The Gateway Trip

That was a general problem with Heechee technology. When human beings found pieces of it they also found a lot of confusion. The Heechee had not been kind enough to leave operating manuals for the humans to pore over. They hadn't even put labels on the machines-at least, not in any way that human beings could read. The best way for human beings to find out what all those gizmos and gadgets were for was what used to be called reverse engineering, which basically meant taking them apart to see how they worked.

The trouble with that was that when engineers tried it, the damned things often blew up. So they tended to treat the machinery with caution, and if they didn't know what it was for, and couldn't figure out any way of trying it out, they tended to leave it alone. Take that crystally, twisty rod sort of thing that was part of the furnishings of some, but not all, Heechee ships. They knew it had a purpose. They didn't know what it was.

If anyone on Earth had known where the Heechee lived, they might have guessed that one a lot sooner... but no one did, and so the human race had in its hands an instrument for penetrating black holes long before anyone knew what it could do.

 

It was a while before any human being knew exactly what a Heechee looked like, for that matter. Still, they are easy enough to describe.

A male Heechee is about five feet tall, on average. His head is the Aryan ideal Nordic squared-off block, only a little more so, though his skin color isn't Nordic at all. If he is male it is probably a sort of oak-bark brown; if female, she is generally somewhat paler. The Heechee skin looks as though it were carved out of shiny plas

 

tic. A dense, fine growth of hair covers his scalp, or would if he didn't keep it cropped very short. He smells ammoniacal to human beings-the Heechee themselves don't notice it. There is no iris to his eyes. There isn't really even a pupil, just a vaguely X-shaped dark blotch in the middle of a pinkish eyeball. His tongue is forked. And his general build

Well, what you would think of a Heechee's bodily build would depend on whether you were looking at him from the front or from the side.

If a human being were squeezed flat, he would come out of it looking like a Heechee. Viewed from the front, your Heechee would look formidable; from the side (except for a rather potbellied, globular abdomen), quite frail. What he would most look like (though not so exaggerated) would be the cardboard-cutout skeletons children decorate their schoolrooms with at Halloween. This was especially true around the hip and leg joints, because the Heechee pelvis was structurally rather different from the human. The legs attached directly to the ends of the pelvis, like a crocodile's, so there was a considerable space between the legs as a Heechee stood er~ct.

The Heechee didn't waste that space. It was the most convenient place for a Heechee to carry anything, so the sorts of loads human beings would be likely to lug in their arms or on their shoulders the Heechee carried slung between their legs. In fact, all civilized Heechee carried a large, tapering pouch there. In it they kept two main items-the microwave generators they needed for their comfort, and the storage facilities for the 'ancient ancestors' whose minds they carried around with them, as a human being might carry a pocket calculator-as well as their equivalents of fountain pens and credit cards and photos of their near and dear. And when the Heechee sat down, what they sat on was the pouch.

(Thus at one blow ended a half century of speculation on why the seats in the Heechee spacecraft were so user-unfriendly for human users.)

Although hard and shiny, the Heechee integument was not

thick. You could see the movement of the bones through it; you could even see the muscles and tendons working, especially when the Heechee was excited-it was a kind of body language, something like a human's grinding his teeth. Their speech was somewhat hissy. Their gestures were not at all like those of Earthmen. They didn't shake their heads in negation; they flapped their wrists instead.

The Heechee had descended from a race of burrowers like prairie dogs rather than arboreal tree climbers moved to the plains, as people had. Therefore the Heechee possessed several traits that their heredity had laid on them. No Heechee ever suffered from claustrophobia. They liked being in enclosed spaces. (That may have been why they enjoyed tunnels so much. It certainly was why they preferred to sleep in things like gunnysacks filled with wood shavings.)

Their family lives were not exactly like those of humans; nor were their occupations; nor were their equivalents of politics, fashion, and religion. They had two sexes, like people, and sex was sometimes obsessive in their minds-as with people-but for long periods they hardly thought about the subject. (Not very like most people at all.) Strangely, they had never evolved equivalents of such human institutions as a government bureaucracy (they hardly had a government) or a financial economy (they didn't even use money in any important sense). Humans didn't understand how they could operate without these things, but the Heechee thought that in those respects human ways were pretty repulsive, too. Since, by the time human beings got far enough out into space to have some chance of encountering Heechee, most employed human persons were in these 'white-collar' occupations, they were startled to find that most Heechee were, in their view, unemployed.

It wasn't just that the human poli-sci and sociology professors wondered how the Heechee managed to get along without kings, presidents, or maximum leaders. Even on Earth, generations of anarchists, libertarians, and small-is-beautiful philosophers had been claiming that human beings didn't need such things, either. The real puzzle was how the Heechee had escaped having them anyway.

It took a number of anthropologists and cultural behaviorists a long time to come up with an explanatory theory. That phenomenon, too, seemed to have an evolutionary basis. It came from the fact that the pre-Heechee nonsapients-the primitive species they labeled 'Heecheeids'-had burrowed in the ground like prairie dogs or trapdoor spiders. They did not form tribes. They staked out territories. Therefore Heecheeids did not conduct tribal wars or struggle for succession to a throne; there wasn't any throne to succeed to. No Heecheeid ever had any need or desire that conflicted with any other Heechee-as long as the other guy stayed out of his territory.

Of course, you can't build a high-tech, spacefaring civilization out of solitary, noninterfering individuals. But by