Heechee Rendezvous Part 3

"Albert says," I said, "that you should go peddle your hamburgers." I pressed her hand with mine. "Honestly. I'm all right."

"Will ask Albert to be sure?" she bargained-actually, she was deeply involved in setting up a whole new string of her franchises and I knew it.

"Will," I promised, and patted her still splendid bottom as she turned away to her own workroom. As soon as she was gone I called, "Albert? You heard?"

In the holoframe over my desk the image of my data-retrieval program swirled into visibility, scratching his nose with the stem of his pipe. "Yes, Robin," said Albert Einstein, "of course I heard. As you know, my receptors are always functioning except when you specifically ask me to turn them off, or when the situation is clearly private."

"Uh-huh," I said, studying him. He is not any sort of pinup, my Albert, with his untidy sweats.h.i.+rt gathered in folds around his neck and his socks down around his ankles. Essie would straighten him up for me in a second if I asked her to, but I liked him the way he was. "And how can you tell the situation is private if you don't peek?"

He moved the stem of his pipe from his nose to his cheekbone, still scratching, still gently smiling; it was a familiar question and did not require an answer.

Albert is really more of a friend than a computer program. He knows enough not to answer when I ask a rhetorical question. Long ago I had about a dozen different information-retrieval and decision-making programs. I had a business-manager program to tell me how my investments were doing, and a doctor program to tell me when my organs were due for replacement (among other things-I think he also conspired with my chef program at home to slip the odd pharmaceutical into my food), and a lawyer program to tell me how to get out of trouble, and, when I got into too much of it, my old psychiatrist program who told me why I was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up. Or tried to; I didn't always believe him. But more and more I got used to one single program. And so the program I spent most of my time with was my general science advisor and home handyman, Albert Einstein. "Robin," he said, gently reproving, "you didn't call me just to find out if I was a Peeping Tom, did you?"

"You know perfectly well why I called you," I told him, and indeed he did. He nodded and pointed to the far wall of my office over Tappan Sea, where my intercom screen was-Albert controls that as well as about everything else I own. On it a sort of X-ray picture appeared.

"While we were talking," he said, "I was taking the liberty of scanning you with pulsed sound, Robin. See here. This is your latest intestinal transplant, and if you will look closely-wait, I'll enlarge the image-I think you'll be able to see this whole area of inflammation. I'm afraid you're rejecting, all right."

"I didn't need you to tell me that," I snapped. "How long?"

"Before it becomes critical, you mean? Ah, Robin," he said earnestly, "that is difficult to say, for medicine is not quite an exact science-"

"How long!"

He sighed. "I can give you a minimum and maximum estimate. Catastrophic failure is not likely in less than one day and almost certain in sixty days."

I relaxed. It was not as bad as it might have been. "So I have some time before it gets serious."

"No, Robin," he said earnestly, "it is already serious. The discomfort you now feel will increase. You should start medication at once in any case, but even with the medication the prognosis is for quite severe pain rather soon." He paused, studying me. "I think from the expression on your face," he said, "that for some idiosyncratic reason you want to put it off as long as you possibly can."

"I want to stop the terrorists!"

"An, yes," he agreed, "I know you do. And indeed that is a valid thing to do, if! may offer a value judgment. For that reason you wish to go to Brasilia to intercede with the Gateway commission"-I did; the worst thing the terrorists were doing was done from a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p no one had been able to catch-"and try to get them to share data so that they can move against the terrorists. What you want from me, then, is a.s.surance that the delay won't kill you."

"Exactly, my dear Albert." I smiled.

"I can give you that a.s.surance," he said gravely, "or at least I can continue to monitor you until your condition becomes acute. At that time, however, you must at once begin new surgery."

"Agreed, my dear Albert." I smiled, but he didn't smile back.

"However," he went on, "it does not seem to me that that is your only reason for putting off the replacement. I think there is something else on your mind."

