Heechee Rendezvous

by Frederik Pohl

  “Of course, Wan! Everyone in Port Hegramet knows you.” She shook her head sympathetically over the blackened eye. “You were pointed out to me last night,” she said. “In the Spindle Lounge.”

  He drew back to look at her more closely. “Oh, yes! The entertainer. I saw your act.”

  Dolly Walthers seldom smiled, but there was a way of crinkling up the corners of her eyes, pursing the pretty lips, that was better than a smile; it was an attractive expression. She displayed it often while they made Wan Santos-Schmitz comfortable, while they fed him coffee and listened to his explanations of why the Libyans had been wrong to get angry at him. If Walthers had thought Dolly would resent his bringing this wayfarer home, he found he had nothing to fear in that direction. But as the hour got later he began to fidget. “Wan,” he said, “I have to fly in the morning, and I imagine you’d like to get back to your hotel—”

  “Certainly not, Junior,” his wife reproved him. “We have plenty of room right here. He can have the bed, you can sleep on the couch, and I’ll take the cot in the sewing room.”

  Walthers was too startled to frown, or even to answer. It was a silly idea. Of course Wan would want to go back to the hotel—and of course Dolly was simply being polite; she couldn’t really want to set up the sleeping arrangements in such a way that they would have no privacy at all, on the one night he had before flying back into the bush with the irascible Arabs. So he waited with confidence for Wan to excuse himself and his wife to allow herself to be convinced, and then with less confidence, and then with none at all. Although Walthers was a short man, the couch was shorter than he was, and he tossed and turned on it all night long, wishing he had never heard the name of Juan Henriquette Santos-Schmitz—

  A wish shared by a whole lot of the human race, including me.

  Wan was not merely a nasty person—oh, it was not his fault, of course (yes, yes, Sigfrid, I know—get out of my head!). He was also a fugitive from justice, or would have been, if anyone had known exactly what he had swiped out of the old Heechee artifacts.

  When he told Walthers he was rich, he did not lie. He had a birthright to a lot of Heechee technology simply because his mom had pupped him on a Heechee habitat with no other human beings to speak of around. This turned out to mean a lot of money for him, once the courts had time to think it over. It also meant, in Wan’s own mind, that he had a right to just about anything Heechee that he could find that wasn’t nailed down. He had taken a Heechee ship—everybody knew that—but his money bought lawyers that stalled the Gateway Corporation’s suit to recover it in the courts. He bad also taken some Heechee gadgets not generally available, and if anyone had known exactly what they were, the case would have whisked through the courts in no time and Wan would have been Public Enemy Number One instead of merely an irritation. So Walthers had every right to hate him, though, of course, those were not the reasons involved.

  When Walthers saw the Libyans the next morning, they were hung over and irritable. He was worse, the difference between them and Walthers being that his mood was even more savage, and he wasn’t even hung over. That was part of the reason for the mood.

  His passengers didn’t ask him anything about the night before; in fact, they hardly spoke as the aircraft droned on over the wide savannahs, occasional glades, and very infrequent farm patches of Peggys Planet. Luqman and one of the other men were buried in false-color satellite holos of the sector they were prospecting, one of the others slept, the fourth simply held his head and glowered out the window. The plane nearly flew itself, this time of year, with very little serious weather anywhere around. Walthers had plenty of time to think about his wife. It had been a personal triumph for him when they were married, but why weren’t they living happily ever after?

