was a man from Cork, Ireland, named Terrance Horran. The Canadians didn't just discover the artifact. They also discovered Ethel Kiock, because she was there when they arrived. When Horran arrived he discovered them all, and later parties kept on discovering those who had come before, because they all stayed right there. As with Pat Bover on the Food Factory, it was a one-way destination for them all. There wasn't any return. The boards on all the ships nulled themselves on arrival.
They had no way of getting off the artifact.
That was a great pity in the minds of all of them, because Ethel's
Place was a wonder. It was an object about the size of a cruise liner,
but without any engines of any kind that they could discover. It
had food machines, and air and water regenerators, and lights; and they were all still operating, even after all the millennia that had passed. The Heechee machines were built to last. Morever, there were a lot of astronomical instruments on Ethel's Place, and they were working, too.
The castaways had plenty of time to investigate their new home. They had nothing else to do. The food machines fed them; their lives were not threatened. They actually made quite a self-sufficient little colony. They might even have made it a permanent one, with generations of settlers coming along, if Klock had not been past the age of childbearing by the time the Canadians got there, or if the later arrivals had included any females.
They realized early that Ethel's Place was a kind of astronomical observatory.
What the observatory had been put there to observe was obvious at once. Ethel's Place was in orbit at a distance of about a thousand AU (which is to say, about five light-days) from a rather spectacular pair of astronomical objects. Binary stars weren't particularly interesting. This pair was unique. One of them was a fafrly standard kind of star, though a rarish one-a hot, pulsating, supergiant specimen of the young and violent class called type F. That by itself would have been worth a little bonus money-if they had had any way of reporting it-but its companion was a lot stranger. The type-F star had a tilted ring of hot gas around it, suggesting that it was still in the process of reaching its final stage of starhood. The companion was all gas, and not very hot gas, at that-an immense, nearly transparent disk of the stuff.
The more they looked at it, the stranger it got. Stars were supposed to be spheres. They weren't supposed to be disks. The diskshaped companion was hard to observe anyway, even with Heechee optics. Visually, it looked like nothing more than a faint scarlet stain on the sky. It was too cool to radiate much. The Heechee instruments couldn't tell them its temperature, because the Heechee had not been thoughtful enough to provide conversion tables into Cel
sius or Kelvin or even Fahrenheit scales. Klock's own best estimate was that it ran to maybe five hundred K-far cooler than the surface of Venus, for instance; cooler even than a log burning in a fireplace on Earth.
The best time to see it, they discovered, was when it was eclipsing the type-F companion star. Because the orbit of Ethel's Place was retrograde with respect to the disk, such eclipses happened more often than they would have if their artifact had somehow been stationary in the sky. They still did not happen very often. Ethel Klock had observed one eclipse alone, shortly after she landed. By the time of the next eclipse she had the Canadians and Horran to share the sight with, but that was more than twenty years later.
The story of Ethel's Place did finally have a happy ending for its captives-well, fairly happy. Ultimately human beings did learn how to make Heechee ships go where they wanted them to go. Shortly thereafter an exploring party in better command of its ship found the five castaways, and they were rescued at last.
It was a little late. By then Ethel Klock was in her seventyeighth year, and even Horran was nearly fifty. They didn't even get
their science bonuses, either. The Gateway Corporation had long since stopped issuing them, because the Gateway Corporation no longer existed.
They would have been out of luck anyway, they found, because even if they'd gotten back early they would not have collected much in the way of financial rewards. That binary star system was unfortunately not a new discovery. Indeed, it turned out to be a system that had been very familiar to astronomers on Earth, because of those very puzzling characteristics. The name of the star was Epsilon Aurigae, and its mysteries were no secret. They had been unlocked by human astronomers with conventional instruments when the binary's cool orbiting disk had passed between Earth and its type-F primary in the eclipse of the year A.D. 2000.
It was more than fifty years between the time the first Gateway prospector landed on one of those 'collection traps' and the time the last of them was discovered. As many as eight separate missions might converge on one of them. When they did, they couldn'treturn. Most had food factories, either built in or supplied with shipments of food by automatic spacecraft from an independent factory nearby, so the castaways didn't starve, nor did they lack for water or air. A few did not have these amenities-not in working condition anymore, at least. In those cases all that was found were the abandoned Heechee ships and a few desiccated corpses.
Heecheeologists grew to believe that these 'collection traps' served some purpose-maybe several purposes, though they could not be really sure what any of them were. None were accessible to planet dwellers; there were no tunnels on inhabited planets, nor were there any treasures where they could be reached without the use of spacecraft.
It seemed to be a sort of intelligence test posed by these vanished aliens. It was almost as though the Heechee, when they went to wherever they had gone, had deliberately left clues to themselves. But even the clues were hard to find. No intelligent race could find
one until it had first mastered at least primitive interplanetary travel on its own.
And the greatest prizes were even more thoroughly concealed.
As a matter of record, it wasn't exactly a Gateway prospector who made the first round-trip expedition to the Food Factory. Pat Bover's was only one way. The expedition that made it possible for the Heechee carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen (or 'CHON') food to do something to help out hunger on Earth arrived there in an Earthly chemical rocket, spiraling out into the outer reaches of the solar system.
And they did more than that, because it was through the Food Factory that the second big discovery came along. It was called Heechee Heaven. It was the largest Heechee-made artifact ever discovered, more than half a mile long, twice the size of an ocean liner. It was shaped like a spindle (a familiar Heechee design), and it was not uninhabited. It held the descendants of the breeding group of australopithecines the Heechee had captured on Earth's surface, half
a million years before; it held one living human, the son of a pair of prospectors who had reached Heechee Heaven in their Gateway ship-and been trapped there. And it contained the stored minds (poorly stored, but the machines that did the job had never been designed for human beings; humans had not yet evolved when those machines were built) of more then twenty Gateway prospectors who had come there on one-way trips.
All that was wonderful
It was more than wonderful, though. For the first time, Heechee technology was not only on hand but accessible. At last some of it could be understood ... and copied ... and even improved! Those treasures were not just satisfying scratches for the scientists' itch of curiosity, or wealth for a few lucky discoverers. They meant a
