Things were coming to a boil. More Heechee were arriving on the run, all of them chattering agitatedly at the top of their voices. As one batch of them disappeared into the Five, others began to use those knives to cut away the captives’ clothing. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Stan squawked, but the Heechee didn’t try to understand. They didn’t stop doing what they were doing, either. As each scrap of garment was cut away, right down to their underwear, it was searched and sniffed and carried away somewhere for study.
Halfway through the process Estrella yelped in sudden shock as one of those knives nicked her thigh. The Heechee wielding it jumped back, startled. “Be careful with her!” Stan shouted, but they didn’t even look at him. The one with the knife screeched an order; another produced a little metal cup and caught a drop of the blood that was oozing from the cut. “Are you all right?” Stan called, suddenly more angry and solicitous than afraid.
“It’s only a scratch,” she said, then added uncomfortably, “But I have to pee.”
There didn’t seem to be any way to communicate that urgency to their captors. Assuming the Heechee would have cared if there had; but they didn’t seem interested in any needs or desires of their prisoners. More and more of the Heechee were crowding into the room, yammering to each other without stop. When one appeared who wore a fancier tunic than the rest, gold-streaked and silky, there was a momentary hush, then they all began talking to him at once. The new one had a sort of frazzled look, the way a man might appear if he had just been wakened from sleep with very unwelcome news. The newcomer listened for just a moment before waving for silence. He snapped what sounded like a command, then raised one skeletal hand to his narrow lips and began to speak into what looked like a large finger ring.
Heechee were beginning to come out of the Five carrying things—spare clothes, packets of food, and, very gingerly, Stan’s trumpet. There was a babble over that as they presented it to the one with the ring microphone. He considered for a moment, then issued more orders. Another Heechee bustled forward with what looked like a stethoscope and touched it to the trumpet, here, there, all over, listening worriedly and reporting to the leader.
A moment later there was a sudden squawking from inside the Five, and Stan heard the familiar blare of the opening bars of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. “Listen, Stan, they’ve turned on the Message!” Estrella cried gladly. “Maybe it’ll be all right now!”
But it wasn’t all right. It didn’t get any better at all. If the Heechee made any sense of the Message, which did not seem likely, it did not appear to reassure them.
How long the two of them hung there, poked and palped and examined, Stan could not know. It seemed to be a very long time. He worried about himself, but worried more about Estrella. Now and then he called empty reassurances to her. She spoke bravely back. “It’ll work out, Stan,” she said, and then, in a different tone, “Oh, damn it.”
Stan saw the problem. Though she had been squeezing her knees together as hard as she could, her bladder would not be denied. Urine was running down her legs. Among the Heechee that produced a new flurry of excitement, as one of them ran for another cup to catch a few drops for study.
What Stan felt was shame—for his lover’s embarrassment—and a sudden hot flash of rage at these coarse and uncaring Heechee who had caused it; and that was the end of the first hour of Stan’s long, long day.
Then, for no reason that Stan could see, things did improve, and they improved very fast.
The Heechee in the gold-embroidered robe had gone off to do whatever Heechee bosses had to do. Now he returned, puffing importantly as he issued orders in all directions. When he marched up close to Estrella Stan strained against his chains, expecting some new deviltry. That didn’t happen. The Heechee reached up with one wide, splay-fingered hand and patted her cheek.
Was that meant as reassurance of some kind? It evidently was, Stan saw, because other Heechee were hurrying toward them to remove their chains, the boss Heechee chattering at them all the while. Stan didn’t listen. Staggering slightly—the chains had cut off circulation, and he weighed less than he expected here—he reached out for Estrella. Naked as they were, they hugged each other while the Heechee stared at them in benign fascination.
“Now what?” Stan asked the air. He didn’t expect an answer. And got none, unless there was an answer in what happened next. A couple of Heechee hustled toward them, one bearing a few scraps of their ruined clothes, as though to apologize or explain, the other with a couple of Heechee smocks as replacements, gesturing that they might put them on.
The garments didn’t fit them all that well. Human beings were a lot thicker front to back than the squashed frames of the Heechee. All the same, having their nakedness covered before these weird beings made Stan feel better.
What it didn’t do for Stan was make him understand just what was going on. That wasn’t because the Heechee weren’t doing their best to explain. They were chirping, gesturing, trying to make something understood, but without a language in common they weren’t getting very far.
“At least we’re not trussed up like a Christmas pig anymore,” Estrella offered hopefully, holding Stan’s hand. They weren’t. They were allowed to roam freely around the chamber, the busy Heechee dodging around them on their errands.
“I wonder if they’ll let us go back in the ship,” Stan said, peering inside. A couple of Heechee were playing the Message again, holding what might have been a camera to record what it showed. Another patted Stan’s shoulder encouragingly as he stood at the entrance.
