Frederik Pohl - Heechee 2 - Beyond the blue event horizon

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A Del Rey Book

Published by Ballantine Books

United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously

in Canada by Random House of Canada,

Limited, Toronto, Canada.

Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

1 Wan 1

2 On the Way to the Oort Cloud 11

3 Wan in Love 35

4 Robin Broadhead, Inc. 43

5 Janine 57

6 After the Fever 75

7 Heechee Heaven 101

8 Schwarze Peter 129

9 Brasilia 145

10 The Oldest One 169

ii S. Ya. Lavorovna 183

12 Sixty Billion Gigabits 191

13 At the Halfway Point 201

14 The Long Night of the Dreams 229

15 Older Than the Oldest One 243

i6 The Richest Person There Is 255

17 The Place Where the Heechee Went 273

1 Wan

It was not easy to live, being young, being so completely alone. "Go to the gold, Wan,

steal what you want, learn. Don't be afraid," the Dead Men told him. But how could he not be

afraid? The silly but worrisome Old Ones used the gold passages. They might be found anywhere in

them, most likely at the ends of them, where the gold skeins of symbols ran endlessly into the

center of things. That is, exactly where the Dead Men kept coaxing him to go. Perhaps he had to go

there, but he could not help being afraid.

Wan did not know what would happen if the Old Ones ever caught him. The Dead Men probably

knew, but he could not make any sense out of their ramblings on the subject. Once long ago, when

Wan was tiny-when his parents were still alive, it was that long ago-his father had been caught.

He had been gone for a long time and then had come back to their green-lit home. He was shaking,

and two-year-old Wan had seen that his father was afraid and had screamed and roared because that

was so frightening to him.

Nevertheless he had to go to the gold, whether the grave old frog-jawed ones were there or

not, because that was where the books were. The Dead Men were well enough. But they were tedious,

and touchy, and often obsessed. The best sources of knowledge were books, and to get them Wan had

to go where they were.

The books were in the passages that gleamed gold. There were other passages, green and red

and blue, but there were no books there. Wan disliked the blue corridors, because they were cold

and dead, but that was where the Dead Men were. The green was used up. He spent most of his time

where the winking red cobwebs of light were spread against the walls and the hoppers still held

food; he was sure to be untroubled there, but he was also alone. The gold was still in use, and

therefore rewarding, and therefore also perilous. And now he was there, cursing fretfully to

himself-but under his breath-because he was stuck. Bloody damn Dead Men! Why did he listen to

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their blathering?

He huddled, trembling, in the insufficient shelter of a berry bush, while two of the

foolish Old Ones stood thoughtfully plucking berries from its opposite side and placing them

precisely into their froggy mouths. It was unusual, really, that they should be so idle. Among the

reasons Wan despised the Old Ones was that they were always busy, always fixing and carrying and

chattering, as though driven. Yet here these two were, idle as Wan himself.

Both of them had scraggly beards, but one also had breasts. Wan recognized her as a female

he had seen a dozen times before; she was the one who was most diligent in pasting colored bits of

something-paper? plastic?-onto her sari, or sometimes onto her sallow, mottled skin. He did not

think they would see him, but he was greatly relieved when, after a time, they turned together and

moved away. They did not speak. Wan had almost never heard any of the grave old frog-jaws speak.

He did not understand them when they did. Wan spoke six languages well-his father's Spanish,

mother's English, the German, the Russian, the Cantonese and the Finnish of one or another of the

Dead Men. But what the frog-jaws spoke he did not comprehend at all.

As soon as they had retreated down the golden corridor-quick, run, grab! Wan had three

books and was gone, safely back in a red corridor. It might be that the Old Ones had seen him, or

perhaps not. They did not react quickly. That was why he had been able to avoid them so long. A

few days in the passages, and then he was gone. By the time they had become aware he was around,

he wasn't; he was back in the ship, away.