"Oh, Albert"-! sighed-"you're pretty tedious when you act like Sigfrid von Shrink. Turn yourself off like a good fellow."

And he did, looking thoughtful; and he had every reason to look thoughtful, because he was right.

You see, somewhere inside me, in that unlocatable s.p.a.ce where I keep the solid core of guilt Sigfrid von Shrink did not quite purge away, I carried the conviction that the terrorists were right. I don't mean right in murdering and blowing up and driving people crazy. That's never right. I mean right in believing that they had a grievance, a wickedly unjust grievance against the rest of the human race, and therefore they were right in demanding attention be paid to it. I didn't want just to stop the terrorists. I wanted to make them well.

Or, at least, I wanted not to make them any sicker than they were, and that was where we got into the morality of it all. How much do you have to steal from another person before the act makes you a thief?

The question was much on my mind, and I had no good place to go for the answers. Not to Essie, because with Essie the conversation always came back to my gut. Not with my old psychoa.n.a.lytic program, because those conversations always s.h.i.+fted from "What do I do to make things better?" to "Why, Robin, do you feel that you must make things better?" Not even with Albert. I could chat with Albert about anything at all. But when I ask him questions like that he gives me the sort of look he would give me if I asked him to define the properties of phlogiston. Or of G.o.d. Albert is only a holographic projection, but he interacts with the environment really well, just as well as though he were there, sometimes. So he looks meditatively around wherever we happen to be-the Tappan Sea house, for instance, which I admit is pretty comfortably fixed up, and he says something like, "Why do you ask such metaphysical questions, Robin?" and I know that the unspoken part of his message is, Good heavens, boy, don't you know when you've got it made?

Well, I do have it made. Up to a point I do. G.o.d's own good luck gave me a bundle of money when I expected it least, and money makes money, and now I can buy anything that is for sale. Even some things that aren't. I already own a large number of things worth having. I have Powerful Friends. I am a Person to Be Reckoned With. I am loved, really well loved, by my dear wife, Essie-and frequently, too, in spite of the fact that we're both getting along in years. So I sort of laugh, and change the subject ... but I haven't had an answer.

I haven't, even now, had an answer, although now the questions are a lot tougher.

Another thing on my conscience is that I am letting poor Audee Walthers stew in his misery a long time while I digress, so let me finish the point.

The reason I felt guilty about the terrorists was that they were poor and I was rich. There was a great grand Galaxy out there for them, but we didn't have any good way of getting them to it, not fast enough, anyway, and they were screaming. Starving. Seeing on the PV screen how glorious life could be for some of us, and then looking around their own huts or hogans or tenements and seeing how despairing it was for them, and how little chance there was that the great good things could become theirs before they died. It is called the revolution of rising expectations, Albert says. There should have been a cure for it-but I couldn't find it. And the question on my mind was, did I have the right to make it worse? Did I have the right to buy somebody else's organs and integument and arteries when my own wore out?

I didn't know the answer and I don't know it now. But the pain in my gut was not as bad for me as the pain of contemplating what it meant for me to steal somebody else's life, just because I could pay for it and he could not.

And while I was sitting there, pressing my hand against my belly and wondering what I was going to be when I grew up, the whole huge universe was going on about its business.

And most of its business was worrisome. There was that Mach's Principle thing that Albert had tried and tried to explain to me that suggested somebody, maybe the Heechee, was trying to crush the universe into a ball so as to rewrite the physical laws. Incredible. Also incredibly scary, when you let yourself think about it ... but millions or billions of years in the future, too, so I wouldn't call it a really pressing worry. The terrorists and the growing armies were nearer at hand. The terrorists had hijacked a loop capsule heading for the High Pentagon. New recruits for their ranks were being generated in the Sahel, where crops had failed one more time. Meanwhile, Audee Walthers was trying to start a new life for himself without his errant wife; and meanwhile, the wife was erring with that nasty creature, Wan; and meanwhile, near the core, the Heechee Captain was beginning to think erotic thoughts about his second in command,