  Of course, Dolly had had a hard life. A Kentucky girl with no money, no family, no job—no skills, either, and perhaps none too much brainpower—such a girl had to use all the assets she had if she wanted to get out of coal country. Dolly’s one commercial asset was looks. Good looks, though flawed. Her figure was slim, her eyes were bright, but her teeth were buck. At fourteen she got work as a bartop dancer in Cincinnati, but it didn’t pay enough to live on unless you hustled on the side. Dolly didn’t want to do that. She was saving herself. She tried singing, but she didn’t have the voice for it. Besides, trying to sing without moving her lips and exposing her Bugs Bunny teeth made her look like a ventriloquist…And when a customer, trying to hurt her because she’d turned his advances down, told her that, the light dawned over Dolly’s head. The M.C. considered himself a comic in that particular club. Dolly traded laundry and sewing for some old, used comedy routines, made herself some hand puppets, studied every puppet act she could find on PV or fantape, and tried out the act at the last show on a Saturday night when another singer was coming in to replace her on Sunday. The act was not boffo, but the new girl singer was even worse than Dolly, so she got a reprieve. Two weeks in Cincinnati, a month in Louisville, nearly three months in little clubs outside Chicago—if the engagements had been consecutive she would have been well enough off, but there were weeks and months between them. She did not, however, actually starve. By the time Dolly got to Peggys Planet the jagged corners of The Act had banged against so many hostile audiences or drunk ones that it had worn into some sort of serviceable shape. Not good enough for a real career. Good enough to keep her alive. Getting to Peggys Planet was a desperation move, because you had to sign your life away for the passage. There was no stardom here, but she wasn’t any worse off, either. And if she was no longer saving herself, exactly, at least she didn’t spend herself very profligately. When Audee Walthers, Jr., came along, he offered a higher price than most others had proposed—marriage. So she did it. At eighteen. To a man twice her age.

  Dolly’s hard life, though, wasn’t really that much harder than anyone else’s on Peggys—not counting, of course, people like Audee’s oil prospectors. The prospectors paid full fare to get to Peggys Planet, or their companies did, and every one of them surely had a paid-up return ticket in his pocket.

  It did not make them more cheerful. It was a six-hour flight to the point on West Island they had chosen for a base camp. By the time they had eaten and popped their shelters and said their prayers a time or two, not without arguments about which direction to face in, their hangovers were pretty well dissipated, but it was also pretty well too late to get anything done that day. For them. Not for Walthers. He was ordered to fly crisscross strikes across twenty thousand hectares of hilly scrub. As he was merely towing a mass sensor to measure gravitational anomalies, it did not matter that he had to do it in the dark. It did not matter to Mr. Luqman, at any rate, but it mattered a lot to Walthers, because it was precisely the sort of flying that he hated most; his altitude had to be quite low, and some of the hills were fairly high. So he flew with both radar and searchbeams going all the time, terrifying the slow, stupid animals that inhabited these West Island savannahs, and terrifying himself when he found himself dozing off and waking to claw for altitude as a shrub-topped hill summit rushed toward him.

  He managed five hours’ sleep before Luqman woke him to order a photographic reconnaissance of a few unclear sites, and when that was done he was set to dropping spikes all over the terrain. The spikes were not simple solid metal; they were geophones, and they had to be set in a receiving array kilometers in length. Moreover, they had to drop from at least twenty meters to be sure to penetrate the surface and stand upright so that their readings would be trustworthy, and each one had to be placed within a circular error of two meters. It did Walthers no good to point out that these requirements were mutually contradictory, so it was no surprise to him that when the truck-mounted vibrators did their thing the petrological data were no use at all. Do it over, said Mr. Luqman, and so Walthers had to retrace his steps on foot, pulling out the geophones and hammering them in by hand.

  What he had signed on to do was pilot, but Mr. Luqman took a broader view. Not just trudging ar
ound with the geophone spikes. One day they had him digging for the ticklike creatures that were the Peggys equivalent of earthworms, aerating the soil. The next they gave him a thing like a Roto-Rooter, which dug itself down into the soil a few dozen meters and pulled out core samples. They would have had him peeling potatoes if they had eaten potatoes, and did in fact try to lumber him with all the dishwashing—backing off only to the extent that it was finally agreed to do it in strict rotation. (But Walthers noticed that Mr. Luqman’s turn never seemed to come.) Not that the chores weren’t interesting. The ticklike bugs went into a jar of solvent and the soup that resulted became a smear on an electrophoresis sheet of filter paper. The cores went into little incubators with sterile water, sterile air, and sterile hydrocarbon vapors. They were both tests for oil. The bugs, like termites, were deep diggers. Some of what they dug through came back to the surface with them, and electrophoresis would sort out what it was that they carried back. The incubators tested for the same thing in a different way. Peggys, like Earth, had in its soil microorganisms that could live on a diet of pure hydrocarbons. So if anything grew on the pure hydrocarbons in the incubators, that sort of bug had to be what was growing there, and it would not have existed without a source of free hydrocarbons in the soil.

  In either case, there would be oil.