He carried the books back to the ship on top of a pannier of food packets. The drive

accumulators were nearly recharged. He could leave whenever he liked, but it was better to charge

them all the way and he did not think there was any need to hurry. He spent most of an hour

filling plastic bags with water for the tedious journey. What a pity there were no readers in the

ship to make it less tedious! And then, wearying of the labor, he decided to say good-bye to the

Dead Men. They might, or might not, respond, or even care. But he had no one else to talk to.

Wan was fifteen years old, tall, stringy, very dark by nature and darker still from the

lights in the ship, where he spent so much of his time. He was strong and self-reliant. He had to

be. There was always food in the hoppers, and other goods for the taking, when he dared. Once or

twice a year, when they remembered, the Dead Men would catch him with their little mobile machine

and take him to a cubicle in the blue passages for a boring day during which he was given a rather

complete physical examination. Sometimes he had a tooth filled, usually he received some long-

acting vitamin and mineral shots, and once they had fitted him with glasses. But he refused to

wear them. They also reminded him, when he neglected it too long, to study and learn, both from

them and from the storehouses of books. He did not need much reminding. He enjoyed learning. Apart

from that, he was wholly on his own. If he wanted clothes, he went into the gold and stole them

from the Old Ones. If he was bored, he invented something to do. A few days in the passages, a few

weeks on the ship, a few more days in the other place, then back to repeat the process. Time

passed. He had no one for company, had not had since he was four and his parents disappeared, and

had almost forgotten what it was like to have a friend. He did not mind. His life seemed complete

enough to him, since he had no other life to compare it with.

Sometimes he thought it would be nice to settle in one place or another, but this was only

dreaming. It never reached the stage of intention. For more than eleven years he had been

shuttling back and forth like this. The other place had things that civilization did not. It had

the dreaming room, where he could lie fiat and close his eyes and seem not to feel alone. But he

could not live there, in spite of plenty of food and no dangers, because the single water

accumulator produced only a trickle. Civilization had much that the outpost did not have: the Dead

Men and the books, scary exploring and daring raids for clothes or trinkets, something happening.

But he could not live there either, because the frog-jaws would surely catch him sooner or later.

So he commuted.

The main lobby door to the place of the Dead Men did not open when Wan stepped on the

treadle. He almost bumped his nose. Surprised, he stopped and then gingerly pushed against the

door, then harder. It took all his strength to force it open. Wan had never had to open it by hand

before, though now and then it had hesitated and made disturbing noises. That was an annoyance.

Wan had experienced machines that broke down before; it was why the green corridors were no longer

very useful. But that was only food and warmth, and there was plenty of that in the red, or even

the gold. It was worrisome that anything should go wrong around the Dead Men, because if they

broke down he had no others.

Still, all looked normal; the room with the consoles was brightly fluoresced, the

temperature was comfortable and he could hear the faint drone and rare click of the Dead Men

behind their panels as they thought their lonely, demented thoughts and did whatever they did when

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he was not speaking to them. He sat in his chair, shifting his rump as always to accommodate to

the ill-designed seat, and pulled the headset down over his ears.

"I am going to the outpost now," he said.

There was no answer. He repeated it in all of his languages, but no one seemed to want to

talk. That was a disappointment. Sometimes two or three of them would be eager for company, maybe

even more. Then they could all have a nice, long chat, and it would be as though he were not

really alone at all. Almost as though he were part of a "family", a word he knew from the books

and from what the Dead Men told him, but hardly remembered as a reality. That was good. Almost as

good as when he was in the dreaming place, where for a while he could have the illusion of being

part of a hundred families, a million families. Hosts of people! But that was more than he could

handle for very long. And so, when he had to leave the outpost to return for water, and for the

more tangible company of the Dead Men, he was never sorry. But he always wanted to come back to

the cramped couch and the velvety metal blanket that covered him in it, and to the dreams.

It was waiting for him; but he decided to give the Dead Men another chance. Even when they

were not eager for talk, sometimes they were interestable if addressed directly. He thought for a

moment, and then dialed number fifty-seven.

