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man named Keith Lofstrom in the late twentieth century, though nobody built
one until there was enough traffic to justify it. What Robin didn't know was
that although the Heechee never invented the loop, the sailship people did-
they had no other way to get out of their dense, opaque atmosphere.
The point I'm making is that all my money-making ventures were also solidly
useful projects that contributed to both the conquest of the Galaxy and the
alleviation of the needs of human beings, and that's a fact. And that's why
all these fragments of biography do ultimately fall together. They don't look
as though they're going to. But they do. All of them. Even the stories of my
seinifriend, Captain, the Heechee whom I ultimately came to know quite well,
and of his lover and second in cornmand, the female Heechee named Twice, whom,
as you will discover, I did at the end come to know quite a lot better than
that.
10
The Place Where the
Heechee Dwelt
When the Heechee hid inside their Schwarzschild shell at the core of the
Galaxy they knew there could be no easy communication between their scared
selves and the immense universe outside. Yet they dared not be without news.
So they set up a web of starlets outside the black hole itself. They were far
enough away so that the roaring radiation of infall into the hole did not
swamp their circuitry, and there were enough of them so that if one were to
fail or be destroyed-even if a hundred were-the ones that were left would be
able to receive and record the data from their early-warning spy stations all
around the Galaxy. The Heechee had run away to hide, but they had left eyes
and ears behind.
So from time to time some brave souls sneaked out of the core, to find out
what the eyes had seen and the ears had heard. When Captain and his crew were
sent out to check space for the errant star, checking the monitors was an
added duty. There were five of them aboard his ship- five living ones, anyway.
By all odds the one that interested Captain the most was the slim, sallow,
shiny-skinned female named Twice. By Captain's standards she was a raving
beauty. And sexy, too-every year without fail-and the time, he judged, was
getting near again!
But not, he prayed, just yet. And so prayed Twice, for getting through the
Schwarzschild perimeter was a brute of a job. Even when the ship had been
purpose-built to manage it. There were other can openers around-Wan had stolen
one-but those managed the job only in limited ways. Wan's ship could not enter
the event horizon and survive. It could only extend a part of itself there.
Captain's ship was bigger and stronger. Even so, the shaking, tossing, racking
strains of passing through the event horizon threw Captain and Twice and the
other four members of the crew violently and hurtingly against their retaining
harnesses; the diamond-bright corkscrew coruscated with great fat silent
sparks of radiance showering all around the cabin; the light hurt their eyes,
the violent motion bruised their bodies; and it went on and on. For an hour or
more by the crew's own subjective time, which was a queer, shifting blend of
the normal pace of the universe at large and the slowed-down tempo inside the
black hole.
But at last they were through into the unstressed space. The terrible lurching
stopped. The blinding lights faded. The Galaxy glowed before them, a velvet
dome of cream splattered with bright, bold stars, for they were too far inside
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the center to see more than the occasional patch of blackness.
"Massed minds be thanked," said Captain, grinning as he crawled out of his
harness-he looked like a med school skull when he grinned-"I think we've made
it!" And the crew followed his example, unstrapping themselves, chattering
cheerfully back and forth. As they rose to begin the data-collection process,
Captain's bony hand reached out to hold Twice's. It was an occasion for
rejoicing-as the captains of Nantucket whalers rejoiced when they passed Cape
Horn, as the covered-wagon pioneers began to breathe again as they came down
the slopes into the promised land of Oregon or California. The violence and
peril were not over. They would have to go through it all again on the way
back inside. But now, for at least a week or more, they could relax and
collect data and this was the pleasure part of the expedition.
Or it should have been.
It should have been but was not, for as Captain secured the ship and the
officer named Shoe opened the communication channels, every sensor on the
board flared violet. The thousand automatic orbiting stations were reporting
big news! Important news-bad news, and all the datastores clamored to announce
their evil tidings at once. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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