were radioed ahead, and the officials had known I was coming before the shuttle left French Guiana. It was just chance that it was Praggler who was there to meet me; even if he hadn’t been, they had plenty of time to get orders from the headquarters in Brasilia. I thought for a while that because it was Praggler I could talk him out of it. I couldn’t. I yelled at him for thirty minutes and begged for thirty more. No good. “There’s nothing wrong with your mission plan,” he admitted. “What’s wrong is you. You’re not entitled to use Gateway facilities, because Gateway Corp preempted you yesterday, while you were in orbit. Even if it hadn’t, Robin, I wouldn’t let you go. You’re too personally involved. Not to mention too old for this kind of thing.”
“I’m an experienced Gateway pilot!-“
“You’re an experienced pain in the ass, Robin. And maybe a little bit crazy, too. What do you think one man could do on Heechee Heaven? No. We’ll use your plan. We’ll even pay you royalties on it-if it works. But we’ll do it the right way, from Gateway itself, with at least three ships going, two of them full of young, healthy, well armed daredevils.”
“Senator,” I pleaded, “let me go! If you ship this computer to Gateway it’ll take months-years!”
“Not if we send it right up there in the Five,” he said. “Six days. Then it can take right off again, in convoy. But not with you. However,” he said reasonably, “we’ll certainly pay you for the computer and for the program. Leave it at that, Robin. Let somebody else take the risks. I’m speaking as your friend.”
Well, he was my friend and we both knew it, but maybe not as much of a friend as he had been, after I told him what he could do with his friendship. Finally Bover pulled me away. The last I saw of the Senator he was sitting on the edge of the desk staring after me, face still purple with rage, eyes looking as though they were getting ready to weep.
“That’s tough luck, Mr. Broadhead,” said Bover sympathetically.
I took a breath to straighten him out, too, and stopped myself just in time. There was no point in it. “I’ll get you a ticket back to Kourou,” I said.
He smiled, showing perfectly chiseled Chiclets-he had been spending some of that money on himself. “You have made me a rich man, Mr. Broadhead. I can pay for my own ticket. Also, I’ve never been here before and will not likely come again, so I think I’ll stay a while.”
“Suit yourself.”
“And you, Mr. Broadhead? What are your plans?”
“I don’t have any.” Nor could I think of any. I had run out of programming. I cannot tell you how empty that feels. I had nerved myself up for another Heechee mystery-ship ride-well, not as much a mystery as when I was prospecting out of Gateway. But still a pretty scary prospect. I had taken a step with Essie that I had feared taking for a long time. And all for nothing.
I stared wistfully down the long, empty tunnel toward the docks. “I might shoot my way through,” I said.
“Mr. Broadhead! That’s-that’s-“
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going to, mostly because all the guns I know anything about are already loaded onto that Five. And I doubt they’ll let me in to get one.”
He peered into my face. “Well,” he said doubtfully, “perhaps you, too, might enjoy just spending a few days-“
And then his expression changed.
I hardly saw it; I was feeling what he felt, and that was enough to demand all my attention. Old Peter was in the couch again. Worse than ever. It was not just his dreams and fantasies that I was experiencing-that everyone alive was feeling. It was pain. Despair. Madness. There was a terrible sense of pressure around the temples, a flaming ache from arms and chest. My throat was dry, then raw with sour clots as I vomited.
Nothing like that had ever come from the Food Factory before.
But then no one had ever died in the couch before. It did not stop in a minute, or in ten. My lungs heaved in great starving gasps. So did Bover’s. So did everyone else’s, wherever they were in range of his transmission. The pain kept on, and every time it seemed to reach a plateau there was an explosion of new pain; and all the time there was the terror, the rage, the awful misery of a man who knew he was dying, and hated it.
But I knew what it was.
I knew what it was, and I knew what I could do-what at least my body could do, if I could only hold my mind together enough to make it. I forced myself to take a step, and then another. I made myself trot down that wide, weary corridor, when Bover was writhing on the ground behind me and the guards were staggering, completely helpless, ahead. I blundered past them and doubt they even saw me, into the narrow hatch of the lander, tumbling all bruised and shaken, forcing myself to dog it closed over my head.
And there I was, in the disastrously familiar tiny cubbyhole, surrounded by shapes of molded tan plastic. Walthers had done his part of the job, at least. I had no way of paying him for it, but if he had put his hand in the port as I was closing it I would have given him a million.
At some point old Peter Herter died. His death did not end the misery. It only began to slow it down. I could not have guessed what it would be like to be in the mind of a man who has died, while he feels his heart stop and his bowels loosen and the certainty of death stab into his brain. It goes on much longer than I would have believed possible. It was going on all the time I cut the lander loose and sent it up on its little hydrogen jets to where the Heechee drive could work. I jammed and heaved the course-guidance wheels about until they showed that well- learned pattern Albert had taught me.
And then I squeezed the launch teat, and I was on my way. The ship began its lurchy, queasy acceleration. The star patterns I could see, barely see, by craning past a memory-storage unit, began to drift together. No one could stop me now. I could not even stop myself.
By all the data Albert had been able to collect the trip would be twenty-two days exactly. Not very long-not unless you are squeezed into a ship that is already filled to capacity. There was room for me-more or less. I could stretch out. I could stand up. I could even lie down, if the vagrant motion of the ship let me know where “down” was, and if I did not mind being folded over between pieces of metal. What I could not do, for those twenty-two days, was move more than half a meter in any direction-not to eat, not to sleep, not to bathe or excrete; not for anything.
There was plenty of time on my hands for the purpose of remembering how terrifying Heechee flight was, and