A sad, distant voice in his ear was mumbling to itself: "...tried to tell him about the

missing mass. Mass! The only mass on his mind was twenty kilos of boobs and ass! That floozy,

Doris. One look at her and, oh, boy, forget about the mission, forget about me. . .

Frowning, Wan poised his finger to cancel. Fifty-seven was such a nuisance! He liked to

listen to her when she made sense, because she sounded a little like the way he remembered his

mother. But she always seemed to go from astrophysics and space travel and other interesting

subjects directly to her own troubles. He spat at the point in the panels behind which he had

elected to believe fifty-seven lived-a trick he had learned from the Old Ones-hoping she would say

something interesting.

But she didn't seem to intend to. Number fifty-seven-when she was coherent she liked to be

called Henrietta-was babbling on about high redshifts and Arnold's infidelities with Doris.

Whoever they were. "We could have been heroes," she sobbed, "and a ten-million-dollar grant, maybe

more, who knows what they'd pay for the drive? But they kept on sneaking off in the lander, and-

Who are you?"

"I'm Wan," the boy said, smiling encouragingly even though he did not think she could see

him. She seemed to be coming into one of her lucid times. Usually she didn't know he was speaking

to her. "Please keep on talking."

There was a long silence, and then, "NGC 1199," she said. "Sagittarius A West."

Wan waited politely. Another long pause, and then she said, "He didn't care about proper

motions. He made all his moves with Doris. Half his age! And the brain of a turnip. She should

never have been on the mission in the first place-"

Wan wobbled his head like a frog-jawed Old One. "You are very boring," he said severely,

and switched her off. He hesitated, then dialed the professor, number fourteen: although Eliot was

still a Harvard undergraduate, his imagery was that of a fully mature man. And a genius at that.

`I should have been a pair of ragged claws.' The self-deprecation of mass man carried to its

symbolic limit. How does he see himself? Not merely as a crustacean. Not even as a crustacean,

only the very abstraction of a crustacean: claws. And ragged, at that. In the next line we see-"

Wan spat again at the panel as he disconnected; the whole face of the wall was stained

with the marks of his displeasure. He liked when Doc recited poetry, not so much when he talked

about it. With the craziest of the Dead Men, like fourteen and fifty-seven, you didn't have any

choice about what happened. They rarely responded, and almost never in a way that seemed relevant,

and you either listened to what they happened to be saying or you turned them off.

It was almost time for him to go, but he tried one more time: the only one with a three-

digit number, his special friend, Tiny Jim. "Hello, Wan." The voice was sad and sweet. It tingled

in his mind, like the sudden frisson of fear that he felt near the Old Ones. "It is you, Wan,

isn't it?"

"That is a foolish question. Who else would it be?"

"One keeps on hoping, Wan." There was a pause, then Tiny Jim suddenly cackled, "Have I

told you the one about the priest, the rabbi and the dervish who ran out of food on the planet

made of pork?"

"I think you have, Tiny Jim, and anyway I don't want to hear any jokes now."

The invisible loudspeaker clicked and buzzed for a moment, and then the Dead Man said,

"Same old thing, Wan? You want to talk about sex again?"

The boy kept his countenance impassive, but that familiar tingle inside his lower abdomen

responded. "We might as well, Tiny Jim."

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"You're a raunchy stud for your age, Wan," the Dead Man offered; and then, "Tell you about

the time I almost got busted for a sex offense? It was hot as hell. I was going home on the late

train to Roselle Park, and this girl came in, sat across the aisle from me, put her feet up, and

began to fan herself with her skirt.

Well, what would you do? I looked, you know. And she kept on doing it, and I kept looking,

and finally around Highlands she complained to the conductor and he threw me off the train. Do you

know what the funny thing was?"

Wan was rapt. "No, Tiny Jim," he breathed.

"The funny thing was I'd missed my regular train. I had time to kill in the city, so I

went to a porn flick. Two hours of, my God, every combination you could think of. The only way I

could've seen more was with a proctoscope, so why was I slouching out over the aisle to peek at

her little white panties? But you know what was funnier than that?"

"No, Tiny Jim."

