in it that relates to anything traumatic or pivotal, but if I told him that he would get angry. So I say obediently, "I was in a car of a long railroad train. There were a number of cars hooked up together, and you could go from one to the other. They were full of people I knew. There was a woman, a sort of motherly type who coughed a lot, and another woman who -- well, she looked rather strange. At first I thought she was a man. She was dressed in a sort of utility coverall, so you couldn't tell from that whether she was male or female, and she had very masculine, bushy eyebrows. But I was sure she was a woman." "Did you talk to either of these women, Rob?" "Please don't interrupt, Sigfrid, you make me lose my train of thought." "I'm sorry, Rob." I go on with the dream: "I left them -- no, I didn't talk to them. I went back into the next car. That was the last one on the train. It was coupled to the rest of the train with a sort of -- let's see, I don't know how to describe it. It was like one of those expanding gatefold things, made out of metal, you know? And it stretched." I stop for a moment, mostly out of boredom. I feel like apologizing for having such a dumb, irrelevant dream. "You say the metal connector stretched, Rob?" Sigfrid prompts me. "That's right, it stretched. So of course the car I was in kept dropping back, farther and farther behind the others. All I could see was the taillight, which was sort of in the shape of her face, looking at me. She--" I lose the thread of what I am saying. I try to get back on the track: "I guess I felt as though it was going to be difficult to get back to her, as if she-- I'm sorry, Sigfrid, I don't remember clearly what happened around there. Then I woke up. And," I finish virtuously, "I wrote it all down as soon as I could, just the way you tell me to." "I appreciate that, Rob," Sigfrid says gravely. He waits for me to go on. I shift restlessly. "This couch isn't nearly as comfortable as the mat," I complain. "I'm sorry about that, Rob. You said you recognized them?" "Who?" "The two women on the train, that you were getting farther and farther away from." "Oh. No, I see what you mean. I recognized them in the dream. Really I have no idea who they were." "Did they look like anyone you knew?" "Not a bit. I wondered about that myself." Sigfrid says, after a moment, which I happen to know is his way of giving me a chance to change my mind about an answer he doesn't like, "You mentioned one of the women was a motherly type who coughed--" "Yes. But I didn't recognize her. I think in a way she did look familiar, but, you know, the way people in a dream do." He says patiently, "Can you think of any woman you've ever known who was motherly and coughed a lot?" I laugh out loud at that. "Dear friend Sigfrid! I assure you the women I know are not at all the motherly type! And they are all on at least Major Medical. They're not likely to cough." "I see. Are you sure, Robbie?" "Don't be a pain in the ass, Sigfrid," I say, angry because the crappy couch is hard to get comfortable on, and also because I need to go to the bathroom, and this situation looks to be prolonging itself indefinitely. "I see." And after a moment he picks up on something else, as I know he is going to: he's a pigeon, Sigfrid is, pecking at everything I throw out before him, one piece at a time. "How about the other woman, the one with the bushy eyebrows?" "What about her?" "Did you ever know any girl who had bushy eyesbrows?" "Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, I've gone to bed with five hundred girls! Some of them had every kind of eyebrows you ever heard of." "No particular one?" "Not that I can think of offhand." "Not offhand, Rob. Please make an effort to remember." It is easier to do what he wants than to argue with him about it, so I make the effort. "All right, let's see. Ida Mae? No. Sue-Ann? No. S. Ya.? No. Gretchen? No -- well, to tell you the truth, Sigfrid, Gretchen was so blond I couldn't really tell you if she had eyebrows at all." "Those are girls you've known recently, aren't they, Rob? Perhaps someone longer ago?" "You mean way back?" I reflect deeply as far back as I can go, all the way to the food mines and Sylvia. I laugh out loud. "You know something, Sigfrid? It's funny, but I can hardly remember what Sylvia looked like -- oh, wait a minute. No. Now I remember. She used to pluck her eyebrows almost altogether away, and then pencil them in. The reason I know is one time when we were in bed together we drew pictures on each other with her eyebrow pencil." I can almost hear him sigh. "The cars," he says, pecking at another bright bit. "How would you describe them?" "Like any railroad train. Long. Narrow. Moving pretty fast through the tunnel." "Long and narrow, moving through a tunnel, Rob?" I lose my patience at that. He is so fucking transparent! "Come on, Sigfrid! You don't get away with any corny penis symbols with me." "I'm not trying to get away with anything, Rob." "Well, you're being an asshole about this whole dream, I swear you are. There's nothing in it. The train was just a train. I don't know who the women were. And listen, while we're on the subject, I really hate this goddamned couch. For the kind of money my insurance is paying you, you can do a lot better than this!" He has really got me angry now. He keeps trying to get back to the dream, but I am determined to get a fair shake from him for the insurance company's money, and by the time I leave he has promised to redecorate before my next visit. As I go out that day I feel pretty pleased with myself. He is really doing me a lot of good. I suppose it is because I am getting the courage to stand up to him, and perhaps all this nonsense has been helpful to me in that way, or in some way, even if it is true that some of his ideas are pretty crazy.
