“That’s what we have to find out,” I yelled back. The boat skillfully snaked us in to shallow water and waited while we jumped out and ran up the grass. When it recognized that we were gone, it purred down the shoreline to put itself away.
Wet as we were, we ran directly to the brain room. We had begun to get opticals already, and the holo tank showed a skinny, scraggly youth wearing a sort of divided kilt and a dirty tunic. He did not seem threatening in any way, but he sure as hell had no right to be there. ‘Voice,” I ordered, and the moving lips began to speak-queer, shrill, high-pitched, but good enough English to understand:
“-from the main station, yes. It is about seven seven-days- weeks, I mean. I come here often.”
“For God’s sake, how?” I could not see the speaker, but it was male and had no accent: Paul Hall.
“In a ship, to be sure. Do you not have a ship? The Dead Men speak only of traveling in ships, I do not know any other way.”
“Incredible,” said Essie over my shoulder. She backed away, not taking her eyes off the tank, and came back with a terrycloth robe to throw over my shoulders and one for herself. “What do you suppose is ‘main station’?”
“I wish to God I knew. Harriet?”
The voices from the tank grew fainter, and my secretary’s voice said, “Yes, Mr. Broadhead?”
“When did he get there?”
“About seventeen point four minutes ago, Mr. Broadhead. Plus transit time from the Food Factory, of course. He was discovered by Janine Herter. She did not appear to have had a camera with her, so we received only voice until one of the other members of the party arrived.” As soon as she stopped speaking the voice from the figure in the tank came up again; Harriet is a very good program, one of Essie’s best.
“-sorry if I behaved improperly,” the boy was saying. Pause. Then, old Peter Herter:
“Never mind that, by God. Are there other people on this main station?”
The boy pursed his lips. “That,” he said philosophically, “would depend, would it not, on how one defines ‘person’? In the sense of a living organism of our species, no. The closest is the Dead Men.”
A woman’s voice-Dorema Herter-Hall. “Are you hungry? Do you need anything?”
“No, why should I?”
“Harriet? What’s that about behaving improperly?” I asked. Harriet’s voice came hesitantly. “He, uh, he brought himself to orgasm, Mr. Broadhead. Right in front of Janine Herter.”
I couldn’t help it, I broke out laughing. “Essie,” I said to my wife, “I think you made her a little too ladylike.” But that wasn’t what I was laughing at. It was the plain incongruity of the thing. I had guessed-anything. Anything but this: a Heechee, a space pirate, Martians-God knows what, but not a horny teen-aged boy.
There was a scrabble of steel claws from behind and something jumped on my shoulder. “Down, Squiffy,” I snapped.
Essie said, “Just let him nuzzle neck for a minute. He’ll go away.”
“He isn’t dainty in his personal habits,” I snarled. “Can’t we get rid of him?”
“Na, na, galubka,” she said soothingly, patting the top of my head as she got up. ‘Want Full Medical, don’t you? Squiffy comes along.” She kissed me and wandered out of the room, leaving me to think about the thing that, to my somewhat surprise, was making all sorts of tiny but discomforting stirrings inside me. To see a Heechee! Well, we hadn’t-but what if we did?
When the first Venus explorers discovered the traces the Heechee had left, glowing blue-lined empty tunnels, spindle-shaped caves, it was a shock. A few artifacts, another shock-what were they? There were the scrolls of metal somebody named “prayer fans” (but did the Heechee pray, and if so to whom?) There were the glowing little beads called “fire pearls”, but they weren’t pearls, and they weren’t burning. Then someone found the Gateway asteroid, and the biggest shock of all, because on it were a couple of hundred working spaceships. Only you couldn’t direct them. You could get in and go, and that was it. . . and what you found when you got there was shock, shock, shock, shock.
I knew. I had had the shocks, on my three silly missions-No. Two silly missions. And then one terribly unsilly one. It had made me rich and deprived me of somebody I loved, and what is silly about either of those things?
And ever since then the Heechee, dead half a million years, not even a written word left to tell what they were up to, had permeated every part of our world. It was all questions, and not very many answers. We didn’t even know what they called themselves, certainly not “Heechee”, because that was just a name the explorers made up for them. We had no idea what these remote and godlike creatures called themselves. But we didn’t know what God called Himself, either. Jehovah, Jupiter, Baal, Allah-those were names people made up. Who knew by what name He was known to His buddies?
I was trying to let myself feel what I might have felt if the stranger in the Food Factory had actually been Heechee when the toilet flushed, Essie came out and Squiffy made a dash for the bowl. There are indignities to having Full Medical coverage, and a mobile bio-assay unit is one of them.
“You are wasting my program time!” Essie scolded, and I realized that Harriet had been sitting patiently in the tank, waiting to be told to get on with her information about the other claims on my attention. The report from the Food Factory was all being taped and stored in any case, so Essie went to her own office to deal with her own priorities, I told Harriet to start the cook on lunch, and then I let her do her secretarial duties.
“You have an appointment to testify before the Senate Ways and Means Committee tomorrow morning, Mr. Broadhead.”
“I know. I’ll be there.”
“You’re due for your next checkup this weekend. Shall I confirm the appointment?”
That’s one of the penalties of Full Medical, and besides Essie insists-she’s twenty years younger than I, and reminds me of it. “All right, let’s get it over with.”
“You are being sued by one Hanson Bover, and Morton wants to talk to you about it. Your consolidated