"She was right! I was staring, all right. I'd just been watching acres of crotches and

boobs, but I couldn't take my eyes off hers! That wasn't the funniest thing, though. Do you want

me to tell you the funniest thing of all?"

"Yes, please, Tiny Jim. I do."

"Why, she got off the train with me! And took me to her home, boy, and we just made out

over and over, all night long. Never did catch her name. What do you say to that, Wan?"

"I say, is that true, Tiny Jim?"

Pause. "Aw. No. You take all the fun out of things."

Wan said severely, "I don't want a made-up story, Tiny Jim. I want to learn facts." Wan

was angry, and thought of turning the Dead Man off to punish him, but was not sure whom he would

be punishing. "I wish you would be nice, Tiny Jim," he coaxed.

"Well-" The bodiless mind clicked and whispered to itself for a moment, sorting through

its conversational gambits. Then it said, "Do you want to know why mallard drakes rape their

mates?"

"No!"

"I think you really do, though, Wan. It's interesting. You can't understand primate

behavior unless you comprehend the whole spectrum of reproductive strategies. Even strange ones.

Even the Acanthocephalan worms. They practice rape, too, and do you know what Moniliformis dubius

does? They not only rape their females, they even rape competing males. With like plaster of

Paris! So the poor Other Worm can't get it up!"

"I don't want to hear all this, Tiny Jim."

"But it's funny, Wan! That must be why they call him `dubius'!" The Dead Man was chuckling

mechanically, a-heh! A-heh!

"Stop it, Tiny Jim!" But Wan was not just angry any more. He was hooked. It was his

favorite subject, as Tiny Jim's willingness to talk about it, at length and in variety, was what

made him Wan's favorite among the Dead Men. Wan unwrapped a food packet and, munching, said, "What

I really want to hear is how to make out, Tiny Jim, please?"

If the Dead Man had had a face it would have shown the strain of trying to keep from

laughing, but he said kindly, "`Kay, sonny. I know you keep hoping. Let's see, did I tell you to

watch their eyes?"

"Yes, Tiny Jim. You said if their pupils dilate it means they are sexually aroused."

"Right. And I mentioned the existence of the sexually dimorphic structures in the brain?"

"I don't think I know what that means, exactly."

"Well, I don't, either, but it's anatomically so. They're different, Wan, inside and out."

"Please, Tiny Jim, keep telling me about the differences!" The Dead Man did, and Wan

listened absorbedly. There was always time to go to the ship, and Tiny Jim was unusually coherent.

All of the Dead Men had their own special subjects that they zeroed in to talk about, as though

each had been frozen with one big thought in his mind. But even on the favored topics you could

not always expect them to make sense. Wan pushed the mobile unit that they used to catch him-when

it was working-out of the way and sprawled on the floor, chin in hands, while the Dead Man

chattered and reminisced and explained courtship, and gifting, and making your move.

It was fascinating, even though he had heard it before. He listened until the Dead Man

slowed down, hesitated, and stopped. Then the boy said, to confirm a theory:

"Teach me, Tiny Jim. I read a book in which a male and a female copulated. He hit her on

the head and copulated her while she was unconscious. That appears to me an efficient way to

`love', Tiny Jim, but in other stories it takes much longer. Why is this?"

"That was not love, sonny. That was what I was telling you about. Rape. Rape is a bad idea

for people, even if it works for mallard ducks."

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Wan nodded and urged him on: "Why, Tiny Jim?"

Pause. "I will demonstrate it for you mathematically, Wan," the Dead Man said at last.

"Attractive sex objects may be defined as female, no more than five years younger than you are, no

more than fifteen years older. These figures are normalized to your present age, and are also only

approximate. Attractive sex objects may further be characterized by visual, olfactory, tactile,

and aural qualities stimulating to you, in descending weighted order of significance plotted

against probability of access. Do you understand me so far?"

"Not really."

Pause. "Well, that's all right for now. Now pay attention. On the basis of those four

preliminary traits, some females will attract you. Up to the point of contact you will not know

about other traits which may repel, harm or detumesce you. 5/28 of subjects will be menstruating.

