better life for everyone.
And Heechee Heaven was not simply a space station. It was a ship. A vast one. A ship big enough to transport human colonists in quantities sizable enough to begin to make a dent in human misery-3,800 emigrants at a time, anywhere they chose to go-and keep on doing it, once a month, indefinitely.
And the colonization of the galaxy by the human race was possible at last.
The biggest 'science' bonus the Gateway Corporation ever offeitd its prospectors wasn't really scientific. It was emotional. It proved that even the Gateway Corporation had some human feelings. The bonus was waiting there for any explorer who discovered a living, breathing Heechee, and it wasn't tiny. It came to fifty million dollars.
That was the kind of bonus any desperate Gateway explorer could dream about, but hardly any of them ever expected to claim it. Maybe the corporate masters didn't expect ever to pay it out, either. They all well knew that every sign of the Heechee anyone had ever found was hundreds of thousands of years old. They also suspected, very likely, that there might not be much chance that anyone who did discover a live Heechee would be allowed to come back and tell the human world what he had found.
But there were other bonuses in that same emotional area. They were lesser but still very worthwhile. The biggest one was the stand-
ing ten-million-dollar offer for the discovery of any intelligent race of aliens. After a while, that was made a little easier. You could earn it by finding any living aliens at all who showed the faintest signs of smarts. You could even earn money for dead ones. There was a flat million posted for the discoverer of the first non-Heechee artifact found, and half a million or so for the discovery of any one of a variety of 'signatures'-that is to say, of such unmistakable signs of intelligence as a clearly coded radio transmission, or the detection of synthetic gases in some planetary atmosphere somewhere.
It stood to reason, Gateway prospectors told each other as they bought each other drinks in Gateway's Blue Hell, that it was just about certain that somebody would find some of that kind of stuff somewhere, sometime. They had to. Everyone knew that there ought to be other intelligent races around. The Heechee couldn't possibly be the only other intelligent beings in the universe. Could they?
That wasn't a new idea. As far back as the middle twentieth century scientists had been listening for signals from other civilizations in space and trying to calculate the probability of ever hearing one. A fellow named Stephen Dole had calculated that there ought to be some 63,000,000 life-sustaining planets in the galaxy; later scientists, on tougher assumptions, cut the expected number down much lower-but hardly any of them were willing to put it at zero. Almost everybody agreed there ought to be some-and, in fact, Gateway prospectors did keep turning up planets where things did live. And if there was life of any kind, it seemed a reasonable bet that sooner or later some of that life would evolve toward intelligence . .
But where were they?
Ultimately a couple of lucky breaks did begin to turn up a few such interesting discoveries, though they were very sparse and slow in coming.
The first definite signs of an alien intelligence (not counting the Heechee themselves, of course) were detected by a three-person crew
from Pasadena, California, Earth. They came out of faster-than-light drive in orbit around a promising-looking sun (it was identified as a G-4, pretty close to Earth's own primary in type and suitability), and discovered quickly that there was a good-sized planet right in the middle of the habitability zone.
The trouble was, the planet was a mess. Most of one hemisphere was a patchwork of bare rock plains, punctuated with volcanoes, and the thing was hot. It didn't have much in the way of oceans. It didn't even have anything like as much of an atmosphere as its mass and constitution would have predicted.
However, what it did have was a dam. A big one.
The dam was on the less ruined side of the planet. Even so, it was not at all in good shape. It wasn't a very high-tech dam, for that matter-half a kilometer of rock piled across a valley. It had once been a river valley, no doubt, but there was nothing left of the river at all. There wasn't much left of the dam, for that matter. But what there was could not have been natural. Someone had piled those rocks in that place for a definite purpose.
Martin Scranton and his two sisters tried to land on the planet. They made a landing, all right, but the heat sensors in their lander
began to squawk warnings as soon as they touched down; the surface even around the dam was hotter than the boiling point of water. They did, they thought, see traces of what might have been other stone structures on a few mountaintops, but nothing in recognizable shape.
Back on the Gateway asteroid, the scientists decided that that planet had had some bad luck-bad enough to be struck by some wandering body, probably something the size of Callisto; the impact had boiled off the seas, buried much of the planet under molten rock, driven the atmosphere into space-and, oh, yes, certainly, killed every organic thing that had ever inhabited it.
So Scranton hadn't found intelligent life. He did claim that he had at least found a place where intelligent life had once been. The Gateway Corporation couldn't call it a success, in terms of the discovery bonus offered. But still
They took a long time to think it over, then paid half the bonus for a good try.
The first living nonhuman intelligent race the human explorers found didn't count. They weren't all that nonhuman, and they weren't all that intelligent, either. (For that matter, they weren't even discovered by a Gateway ship; the people who found them were moping around the extremes of Earth's own solar system in a primitive Earth-designed rocket ship.) What these particular 'aliens' were were the remote descendants of a tribe of Earthly australopithecines, and the place they were found was on the big Heechee ship (or artifact), orbiting out in Sol's Oort cloud of comets, called 'Heechee Heaven.'
Of course, as we have seen, those old australopithecines hadn't gotten there by themselves. The Heechee had taken them away for breeding stock, in that long-ago visit to prehuman Earth. Then they had left them to the care of machine nursemaids-for half a million years and more.
The second race of aliens was better. It took a long time before they were found, but they were clearly the real thing at last. They were definitely intelligent-they proved it by traveling through interstellar space on their own! But they were a bit of a disappointment, all the same. They certainly weren't much fun to talk to.
They weren't exactly found by a Gateway prospector, either-the whole Gateway Corporation was pretty nearly history by the time these folks got discovered. It still existed, of course. But Gateway no longer was where the action was, for by then human beings had learned to copy a lot of Heechee technology and were venturing into new areas of the galaxy on their own.
At that point, one interstellar ship, on what had become a fairly routine cruise, detected an unfamiliar vessel. It turned out to be a photon-sail ship, slowly chugging along between stars on a voyage of centuries.
That certainly was not Heechee technology! Nor was it human, not even australopithecine: the long-awaited truly alien race had at last been located!
But actually they had been discovered quite a while earlier, it turned out-by the Heechee themselves, in fact. The sailboat people were the descendants of what the Heechee had called the 'Slow Swimmers' and human beings came to know as the 'Sluggards.' They were definitely alien, and definitely not Heechee, and definitely intelligent.