14
I struggled out of my sling to get out of the way of Klara's knee and bumped into Sam Kahane's elbow. "Sorry," he said, not even looking around to see who he was sorry about. His hand was still on the go-teat, although we were ten minutes on our way. He was studying the flickering colors on the Heechee instrument board, and the only time he looked away was when he glanced at the viewsereen overhead. I sat up, feeling very queasy. It had taken me weeks to get used to Gateway's virtual absence of gravity. The fluctuating G forces in the capsule were something else. They were very light, but they didn't stay the same for more than a minute at a time, and my inner ear was complaining. I squeezed out of the way into the kitchen area, with one eye on the door to the toilet. Ham Tayeh was still in there. If he didn't get out pretty soon my situation was going to become critical. Klara laughed, reached out from her sling, and put an arm around me. "Poor Robbie," she said. "And we're just beginning." I swallowed a pill and recklessly lit a cigarette and concentrated on not throwing up. I don't know how much it was actually motion sickness. A lot of it was fear. There is something very fright-citing about knowing that there is nothing between you and instant, ugly death except a thin skin of metal made by some peculiar strangers half a million years ago. And about knowing that you're committed to go somewhere over which you no longer have any control, which may turn out to be extremely unpleasant. I crawled back into my sling, stubbed out the cigarette, closed my eyes, and concentrated on making the time pass. There was going to be a lot of it to pass. The average trip lasts maybe forty-five days each way. It doesn't matter as much as you might think, how far you are going. Ten light-years or ten thousand: it matters some, but not linearly. They tell me that the ships are continually accelerating and accelerating the rate of acceleration the whole time. That delta isn't linear, either, or even exponential, in any way that anybody can figure out. You hit the speed of light very quickly, in less than an hour. Then it seems to take quite a while before you exceed it by very much. Then they really pick up speed. You can tell all this (they say) by watching the stars displayed on the overhead Heechee navigation screen (they say). Inside the first hour the stars all begin to change color and swim around. When you pass c you know it because they've all clustered in the center of the screen, which is in front of the ship as it ifies. Actually the stars haven't moved. You're catching up with the light emitted by sources behind you, or to one side. The photons that are hitting the front viewer were emitted a day, or a week, or a hundred years ago. After a day or two they stop even looking like stars. There's just a sort of mottled gray surface. It looks a little like a holofilm held up to the light, but you can make a virtual image out of a holofllm with a flashlight and nobody has ever made anything but pebbly gray out of what's on the Heechee screens. By the time I finally got into the toilet, the emergency didn't seem as emergent; and when I came out Klara was alone in the capsule, checking star images with the theodolitic camera. She turned to regard me, then nodded. "You're looking a little less green," she said approvingly. "I'll live; Where are the boys?" "Where would they be? They're down in the lander. Dred thinks maybe we should split things up so you and I get the lander to ourselves part of the time while they're up here, then we come up here and they take it." "Hmm." That sounded pretty nice; actually, I'd been wondering how we were going to work out anything like privacy. "Okay. What do you want me to do now?" She reached over and gave me an absentminded kiss. "Just stay out of the way. Know what? We look like we're going almost toward straight Galactic North." I received that information with the weighty consideration of ignorance. Then I said, "Is that good?" She grinned. "How can you tell?" I lay back and watched her. If she was as frightened as I was, and I had little doubt she was, she certainly was not letting it show. I began wondering what was toward Galactic North -- and, more important, how long it would take us to get there. The shortest trip to another star system on record was eighteen days. That was Barnard's Star, and it was a bust, nothing there. The longest, or anyway the longest anybody knows of so far -- who knows how many ships containing dead prospectors are still on their way back from, maybe, M-31 in Andromeda? -- was a hundred and seventy-five days each way. They did come back dead. Hard to tell where they were. The pictures they took didn't show much, and the prospectors themselves, of course, were no longer in condition to say. When you start out it's pretty scary even for a veteran. You know you're accelerating. You don't know how long the acceleration will last. When you hit turnaround you can tell. First thing, you know formally because that golden coil in every Heechee ship flickers a little bit. (No one knows why.) But you know that you're turning around even without looking, because the little pseudo-grav that had been dragging you toward the back of the ship now starts dragging you toward the front. Bottom becomes top. Why didn't the Heechee just turn their ships around in midflight, so as to use the same propulsive thrust for both acceleration and deceleration? I wouldn't know. You'd have to be a Heechee to know that. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that all their viewing equipment seems to be in front. Maybe it's because the front part of the ship is always heavily armored, even in the lightweight ships
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-- against, I guess, the impact of stray molecules of gas or dust. But some of the bigger ships, a few Threes and almost all the Fives, are armored all over. They don't turn around either. So, anyway, when the coil flickers and you feel the turnaround, you know you've done one-quarter of your actual travel time. Not necessarily a quarter of your total out-time, of course. How long you stay at your destination is another matter entirely. You make up your own mind about that. But you've gone half of the automatically controlled trip out. So you multiply the number of days elapsed so far by four, and if that number is less than the number of days your life-support capability is good for, then you know that at least you don't have to starve to death. The difference between the two numbers is how long you can hang around at destination. Your basic ration, food, water, air replenishment, is for two hundred fifty days. You can stretch it to three hundred without much trouble (you just come back skinny, and maybe with a few deficiency diseases). So if you get up to sixty or sixty-five days on the outbound leg without turnaround, then you know you may be having a problem, and you begin eating lighter. If you get up to eighty or ninety, then your problem solves itself, because you don't have any options anymore, you're going to die before you get back. You could try changing the course settings. But that's just another way of dying, as far as can be told from what the survivors say. Presumably the Heechee could change course when they wanted to, but how they did it is one of those great unanswered questions about the Heechee, like why did they tidy everything up before they left? Or what did they look like? Or where did they go? There used to be a jokey kind of book they sold at the fairs when I was a kid. It was called Everything We Know About the Heechee. It had a hundred and twenty-eight pages, and they were all blank.