3/87 will have gonorrhea, 2/95 syphilis. 1/17 will have excessive bodily hair, skin blemishes or

other physical deformities concealed by clothing. Finally, 2/71 will conduct themselves

offensively during intercourse, i/i6 will emit an unpleasant odor, 3/7 will resist rape so

extensively as to diminish your enjoyment; these are subjective values quantified to match your

known psychological profile. Cumulating these fractions, the odds are better than six to one that

you will not receive maximum pleasure from rape."

"Then I must not copulate a woman without wooing?"

"That's right, boy. Not counting it's against the law."

Wan was thoughtfully silent for a moment, then remembered to ask, "Is all this true, Tiny

Jim?"

Cackle of glee. "Got you that time, kid! Every word."

Wan pouted like a frog-jaw. "That was not very exciting, Tiny Jim. In fact, you have

detumesced me."

"What do you expect, kid?" Tiny Jim said sullenly. "You told me not to make up any

stories. Why are you being so unpleasant?"

"I am getting ready to leave. I do not have much time."

"You don't have anything else!" cackled Tiny Jim.

"And you have nothing to say that I want to hear," said Wan cruelly. He disconnected them

all, and angrily he went to the ship and squeezed the launch control. It did not occur to him that

he was being rude to the only friends he had in the universe. It had never occurred to him that

their feelings mattered.

2 On the Way to the Oort Cloud

On the twelve hundred and eighty-second day of our all-expense-paid joyride on the way to

the Oort Cloud, the big excitement was the mail. Vera tinkled joyously and we all came to collect

it. There were six letters for my horny little half-sister-inlaw from famous movie stars-well,

they're not all movie stars. They're just famous and good-looking jocks that she writes to,

because she's only fourteen years old and needs some kind of male to dream about, and that write

back to her, I think, because their press agents tell them it's going to be good publicity. A

letter from the old country for Payter, my father-in-law. A long one, in German. They want him to

come back to Dortmund and run for mayor or Blirgermeister or something. Assuming, of course, that

he is still alive when he gets back, which is only an assumption for any of the four of us. But

they don't give up. Two private letters to my wife, Lurvy, I assume from ex-boyfriends. And a

letter to all of us from poor Trish Bover's widower, or maybe husband, depending on whether you

considered Trish alive or dead:

Have you seen any trace of Trish's ship?

Hanson Bover

Short and sweet, because that's all he could afford, I guess. I told Vera to send him the

same reply as always-"Sorry, no." I had plenty of time to take care of that correspondence,

because there was nothing for Paul C. Hall, who is me.

There is usually not much for me, which is one of the reasons I play chess a lot. Payter

tells me I'm lucky to be on the mission at all, and I suppose I wouldn't be if he hadn't put his

own money into it, financing his whole family. Also his skills, but we've all done that. Payter is

a food chemist. I'm a structural engineer. My wife, Dorema-it's better not to call her that, and

we mostly call her "Lurvy"-is a pilot. Damn good one, too. Lurvy is younger than I am, but she was

on Gateway for six years. Never scored, came back next to broke, but she learned a lot. Not just

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about piloting. Sometimes I look at Lurvy's arms with the five Out bangles, one for each of her

Gateway missions; and her hands, hard and sure on the ship controls, warm and warming when we

touch. . . I don't know much about what happened to her on Gateway. Perhaps I shouldn't.

And the other one is her little jailbait half-sister, Janine. Ak, Janine! Sometimes she

was fourteen years old, and sometimes forty. When she was fourteen she wrote her gushy letters to

her movie stars and played with her toys-a ragged, stuffed armadillo, a Heechee prayer fan (real)

and a fire-pearl (fake) which her father had bought her to tempt her onto the trip. When she was

forty what she mostly wanted to play with was me. And there we are. In each other's pockets for

three and a half years. Trying not to need to commit murder.