The "Mach's Principlething" Robin talks about was at that time still only a speculation, though, as Robin says, a very scary one. It is a complicated subject. For now, let me just say that there were indications that the expansion of the universe had been arrested and a contraction had begun-and even a suggestion, from old fragmentary Heechee records, that the process was not natural.

whose friendly-name was Twice; and meanwhile, my wife, troubled about my belly, was nevertheless happily completing a deal for extending her fast-food franchise chain to Papua New Guinea and the Andaman Islands; and meanwhile-oh, meanwhile! What a lot was going on meanwhile!

And always is, though usually we don't know about it.

4 Aboard the S. Ya.

1908 light-years from Earth my friend-former friend-about to be friend again, Audee Walthers, was remembering my name again, and not too favorably. He was coming up against a rule I had made.

I mentioned that I owned a lot of things. One of the things I owned was a share in the biggest s.p.a.ce vehicle known to mankind. It was one of the bits and pieces of gadgetry the Heechee had left behind in the solar system, floating out beyond the Oort comet cloud until it got discovered. Discovered by human beings, I mean-Heechee and australopithecines don't count. We called it Heechee Heaven, but when it occurred to me that it would make a marvelous good transport for getting some of those poor people away from the Earth, which couldn't support them, to some hospitable other planet that could, I persuaded the other shareholders to rename it. After my wife: the S. Ya. Broadhead it was called. So I put up the money to refit it for colonist-carrying, and we started it off on round trips to the best and nearest of those places, Peggy's Planet.

This put me into another of those situations where conscience and common sense came into conflict, because what I really wanted was to get everybody to a place where they could be happy, but in order to get it done, I had to be able to show a profit. Thus Broadhead's Rules. They were pretty much the same rules as for the Gateway asteroid, years ago. You had to pay your way there, but you could do it on credit if you were lucky enough to have your name come up in the draw. Getting back to Earth, however, was strictly cash. If you were a land-grant colonist, you could rea.s.sign your sixty hectares to the company and they would give you a return ticket. If you didn't have the land anymore because you'd sold it, or traded it, or lost it shooting c.r.a.ps, you had two choices. You could pay for a return ticket in cash. Or you could stay where you were.

Or, if you happened to be a fully qualified pilot, and if one of the s.h.i.+p's officers had made up his mind to stay on Peggy's, you could work your way back. That was Walthers' way. What he would do when he got back to Earth he didn't know. What he knew for sure was that he could not stay in that empty apartment after Dolly left, and so he sold off their furnis.h.i.+ngs for whatever he could get, in the minutes between shuttle flights, made his deal with the S. Ya.'s captain, and was on his way. It struck him as queer and unpleasant that the thing that had seemed so impossible when Dolly asked for it suddenly became the only thing he could do when she left him. But life, he had discovered, was often queer and unpleasant.

So he came aboard the S. Ya. at the last minute, shaking with fatigue. He had ten hours before his first duty s.h.i.+ft, and he slept it all. Even so, he was still groggy, and maybe a little numbed with trauma, when a fifteen-year-old failed colonist came to bring him coffee and escort him to the control room of the interstellar transport S. Ya. Broadhead nee Heechee Heaven.

How huge the d.a.m.n thing was! From outside you couldn't really tell, but those long pa.s.sages, those chambers with ten-tiered bunk beds, now empty, those guarded galleries and halls with unfamiliar machines or the stubs of places where the machines had been taken away-such vastness was no part of Walthers' previous experience of s.p.a.cecraft. Even the control room was immense; and even the controls themselves were duplicated. Walthers had flown Heechee vessels-that was how he'd got to Pews Planet in the first place, piloting a converted Five. The controls here were almost the same, but there were two sets of them, and the transport could not be flown unless both sets were manned. "Welcome aboard, Seventh." The tiny Oriental-looking woman in the left-hand seat smiled. "I'm Janie Yee-xing, Third Officer, and you're my relief. Captain Ainheiro will be here in a minute." She didn't offer her hand or even lift either of them from the controls before her. That much Walthers had expected. Two pilots on duty at all times meant two pilots' hands on the controls; otherwise the bird did not fly. It wouldn't crash, of course, because there was nothing for it to crash into; but it wouldn't maintain course and acceleration, either.

