“Yes! But,” he added, softening, “although they could, there is some chance they would not. At least not in time. Nevertheless, as your legal advisor, I have to say-“
“You don’t have to say anything. Buy the computer. Albert and Sigfrid, program it the way we discussed. You three get out of the tank; I want Harriet. Harriet? Get me a flight, Kourou to the Moon, same ship as the computer Morton’s buying for me, soon as you can. And while you’re doing that see if you can locate Hanson Bover for me. I want to talk to him.” When she nodded and winked away I turned to look at Essie. Her eyes were damp, but she was smiling.
“You know something?” I said. “Sigfrid never called me ‘Rob’ or ‘Bobby’ once.”
She put her arms around me and hugged me close. “Maybe he thinks you are not to be treated like an infant now,” she said. “And neither am I, Robin. Do you think I wanted to get well only so we could make love quickly? No. It was also so you would not be held prisoner here by a wife you thought it wicked to leave. And so that I would be well able to deal with it,” she added, “when you left anyway.”
We landed at Cayenne in pitch dark and pouring rain. Bover was waiting for me as I cleared Customs, half asleep in a foam armchair by the baggage terminal. I thanked him several times for meeting me, but he shrugged it off. “We have only two hours,” he said. “Let us get on with it.”
Harriet had chartered a chopper for us. We took off over the palms just as the sun was coming up from the Atlantic. By the time we reached Kourou it was full daylight, and the lunar module was erect beside its support tower. It was tiny compared to the giants that climb up from Kennedy or California, but the Centre Spatial Guyanais gets one-sixth better performance out of its rockets, being almost on the equator, so they don’t have to be as big. The computer was already loaded and stowed, and Bover and I got aboard at once. Slam. Shove. Retching taste of the breakfast I shouldn’t have eaten on the airplane rising in my throat, and then we were under way.
It takes three days for the lunar flight. I spent as much of it as I could sleeping, the rest talking to Bover. It was the longest time I had spent out of reach of my comm facilities in at least a dozen years, and I thought it would hang heavy on my hands. It went like lightning. I woke up when the acceleration warnings went off, and watched the brassy Moon rise up toward us, and then there we were.
Considering how far I had been, it was surprising that I had never been on the Moon before. I didn’t know what to expect. It all took me by surprise: the dancy, prancy feeling of weighing no more than an inflated rubber doll, the sound of the reedy tenor that came out of my mouth in the twenty-percent helium atmosphere. They weren’t breathing Heechee mixture any more, not on the Moon. Heechee digging machines went like a bomb in the lunar rock, and with all the sunlight anybody could want to drive them it cost nothing to keep them going. The only problem was filling them with air, which was why they supplemented with helium-cheaper and easier to get than N2.
The Heechee lunar spindle is near the shuttle base-or, to put it the right way around, the shuttle base was located where it is, near Fra Mauro, because that was where the Heechee had dug most a million years before. It was all underground, even the docking ports concealed under the lee of a ridge. A couple of American astronauts named Shepard and Mitchell had spent a weekend roaming around within two hundred kilometers of it once, and never noticed it was there. Now a community of more than a thousand people lived in the spindle, and the digs and the new tunnels were branching off in all directions, and the lunar surface was a rash of microwave dishes and solar collectors and plumbing. “Hi, you,” I said to the first able-bodied man who seemed to have nothing to do. “What’s your name?”
He loped leisurely toward me, chewing on an unlighted cigar. “What’s it to you?” he asked.
“There’s cargo coming off the shuttle. I want it loaded onto the Five that’s in the dock now. You’ll need half a dozen helpers and probably cargo-handling equipment, and it’s a rush job.”
“Urn,” he said. “You got authority for this?”
“I’ll show it to you when I pay you off,” I said. “And the pay’s a thousand dollars a man, with a ten thousand dollar bonus to you personally if you do it within three hours.”
“Urn. Let’s see the cargo.” It was just coming off the rocket. He looked it over carefully, scratched for a while, thought for a while. He wasn’t entirely without conversation. A couple of words at a time it developed that his name was A. T. Walthers, Jr., and that he had been born in the tunnels on Venus. By his bangle I could tell that he had tried his luck on Gateway, and by the fact that he was doing odd jobs on the Moon I could tell that his luck hadn’t been good. Well, mine hadn’t been either, the first couple of times; and then it changed. In which direction is hard to say. “Can do it, Broadhead,” he said at last, “but we don’t have three hours. That joker Herter is due to perform again in about ninety minutes. We’ll have to wrap this up before that.”
“All the better,” I said. “Now, which way is the Gateway Corp office?”
“North end of the spindle,” he said. “They close in about half an hour.”
All the better, I thought again, but didn’t say it. Dragging Bover after me I prancy-danced back along the tunnel to the big spindle-shaped cavern that was headquarters for the area and argued our way into the Launch Director’s room. “You’ll want an open circuit to Earth for ID,” I told her. “I’m Robin Broadhead, and here’s my thumbprint. This is Hanson Bover-if you’ll oblige, Bover-“ He pressed his thumb on the plate next to mine. “Now say your bit,” I invited him.
“I, Allen Bover,” he said by rote, “hereby withdraw my injunction against Robin Broadhead, the Gateway Corp et al.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Now, Director, while you’re verifying that, here’s a signed copy of what Bover has just said for your records, plus a mission plan. Under my contract with Gateway Corp. which your machines can retrieve for you, I have the right to make use of Gateway facilities in connection with the Herter-Hall expedition. I am going to do so, for which purpose I need the Five at present parked in your landing docks. You will see by the mission plan that I intend to go to Heechee Heaven, and from there to the Food Factory, where I will prevent Peter Herter from inflicting any more damage to the Earth, also rescuing the Herter-Hall party and returning valuable Gateway information for processing and use. And I’d like to leave within the next hour,” I finished strongly.
Well, for a minute there it looked like it was going to work. The Launch Director looked at the thumbprints on the register plate, picked up the spool of mission plan and weighed it in her hand, and then stared at me in silence for a moment, her mouth open. I could hear the whine of whatever volatile gas they were using in the heat engines, Carnot-cycling from under the Fresnel lenses to the shaded artichoke-shaped reflectors just above us. I didn’t hear anything else at all. Then she sighed and said, “Senator Praggler, have you been getting all that?”
And from the air behind her desk came Praggler’s growl. “You bet your ass I have, Sally. Tell Broadhead it won’t work. He can’t have the ship.”
It was the three days in transit that had done me in. Automatically the passport identities of all passengers