  But for Walthers the tests were mostly stoop-labor drudgery, and the only surcease from them was to be ordered back into the aircraft to tow the magnetometer again or to drop more spikes. After the first three days he retired to his tent to pull out his contract printout and make sure he was required to do all these things. He was. He decided to have a word with his agent when he got back to Port Hegramet; after the fifth day he was reconsidering. It seemed more attractive to kill the agent…But all the flying had one beneficial effect. Eight days into the three-week expedition, Walthers reported gladly to Mr. Luqman that he was running low on fuel and would have to make a flight back to base for more hydrogen.

  When he got to the little apartment it was dark; but the apartment was neat, which was a pleasant surprise; Dolly was home, which was even better; best of all, she was sweetly, obviously delighted to see him.

  The evening was perfect. They made love; Dolly fixed some dinner; they made love again, and at midnight they sat on the opened-out bed, backs propped against the cushioning, legs outstretched before them, holding hands and sharing a bottle of Peggys wine. “I wish you could take me back with you,” Dolly said when he finished telling her about the New Delaware charter. Dolly wasn’t looking at him; she was idly fitting puppet heads on her free hand, her expression easy.

  “No chance of that, darling.” He laughed. “You’re too good-looking to take out in the bush with four horny Arabs. Listen, I don’t feel all that safe myself.”

  She raised her hand, her expression still relaxed. The puppet she wore this time was a kitten face with bright red, luminous whiskers. The pink mouth opened and her kitten voice lisped, “Wan says they’re really rough. He says they could’ve killed him, just for talking about religion with them. He says he thought they were going to.”

  “Oh?” Walthers shifted position, as the back of the daybed no longer seemed quite so comfortable. He didn’t ask the question on his mind, which was Oh, have you been seeing Wan? because that would suggest that he was jealous. He only said, “How is Wan?” But the other question was contained in that one, and was answered. Wan was much better. Wan’s eye was hardly black at all now. Wan had a really neat ship in orbit, a Heechee Five, but it was his personal property and it had been fixed up special—so he said; she hadn’t seen it. Of course. Wan had sort of hinted that some of the equipment was old Heechee stuff, and maybe not too honestly come by. Wan had sort of hinted that there was plenty of Heechee stuff around that never got reported, because the people that found it didn’t want to pay royalties to the Gateway Corporation, you know? Wan figured he was entitled to it, really, because he’d had this unbelievable life, brought up by practically the Heechee themselves—

  Without Walthers willing it, the internal question externalized itself. “It sounds like you’ve been seeing a great deal of Wan,” he offered, trying to seem casual and hearing his own voice prove he was not. Indeed he was not casual; he was either angry or worried—more angry than worried, actually, because it made no sense! Wan was surely not good-looking. Or good-tempered. Of course, he was rich, and also a lot closer to Dolly’s age…

  “Oh, honey, don’t be jealous,” Dolly said in her own voice, sounding if anything pleased—which somewhat reassured Walthers. “He’s going to go pretty soon anyway, you know. He doesn’t want to be here when the transport gets in, and right now he’s off ordering supplies for his next trip. That’s the only reason he came here.” She raised the puppeted hand again, and the childish kitten voice sang, “Jun-ior’s jealous of Dol-lee!”

  “I am not,” he said instinctively, and then admitted, “I am. Don’t hold it against me, Doll.”

  She moved in the bed until her lips were near his ear, and he felt her soft breath, lisping in the kitten voice, “I promise I won’t, Mr. Junior, but I’d be awful glad if you would…” And as reconciliations went, it went very well; except that right in the middle of Round Four it was zapped by the snarling ring of the piezophone.

  Walthers let it ring fifteen times, long enough to complete the task in progress, though not nearly as well as he had intended. When he answered the phone it was the duty officer from the airport. “Did I call you at a bad time, Walthers?”

  “Just tell me what you want,” said Walthers, trying not to show that he was still breathing hard.

  “Well, rise and shine, Audee. There’s a party of six down with scurvy, Grid Seven Three Poppa, coordinates a little fuzzy but they’ve got a radio beacon. That’s all they’ve got. You’re flying them a doctor, a dentist, and about a ton of vitamin C to arrive at first light. Which means you take off in ninety minutes tops.”