Ludolfo Amheiro came in, a plump little man with gray sideburns with nine blue bangles on his left forearm-not many people wore them anymore, but Walthers knew that each one represented a Heechee-vessel flight in the days when you never knew where your s.h.i.+p was taking you; so here was a man with experience! "Glad to have you aboard, Walthers," he said perfunctorily. "Do you know how to relieve the watch? There's nothing to it, really. If you'll just put your hands on the wheel over Yee-xing's-" Walthers nodded and did as he was ordered. Her hands felt warm and soft as she slipped them carefully out from under his, then slid her pretty bottom off the pilot's seat to allow Walthers to occupy it. "That's all there is, Walthers," said the captain, satisfied. "First Officer Madjhour will actually fly the vessel"-nodding to the dark, smiling man who had just moved into the right-hand seat- "and he'll tell you what's necessary for you. You get a pee break of ten minutes each hour ... and that's about it. Join me for dinner tonight, will you?"

And the invitation was reinforced by a smile from Third Officer Janie Yee-xing; and it was astonis.h.i.+ng to Walthers, as he turned to listen to his instructions from Ghazi Madjhour, to realize that it had been all of ten minutes since he had thought of gone-away Dolly.

It was not quite as easy as that. Piloting was piloting. You didn't forget it. But navigation was something else. Especially as a lot of the old Heechee navigation charts had been unraveled, or at least partly unraveled, while Walthers was flying shepherds and prospectors around Peggy's.

The star charts on the S. Ya. were far more complicated than the ones Audee had used on the trip out. They came in two varieties. The most interesting one was Heechee. It had queer gold and gray-green markings that were only imperfectly understood, but it showed everything. The other, far less detailed but a lot more useful to human beings, was human-charted and English-labeled. Then there was the s.h.i.+p's log to check, as it automatically recorded everything the s.h.i.+p did or saw. There was the whole internal system display-not the pilot's concern, of course, except that if something went wrong the pilot needed to know about it. And all of this was new to Audee.

The good part of that was that learning the new skills kept Walthers busy. Janie Yee-xing was there to teach him, and that was good, too, because she kept his thoughts busy in a different way ... except in those bad times just before he fell asleep.

Since the S. Ya. was on a return trip it was almost empty. More than thirty-eight hundred colonists had gone out to Peggy's Planet. Coming back, there were hardly any. The three dozen human beings in the s.h.i.+p's crew; the military detachments maintained by the four governing nations of the Gateway Corp; and about sixty failed immigrants. They were the steerage. They had impoverished themselves to go out. Now they glumly bankrupted themselves to get back to whatever desert or slum they had fled, because, when push came to shove, they couldn't quite hack pioneering in a new world. "Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," Walthers said, circling to pa.s.s a work party of them cleaning air filters at a slave's torpid pace; but Yeewig would have none of that.

"Don't waste your pity on them, Walthers. They had it made and they chickened out." She snarled something in Cantonese at the work party, who resentfully moved minutely faster for a moment.

"You can't blame people for being homesick."

"Home! G.o.d, Walthers, you talk as if there was a 'home' left-you've been out in the boonies too long."

