Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (34 page)

He loped leisurely toward me, chewing on an unlighted cigar. “What’s it to you?” he asked.

“There’s cargo coming off the shuttle. I want it loaded onto the Five that’s in the dock now. You’ll need half a dozen helpers and probably cargo-handling equipment, and it’s a rush job.”

“Urn,” he said. “You got authority for this?”

“I’ll show it to you when I pay you off,” I said. “And the pay’s a thousand dollars a man, with a ten thousand dollar bonus to you personally if you do it within three hours.”

“Urn. Let’s see the cargo.” It was just coming off the rocket. He looked it over carefully, scratched for a while, thought for a while. He wasn’t entirely without conversation. A couple of words at a time it developed that his name was A. T. Walthers, Jr., and that he had been born in the tunnels on Venus. By his bangle I could tell that he had tried his luck on Gateway, and by the fact that he was doing odd jobs on the Moon I could tell that his luck hadn’t been good. Well, mine hadn’t been either, the first couple of times; and then it changed. In which direction is hard to say. “Can do it, Broadhead,” he said at last, “but we don’t have three hours. That joker Herter is due to perform again in about ninety minutes. We’ll have to wrap this up before that.”

“All the better,” I said. “Now, which way is the Gateway Corp office?”

“North end of the spindle,” he said. “They close in about half an hour.”

All the better, I thought again, but didn’t say it. Dragging Bover after me I prancy-danced back along the tunnel to the big spindle-shaped cavern that was headquarters for the area and argued our way into the Launch Director’s room. “You’ll want an open circuit to Earth for ID,” I told her. “I’m Robin Broadhead, and here’s my thumbprint. This is Hanson Bover-if you’ll oblige, Bover-“ He pressed his thumb on the plate next to mine. “Now say your bit,” I invited him.

“I, Allen Bover,” he said by rote, “hereby withdraw my injunction against Robin Broadhead, the Gateway Corp et al.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Now, Director, while you’re verifying that, here’s a signed copy of what Bover has just said for your records, plus a mission plan. Under my contract with Gateway Corp. which your machines can retrieve for you, I have the right to make use of Gateway facilities in connection with the Herter-Hall expedition. I am going to do so, for which purpose I need the Five at present parked in your landing docks. You will see by the mission plan that I intend to go to Heechee Heaven, and from there to the Food Factory, where I will prevent Peter Herter from inflicting any more damage to the Earth, also rescuing the Herter-Hall party and returning valuable Gateway information for processing and use. And I’d like to leave within the next hour,” I finished strongly.

Well, for a minute there it looked like it was going to work. The Launch Director looked at the thumbprints on the register plate, picked up the spool of mission plan and weighed it in her hand, and then stared at me in silence for a moment, her mouth open. I could hear the whine of whatever volatile gas they were using in the heat engines, Carnot-cycling from under the Fresnel lenses to the shaded artichoke-shaped reflectors just above us. I didn’t hear anything else at all. Then she sighed and said, “Senator Praggler, have you been getting all that?”

And from the air behind her desk came Praggler’s growl. “You bet your ass I have, Sally. Tell Broadhead it won’t work. He can’t have the ship.”

It was the three days in transit that had done me in. Automatically the passport identities of all passengers 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 to feel all of it.

There was plenty of time, too, to learn. Albert had been careful to record for me all the data I had not had the wit to ask him for, and those tapes were available for me to play. They were not very interesting or sophisticated in delivery. The PMAL-2 was all memory: plenty of brain, not much display. There was no three-dimensional tank, only a stereo flat-plate goggle system when my eyes would bear watching it, or a screen the size of the palm of my hand when they would not.

At first I did not use it. I just lay there, sleeping as much as I could. Partly I was recovering from the trauma of Peter’s death, so terrifyingly like my own. Partly I was experimenting with the inside of my head-allowing myself to feel fear (when I had every reason for it!), encouraging myself to feel guilt. There are kinds of guilt that I know I cherish, the contemplation of obligations unmet and commitments undone. I had plenty of those to think about, beginning with Peter (who would almost surely have been still alive, if I had not accepted him for that expedition) and ending, or rather not ending, with Kiara in her frozen black hole-not ending because I could always think of others. That amusement staled before long. To my surprise I found that the guilt was not very overpowering after all, once I let myself feel it; and that took care of the first day.

Then I turned to the tapes. I let the semi-Albert, the rigid, half-animated caricature of the program I knew and loved, lecture me on Mach’s Principle and gosh numbers and more curious forms of astrophysical speculation than I had ever dreamed of. I didn’t really listen, but I let the voice roll over me, and that was the second day.

Then, from the same source, I poured into myself all that was stored about the Dead Men. I had heard almost all of it before. I heard it all again. I had nothing better to do, and that was the third day.

Then there were miscellaneous lectures on Heechee Heaven and the provenance of the Old Ones and possible strategies for dealing with Henrietta and possible risks to be guarded against from the Old Ones, and that was the third day, and the fourth, and the fifth.

I began to wonder how I would fill twenty-two of them, so I went back and did those tapes all over again, and that was the sixth day, and the eighth, and the tenth; and on the eleventh- On the eleventh I cut off the computer entirely, grinning to myself with anticipated pleasure.

It was halfway day. I hung there in my restraining straps, waiting for the satisfaction of the one event this cramped and cussed trip could produce for me: the twinkling eruption of golden sparks of light in the crystal spiral that would signify turnover time. I didn’t know exactly when it would happen. Probably not in the first hour of the day (and it didn’t). Probably not, either, in the second or third . . . and it didn’t. Not in those hours, nor in the fourth, or fifth, or the ones after that. It did not happen at all on the eleventh day.

Or on the twelfth.

Or on the thirteenth.

Or on the fourteenth; and when at last I punched in the data to check out the arithmetic I did not care to do in my head, the computer told me what I did not want to know.

It was too late.

Even if the halfway point occurred any time now-even in the next minute-there would not be water, food and air enough to carry me through to the end.

There are economies one can make. I made them. I moistened my lips instead of drinking, slept all I could, breathed as shallowly as I knew how. And turnover at last did occur-on day nineteen. Eight days late.