We were not the only ones in space. Once in a great while we would get a message from our

nearest neighbors, the Triton base or the exploring ship that had got itself lost. But Triton,

with Neptune, was well ahead of us in its orbit-round-trip message time, three weeks. And the

explorer had no power to waste on us, though they were now only fifty light-hours away. It was not

like a friendly natter over the garden hedge.

So what I did, I played a lot of chess with our shipboard computer.

There's not an awful lot to do on the way to the Oort except play games, and besides it

was a good way to stay noncombatant in The War Between Two Women that continually raged in our

little ship. I can stand my father-in-law, if I have to. Mostly he keeps to himself, as much as he

can in four hundred cubic meters. I can't always stand his two crazy daughters, even though I love

them both.

All this would have been easier to take if we had had more room-I told myself that-but

there is no way to go for a cooling-down walk around the block when you are in a spaceship. Once

In a while a quick EVA to check the side-cargos, yes, and then I could look around-the sun still

the brightest star in its constellation, but only just; Sirius ahead of us was brighter, and so

was Alpha Centauri, off below the ecliptic and to the side. But that was only an hour at a time,

and then back inside the ship. Not a luxury ship. A human-made antique of a spaceship that was

never planned for more than a six-month mission and that we had to stay cooped up in for three and

a half years. My God! We must have been crazy to sign up. What good is a couple million dollars

when getting it drives you out of your head?

Our shipboard brain was a lot easier to get along with. When I played chess with her,

hunched over the console with the big headset over my ears, I could shut out Lurvy and Janine. The

brain's name was Vera, which was just my own conceit and had nothing to do with her, I mean its,

gender. Or with her truthfulness, either, because I had instructed her she could joke with me

sometimes. When Vera was downlinked with the big computers that were in orbit or back on Earth,

she was very, very smart. But she couldn't carry on a conversation that way, because of the 25-day

round-trip communications time, and so when she wasn't in link she was very, very dumb- "Pawn to

king's rook four, Vera."

"Thank you. . ." Long pause, while she checked my parameters to make sure who she was

talking to and what she was supposed to be doing. "Paul. Bishop takes knight."

I could beat the ass off Vera when we played chess, unless she cheated. How did she cheat?

Well, after I had won maybe two hundred games from her she won one. And then I won about fifty,

and then she won one, and another, and for the next twenty games we were about even and then she

began to clobber me every time. Until I figured out what she was doing. She was transmitting

position and plans to the big computers on Earth and then, when we recessed games, as we sometimes

did, because Payter or one of the women would drag me away from the set, she would have time to

get Downlink-Vera's criticism of her plans and suggestions to amend her strategies. The big

machines would tell Vera what they thought my strategies might be, and how to counteract them; and

when Downlink-Vera guessed right, Shipboard-Vera had me. I never bothered to make her stop. I just

didn't recess games any more, and then after a while we were so far away that there just wasn't

time for her to get help and I went back to beating her every game.

And the chess games were about the only games I won, those three and a half years. There

was no way for me to win anything in the big one that kept going on between my wife, Lurvy, and

her horny fourteen-year-old half-sister, Janine. Old Payter was a long time between begats, and

Lurvy tried to be a mother to Janine, who tried to be an enemy to Lurvy. And succeeded. It wasn't

all Janine's fault. Lurvy would take a few drinks-that was her way of relieving the boredom-and

then she would discover that Janine had used her toothbrush, or that Janine had unwillingly done

as she had been told and cleaned up the food-preparation area before it began to stink, but hadn't

put the organics in the digester. Then they were off. From time to time they would go through

ritualized performances of woman talk, punctuated by explosions- "I really love those blue pants

on you, Janine. Do you want me to tack that seam?"

"All right, so I'm getting fat, is that what you're saying? Well, it's better than

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drinking myself stupid all the time!"-and then back to blow-drying each other's hair. And I would

go back to playing chess with Vera. It was the only safe thing to do. Every time I tried to

intervene I achieved instant success by uniting them against me: "Fucking male chauvinist pig, why

don't you scrub the kitchen floor?"