She paused at the junction of two corridors, one glowing blue with tracings of Heechee metal, the other gold. She waved at the party of armed guards in the uniforms of China, Brazil, the United States, and the Soviet Union. "Do you see them fraternizing?" she demanded. "Used to be they didn't take this seriously. They'd pal around with the crew, they never carried weapons, it was just an all-expense-paid cruise in s.p.a.ce for them. But now." She shook her head and reached out abruptly to grab Walthers' arm as he started to get closer to the guards. "Why don't you listen to me?" she demanded. "They'll give you h.e.l.l if you try to go in there."

"What's in there?"

She shrugged. "The Heechee stuff they didn't take out of the s.h.i.+p when they converted it. That's one of the things they're guarding-although," she added, her voice lower, "if they knew the s.h.i.+p better they'd do a better job. But come on, we go this way."

Unraveling the Heechee maps was extremely difficult, especially as they showed clear indications that they were intended to be difficult to unravel. There were not many of them to go on. Two or three fragments found in vessels like the so-called Heechee Heaven or S. Va., and a nearly complete one found in an artifact circling a frozen planet around a star in Bootes. It was my personal opinion, though not supported by the official reports of the cartographical study commissions, that many of the haloes, check marks, and flickering indicia were meant as warning signs. Robin didn't believe me then. He said I was a cowardly pudding of spun photons. By the time he came to agree with me, what he called me no longer mattered.

Walthers followed willingly enough, grateful for the sight-seeing tour as much as for their destination. The S Ya. was far the biggest s.h.i.+p he, or any other human being, had ever seen, Heechee-built, very old-and still, in some ways, very puzzling. They were halfway home, and Walthers had not yet explored a quarter of its mazy, glowing corridors. The part he had especially not explored was Yee-xing's private cabin, and he was looking forward to that with the interest of any ten-day virgin. But there were distractions. "What's that?" he asked, pausing at a pyramidal construction of green-glowing metal in an alcove. A heavy steel grating had been welded in front of it to keep prying hands off.

"Beats me," said Yee-xing. "n.o.body else knows, either-that's why they've left it here. Some of the stuff can be cut out and moved easily, some gets wrecked-now and then if you try to remove something, it blows up in your face. Here, right down this little alley. This is where I live."

Neat, narrow bed, pictures of an old Oriental couple on the wall- Janie's parents?-sprays of flowers on the wail chest; Yee-xing had made the place her own. "On return trips, that is," she explained. "On the way out this is the captain's cabin, and the rest of us sleep on cots in the pilot room." She tugged at the cover on the bed, which was already quite straight. "There's not much chance to fool around on outgoing trips," she said meditatively. "Would you like a gla.s.s of wine?"

"I certainly would," said Walthers. And so he sat down and had the wine, and then he had the share of a joint with pretty Janie Yee-xing, and by and by had the other refreshments the tiny cabin had to offer, which were excellent in quality and satisfying to his soul, and if he thought at all of lost Dolly in the next half hour or so it was not at all with jealousy and rage, but almost with compa.s.sion.

There was plenty of room to fool around on return trips, it turned out, even in a cabin no bigger than the one Horatio Hornblower had occupied centuries before. And the wine was Peggy's Planet's best, but when they had finished emptying the bottle, and themselves, the cabin began to seem a lot smaller and there was still an hour or more before their s.h.i.+fts began. "I'm hungry," Yee-xing announced. "I've got some rice and stuff here, but maybe-"

It was not a time to push his luck, although a home-cooked meal sounded good. Even rice and stuff. "Let's go to the galley," said Walthers, and, in no particular hurry, they wandered hand in hand back to the working part of the s.h.i.+p. They paused at a junction of corridors, where the long-gone Heechee had, for reasons of their own, planted little cl.u.s.ters of shrubs and bushes-not, no doubt, the same ones that were still growing there. Yee-xing paused to pick a bright blue berry.

"Look at that," she said. "They're all ripe, and the deadbeats don't even pick them."

"You mean the returning colonists? But they pay their way-"

"Oh, sure," she said bitterly. "No pay, no fly. But when they get back they'll go right on welfare, because what else is there for them?"

