“No, you aren’t, Payter. The goddam thing’s got a little acceleration!”
and maybe a star. We didn’t really need the life-support; Payter was nudging us gently as he would a jellyfish in a tank. I wanted to ask where the acceleration came from, or why; but the two pilots were busy, and besides I did not suppose they knew the answer.
“That’s got it. Now bring her in to that center docking pit, middle of that row of three.”
“Why that one?”
“Why not? Because I say so!”
And we edged in for a minute or two, and came to relative rest again. And we matched and locked. The Heechee capsule at the forward end mated neatly with the ancient pit.
Lurvy reached down and killed the board, and we all looked at each other. We were there.
Or, to put it another way, we were halfway. Halfway home.
Day 1290. It was no surprise that the Heechee had breathed an atmosphere we could survive in. The surprise was that any of it was left in this place, after all the tens or hundreds of thousands of years since anyone breathed any of it. And that was not the only surprise. The others came later, and were scarier and worse.
It was not just the atmosphere that had survived. The whole ship had survived-in working condition! We knew it as soon as we were inside and the samplers had shown us we could take off our helmets. The blue-gleaming metal walls were warm to the touch, and we could feel a faint, steady vibration. The temperature was around twelve-cool, but no worse than some Earthside homes I’ve been in. Do you want to guess what the first words were spoken by human beings inside the Food Factory? They came from Payter, and they were:
“Ten million dollars! Jesus, maybe even a hundred!”
And if he hadn’t said it, one or another of us would. Our bonus was going to be astronomical. Trish’s report hadn’t said whether the Food Factory was operational or not-for all we knew, it could have been a riddled hulk, empty of anything that made it worthwhile. But here we had a complete and major Heechee artifact, in working condition! There was simply nothing like it to judge against. The tunnels on Venus, the old ships, even Gateway itself had been carefully emptied of nearly all their contents half a million years before. This place was furnished! Warm, livable, thrumming, soaked with weak microwave radiation, it was alive. It did not seem old at all.
We had little chance to explore; the sooner we got the thing moving in toward Earth, the sooner we would cash in on its promise. We allowed ourselves an hour to roam around in the breathable air, poking into chambers filled with great gray and blue metal shapes, slithering down corridors, eating as we wandered, telling each other over the pocket communicators (and relayed through Vera to Earth) what we found. Then work. We suited up again and began the job of derigging the side-cargos.
And that was where we ran into the first trouble.
The Food Factory was not in free orbit. It was accelerating. Some sort of thrust was driving it. It was not great, less than one percent of a G.
But the electric rocket assemblies weighed more than ten tons each.
Even at one percent of perceived weight, that meant over a hundred kilograms of weight, not counting ten tons worth of inertia. As we began to unship the first one it pulled itself free at one end and began to fall away. Payter was there to catch it, but it was more than he could hold for long; I pulled myself over and grabbed the side-cargo with one hand, the brace it had been fastened to with the other, and we managed to keep it in place until Janine could secure a cable over it.
Then we retired inside the ship to think things over.
We were already exhausted. After three-plus years in confined quarters, we were not used to hard work. Vera’s bio-assay unit reported we were accumulating fatigue poisons. We bickered and worried at each other for a while, then Payter and Lurvy went to sleep while Janine and I schemed out a rigging that would let us secure each side- cargo before it was released and swing it around the Food Factory on three long cables, belayed by smaller guiding cables so that it would not smash into the hull at the far end of its travel and pound itself into scrap. We had allowed ten hours to move a rocket into position. It took three days for the first one. By the time we had it secured we were stark, staring wrecks, our heartbeats pounding, our muscles one solid ache. We took a full sleep shift and a few hours of loafing around the interior of the Food Factory before we went back to securing the rocket so that it could be started. Payter was the most energetic of us; he went prowling as far as he could go down half a dozen corridors. “All come to dead ends,” he reported when he came back. “Looks like the part we can reach is only about a tenth of the object-‘less we cut holes through the walls.”
“Not now,” I said.
“Not ever!” said Lurvy strongly. “All we do is get this thing back. Anybody wants to start cutting it up, it will be after we’ve collected our money!” She rubbed her biceps, arms folded across her chest, and added regretfully, “And we might as well get started on securing the rocket.”
It took us another two days to do that, but finally we had it in place. The welding fluxes they had given us to secure steel to Heechee metal actually worked. As far as we could tell from static inspection, it was solid. We retired into the ship and commanded Vera to give it a ten percent thrust.
At once we felt a tiny lurch. It was working. We all grinned at each other, and I reached into my private hold-all for the bottle of champagne I had been saving for this occasion-Another lurch.
Click, click, click, click-one after another our grins snapped off. There should have been only one felt acceleration.
Lurvy jumped to the cyber board. “Vera! Report delta-V!” The screen lighted up with a diagram of forces: the Food Factory imaged in the middle, force arrows showing in two directions. One was our thruster, doing its job of pushing against the hull. The other was not.
“Additional thrust now affecting course. . . Lurvy,” Vera reported. “Vector result now same in direction and magnitude as previous delta-V.”
Our rocket was pushing against the Food Factory. But it wasn’t doing much good. The factory was pushing back.
Day 1298. So we did what we obviously had to do. We turned everything off and screamed for help.