The funny thing was, I did love them both. In different ways, of course, though I had

trouble getting that across to Janine.

We were told what we were getting into when we signed up for the mission. Besides the

regular long-voyage psychiatric briefing, all four of us went through a dozen session hours on the

problem during the preflight, and what the shrink said boiled down to "do the best you can." It

appeared that during the refamilying process I would have to learn to parent. Payter was too old,

even if he was the biological father. Lurvy was undomestic, as you would expect from a former

Gateway pilot. It was up to me; the shrink was very clear about that. It just didn't say how.

So there I was at forty-one, umpty zillion kilometers from Earth, way past the orbit of

Pluto, about fifteen degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic, trying not to make love to my

halfsister-in-law, trying to make peace with my wife, trying to maintain the truce with my father-

in-law. Those were the big things that I woke up with (every time I was allowed to go to sleep),

just staying alive for another day. To get my mind off them, I would try to think about the two

million dollars apiece we would get for completing the mission. When even that failed I would try

to think about the long-range importance of our mission, not just to us, but to every human being

alive. That was real enough. If it all worked out, we would be keeping most of the human race from

dying of starvation.

That was obviously important. Sometimes it even seemed important. But it was the human

race that had jammed us all into this smelly concentration-camp for what looked like forever; and

there were times when-you know?-I kind of hoped they would starve.

Day 1283. I was just waking up when I heard Vera beeping and crackling to herself, the way

she does when there's an action message coming in. I unzipped the restraining sheet and pushed

myself out of our private, but old Payter was already hanging over the printer.

He swore creakily. "Gott sel dammt! We have a course changing." I caught hold of a rail

and pushed myself over to see, but Janine, busily inspecting her cheekbones for pimples in the

wall mirror, got there ahead of me. She ducked her head in front of Payter's, read the message,

and slid herself away disdainfully. Payter worked his mouth for a minute and then said savagely,

"This does not interest you?" Janine shrugged minutely without looking at him.

Lurvy was coming out of the private after me, zipping up her skivvies. "Leave her alone,

Pa," she said. "Paul, go put some clothes on." It was better to do what she said, besides which

she was right. The best way to stay out of trouble with Janine was to behave like a puritan. By

the time I fished my shorts out of the tangle of sheets, Lurvy had already read the message.

Reasonably enough; she was our pilot. She looked up, grinning. "Paul! We have to make a correction

in about eleven hours, and maybe it's the last one! Back away," she ordered Payter, who was still

hanging over the terminal, and pulled herself down to work Vera's calculator keys. She watched

while the trajectories formed, pressed for a solution and then crowed: "Seventy-three hours eight

minutes to touchdown!"

"I myself could have done that," her father complained.

"Don't be grouchy, Pa! Three days and we're there. Why, we ought to be able to see it in

the scopes when we turn!"

Janine, back to picking at her cheekbones, commented over her shoulder, "We could have

been seeing it for months if somebody hadn't busted the big scope."

"Janine!" Lurvy was marvelous at holding her temper in-when she was able to do it at all-

and this time she managed to stay in control. She said in her voice of quiet reason, "Wouldn't you

say this was an occasion for rejoicing, not for starting arguments? Of course you would, Janine. I

suggest we all have a drink-you, too."

I stepped in quickly, belting my shorts-I knew the rest of that script. "Are you going to

use the chemical rockets, Lurvy? Right, then Janine and I will have to go out and check the side-

cargos. Why don't we have the drink when we come back?"

Lurvy smiled sunnily. "Good idea, dear. But perhaps Pa and I will have one short one now-

then we'll join you for another round later, if you like."

"Suit up," I ordered Janine, preventing her from saying whatever inflammatory remark was

in her mind. She obviously had decided to be placatory for the moment, because she did as she was

told without comment. We checked each other's seals, let Lurvy and Payter double-check us, crowded

one by one into the exit and swung out into space on our tethers. The first thing we both did was

look toward home-not very satisfying; the sun was only a bright star and I couldn't see the Earth

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