  “Ah, hell, Carey! Can’t it wait?”

  “Only if you want them DOA. They’re real bad. The shepherd that found them says there’s two of them he don’t think will make it anyway.”

  Walthers swore to himself, looked apologetically at Dolly, and then reluctantly began getting his gear together.

  When Dolly spoke the voice was not a kitten’s anymore. “Junior? Can’t we go back home?”

  “This is home,” he said, trying to make it light.

  “Please, Junior?” The relaxed face had tightened up, and the ivory mask was impassive, but he could hear the strain in her voice.

  “Dolly, love,” he said, “there’s nothing there for us. Remember? That’s why people like us come here. Now we’ve got a whole new planet—why, this city by itself is going to be bigger than Tokyo, newer than New York; they’re going to have six new transports in a couple of years, you know, and a Lofstrom loop instead of these shuttles—”

  “But when? When I’m old?”

  There might not have been a justifiable reason for the misery in her voice, but the misery was there all the same. Walthers swallowed, took a deep breath, and tried his joking best. “Sweet-pants,” he said, “you won’t be old even when you’re ninety.” No response. “Aw, but, honey,” he cajoled, “it’s bound to get better! They’re sure to start a food factory out in our Oort pretty soon. It might even be next year! And they as much as promised me a piloting job for the construction—”

  “Oh, fine! So then you’ll be away a year at a time instead of just a month. And I’ll be stuck in this dump, without even any decent programs to talk to.”

  “They’ll have programs—”

  “I’ll be dead first!”

  He was wide awake now, the joys of the night worn away. He said, “Look. If you don’t like it here we don’t have to stay. There’s more on Peggys than Port Hegramet. We can go out into the back country, clear some land, build a house—”

  “Raise strong sons, found a dynasty?” Her voice was scornful.

  “Well…something
like that, I guess.”

  She turned over in the bed. “Take your shower,” she advised. “You smell like fucking.”

  And while Audee Walthers, Jr., was in the shower, a creature that looked quite unlike any of Dolly’s puppets (though one of them was supposed to represent him) was seeing his first foreign stars in the thirty-one true years; and meanwhile one of the sick prospectors had stopped breathing, much to the relief of the shepherd who was trying, head averted, to nurse him; and meanwhile there were riots on Earth, and fifty-one dead colonists on a planet eight hundred light-years away…

  And meanwhile Dolly had got up long enough to make him coffee and leave it on the table. She herself went back to bed, where she was, or pretended to be, sound asleep while he drank it, and dressed, and went out the door.

  When I look at Audee, from this very great distance that separates us now, I am saddened to see that he looks so much like a wimp. He wasn’t, really. He was quite an admirable person. He was a first-rate pilot, physically brave, rough-and-tumble tough when he had to be, kind when he had a chance. I suppose everybody looks wimpy from inside, and of course from inside is how I see him now—from a very great distance inside, or outside, depending on what analog of geometry you choose to apply for this metaphor. (I can hear old Sigfrid sighing, “Oh Robin! Such digressions!” But then Sigfrid was never vastened.) We all have some areas of wimpiness, is what I am trying to say. It would be kinder to call them areas of vulnerability, and Audee simply happened to be extremely vulnerable where Dolly was concerned.

  But wimpiness was not Audee’s natural state. For the next little bit of time he was all the good things a person needed to be—resourceful, succoring the needy, tireless. He needed to be. Peggys Planet had some traps concealed beneath its gentle facade.

  As non-Terran worlds go, Peggys was a jewel. You could breathe the air. You could survive the climate. The flora did not usually give you hives, and the fauna was astonishingly tame. Well—not exactly tame. More like stupid. Walthers wondered sometimes what the Heechee had seen in Peggys Planet. The thing was, the Heechee were supposed to be interested in intelligent life—not that they seemed to have found much—and there was certainly not much of that on Peggys. The smartest animal was a predator, fox-sized, mole-slow. It had the IQ of a turkey, and proved it by being its own worst enemy. Its prey was dumber and slower than it was—so it always had plenty to eat—and its biggest single cause of death was strangulation on food particles when it threw up what it had eaten too much of. Human beings could eat that predator if they wanted to, and most of its prey, and a lot of the biota in general…as long as they were careful.