Walthers sampled one of the juicy, thin-skinned fruits. "You don't like the returnees very much."

Yee-xing grinned. "I don't keep that a secret very well, do I?" But the grin faded. "In the first place, there's nothing for them to go home to-if they had a decent life, they wouldn't have left it. In the second place, things have got a lot worse since they left. More terrorist trouble. More international friction-why, there are countries that are building up their armies again! And in the third place, they're not only going to suffer from all that; they're part of the cause of it. Half the goons you see here will be in some terror group in a month-or supporting one, anyway."

They strolled onward, and Walthers said humbly, "It's true I've been away a long time, but I did hear that things are getting nasty-bombings and shootings."

"Bombings! If that's all there was! They've got a TPT now! You go back to the Earth system now, and you never know when you're going to be right off your rocker without warning!"

"TPT? What's a TPT?"

"Oh, my G.o.d, Walthers," she said earnestly, "you have been away a long time. What they used to call the Craziness, don't you remember? It's a telempathic psychokinetic transceiver, one of those old Heechee things. There are about a dozen of them around, and the terrorists have one!"

"The Craziness," Walthers repeated, scowling, as a memory tried to work its way up out of his subconscious.

"Right. The Craziness," said Yee-xing, with gloomy satisfaction. "I remember when I was a kid in Kanchou, my father came home with his head all b.l.o.o.d.y because somebody had jumped out of the top story of the gla.s.s factory. Right on top of my father! Crazy as a bedbug! And it was all the TPT."

Walthers nodded without answering, his face drawn. Yee-xing looked at him in puzzlement, then waved at the guards ahead of them. "That's what they're protecting mostly," she said, "because there's still one on the S. Ya. Too d.a.m.n many of them around! And they thought of protecting them a little too late, because now there's a bunch of terrorists that have a Heechee Five, and they've got a TPT in it, and somebody who's

It was, of course, the castaway boy Wan who caused the Fever. All he wanted was some sort of human contact, because he was lonesome, It was not his intention to drive most of the human race crazy with his crazy, obsessive thoughts. The terrorists, on the other hand, knew exactly what they were doing.

really crazy. Lunatic, I mean! When he gets on that thing and you feel him in your head it's so creepy and awful-Walthers, is something the matter?"

He stopped at the entrance to the gold-lit corridor, the four guards looking at him with curiosity. "The Craziness," he said. "Wan! This used to be his s.h.i.+p!"

"Well, sure it was," the girl said, frowning. "Listen, we were going to get something to eat. We'd better do it." She was getting worried. Walthers' jaw was set, the muscles around his face contracted. As much as anything, he looked like somebody who was expecting to be punched in the face, and the guards were getting curious. "Come on, Audee," she said pleadingly.

Walthers stirred and looked at her. "You go ahead," he said. "I'm not hungry any more."

Wan's s.h.i.+p! How strange, Walthers thought, that he had not made the connection before. But of course it was so.

Wan had been born in this very vessel, long before it was renamed the S. Ya. Broadhead, long before the human race even knew it existed unless you considered a few dozen remote descendants of Australopithecus afarensis human. Wan had been born to a pregnant female Gateway prospector. Her husband was lost on one mission, herself stranded on another. She hung on to life for his first few years and then left him orphaned. Walthers could not easily imagine what Wan's infancy was like tiny child in this vast, almost empty vessel, no company but savages and the computer-stored a.n.a.logs of dead s.p.a.ce prospectors. One of whom, no doubt, had been his mother. It called for pity Walthers had no pity to give. Not to Wan, who had borrowed his wife. Not, for that matter, to the same Wan who had found the machine they called the TPT-short for "telempathic psychokinetic transceiver," as the thick tongue of the bureaucracy had relabeled it. Wan himself had only called it a dream couch, and the rest of the human race had called it the Fever, the terrible, cloudy obsessions that had infected every human alive when silly young Wan, discovering a couch, had found that it gave him some sort of contact with some sort of living beings. He did not know that the same process gave them some sort of contact with him, and so his teen-aged dreams and fears and s.e.xual fantasies invaded ten billion human brains ... Perhaps Dolly should have made the connection, but she had been a small child when it happened. Walthers had not. He remembered, and it gave him a fresh reason to hate Wan.

He could no longer remember that recurrent worldwide madness very clearly, could hardly imagine how devastating its effects had been. He did not even try to imagine Wan's idle, lonely childhood here, but present Wan, cruising around the stars on his mysterious quest, his only company Walthers' fugitive wife-that, all of that, Walthers could imagine all too clearly.

In fact, he spent nearly all of the hour available to him, before his s.h.i.+ft began, in imagining it, before it occurred to him that he was wallowing in self-pity and volunteered humiliation and that was really, after all, no way for a grown human being to behave.

He showed up on time. Yee-xing, there in the pilot room before him, said nothing but looked faintly surprised. He grinned at her in the changeover and set in to work.

Although the actual piloting of the s.h.i.+p amounted to not much more than holding on to the controls and letting the vessel fly itself~ Walthers kept himself busy. His mood had changed. The vastness of the vessel he had under his fingertips was a challenge. He watched Janie Yee-xing as, with knees and toe-tips and elbows, she worked the auxiliary controls that displayed course and position and s.h.i.+p's state and all the other data that a pilot didn't really need to know to fly the beast but ought to go to the trouble of finding out if he wanted to call himself a pilot. And he did the same. He summoned up the course display and checked the position of the S Ya., tiny glowing gold dot along a thin blue line nineteen hundred light-years long; he verified that the position was right by calculating angles to the red-glowing marker stars along the route; he frowned at the handful of "Stay Away!" markings, where black holes and gas clouds posed a threat-none of them anywhere near their course, it appeared- and he even called up the great Heechee sky chart that displayed the entire Galaxy, with other members of the Local Group hanging on its fringes. Several hundred very bright human beings and thousands of hours of machine-intelligence time had gone into unraveling the Heechee chart code. There were parts that were not understood yet, and Walthers studied, frowning, the handful of points in all that area where the blinking, multicolored halos that meant "Here there be danger" were doubled and tripled. What could be so dangerous that the Heechee charts fairly screamed with panic?

There was still a lot to learn! And, Walthers thought to himself, no better place to learn it than on this s.h.i.+p. His job was strictly temporary, of course. But if he did good work ... if he showed willingness and talent ... if he ingratiated himself with the captain ... why then, he thought, when they reached Earth, and the captain had to face the job of hiring a new Seventh Officer, what better candidate than Audee Walthers?

When the s.h.i.+ft was over, Yee-xing came across the ten-meter s.p.a.ce separating the two pilot positions and said, "As a pilot, you're looking pretty good, Walthers. I was a little worried about you."

He took her hand and they headed for the door. "I guess I was in a bad mood," he apologized, and Yee-xing shrugged.

"First girl friend always catches all the c.r.a.p after a divorce," she observed. "What did you do, plug in one of our headshrinker programs?"

"I didn't have to. I just-" Walthers hesitated, trying to remember just what he had done. "I guess I just talked to myself a little. The thing about having your wife walk out on you," he explained, "is that it makes you feel ashamed I mean, besides jealous, and angry, and all that other stuff. But after I stewed around for a while it occurred to me that I hadn't done anything much to be ashamed of. The feeling didn't belong to me, you see?"

"And that helped?" she demanded.

"Well, after a while it did." And, of course, the sovereign antidote for woman-induced pain was another woman, but he didn't want to say that to the antidote.

"I'll have to remember that, next time I get dumped. Well, I guess it's about bedtime . .

He shook his head. "It's early yet, and I'm all charged up. What about that old Heechee stuff? You said you knew a way past the guards."