He took it for permission. “Let’s try it,” he said, leading the way. No one interfered, but Estrella gasped when she saw what had been done to their Five. Most of the movables had been taken away, and two Heechee were puzzling over the fixtures in the head.
Estrella asserted herself. “Get out!” she ordered, flapping her arms to show what she meant. The Heechee jabbered at each other for a moment, then complied.
That made a difference. The toilet had been partly disassembled, but it still worked. A little cleaner, a lot more comfortable, Stan and Estrella took care of their next needs: they were hungry. It was impossible to use the food-preparation equipment, because that was already in fragments, but among the odds and ends that had been hauled out of the Five they found a packet of biscuits that could be eaten as they were, and water. Every move they made was watched by the Heechee with interest and approval.
Then the boss Heechee came back, trundling a gadget that looked like a portable video screen. One of the Heechee touched something, and a picture appeared.
They were looking at a Heechee male who was talking to them excitedly—and, of course, incomprehensibly to the humans. Behind him was the interior of a Heechee ship, but not any ship Stan had ever seen before. It was much larger than even a Five, and the only familiar item in it was one of those dome-shaped machineries that had got them into the Core.
Then the Heechee in the scene gestured. The scene widened, and they saw something else that was familiar.
“Mother of God,” Estrella whispered. “Isn’t that Robinette Broadhead?”
It was Broadhead. He was grinning widely, and he was touching the Heechee in the screen, offering a handshake, which the Heechee clumsily accepted.
Beside Stan, the boss Heechee was patting his shoulder enthusiastically with his splayed hand. It seemed to be a gesture of apology, and hesitantly Stan returned it. The Heechee’s shoulder was warm but bony, and he seemed to be smiling.
“Well,” Estrella said wonderingly. “It looks like we’re all friends together now.” And that was the end of the second hour in this longest of days.
It was good to be friends, better to have had a chance to eat and drink and relieve themselves, best of all to be free. What Stan really wanted was some sleep, but there didn’t seem much chance of that. The Heechee kept trying to tell them things by sign language; they kept not understanding. When the boss Heechee approached, bearing Stan�
��s horn inquiringly, he got that message right away. “It’s a trumpet,” he informed them. He repeated the name a couple of times, touching the instrument, then gave up. “Here, let me show you.” And he blew a scale, and then a couple of bars of the Cab Calloway version of the “St. Louis Blues.” All the Heechee jumped back, then made gestures urging him to play more.
That was as far as Stan was prepared to go. He shook his head. “We’re tired,” he said, demonstrating by closing his eyes and resting his check on his folded hands. “Sleep. We need rest.”
Estrella took a hand. Beckoning to the nearest Heechee, she led him to the entrance to the Five, pointing to their sleep shelves, now bare. After more jabbering, the Heechee seemed to get the idea. A couple of them raced away, and the boss Heechee beckoned to them to follow. They left the big chamber that had been all they had seen of the worlds of the Heechee and followed the leader down a short corridor. Its walls, Stan saw, seemed to be Heechee-metal still, but a veined rose pink instead of the familiar blue. They paused at a chamber. A waiting Heechee showed them the ruins of their own sleep sacks, then pointed hopefully inside. There were two heaps of something side by side on the floor. Beds? Evidently so. The Heechee closed the door on them, and Estrella immediately stretched out on one. When Stan followed her example it was more like burrowing into a pile of dried leaves than any bed he had ever had. But it wasn’t uncomfortable, and best of all it was flat and horizontal, and no one was jabbering at him.
Thankfully he stretched out and closed his eyes.…
But only for a moment.
Almost at once he was awakened as the door opened again. It was the boss Heechee, jabbering in excitement but beckoning insistently.
“Oh, hell,” Stan muttered. Things happened pretty fast in this place; but the two of them got up and followed. Farther, this time, along the rose pink corridor and then a gold-colored one. They stopped in a chamber like the one they had first entered, where half a dozen Heechee were jabbering and pointing at the lock.
“I think they’re trying to tell us that another ship’s coming in,” Estrella said.
“Fine,” Stan grumbled. “They could’ve let us sleep a little bit, though.”
They didn’t have long to wait. There was a faint sound of metal against metal from outside the door. One of the Heechee, watching a display of color from something beside the door, waited just a moment, then opened it. A pair of Heechee came in, talking excitedly to the equally excited ones meeting them, and then a pair of human beings.
Human beings! They were talking, too, but the people they were talking to were the Heechee. In their own Heechee language. And then one of the human arrivals caught sight of Stan and Estrella. His eyes went wide. “Jesus,” he said unbelievingly. “Who the hell are you?”
Who the hell the man himself was was somebody named Lon Alvarez, one of Robinette Broadhead’s personal assistants, and as soon as Stan told him their names he snapped his fingers. “The kids who took off from Gateway right after the discovery, sure. I guess everybody thought you were dead.”
“Well, we’re not,” Estrella said, “just dead tired.”
But Stan had a sudden sense of guilt. Everybody thought they were dead? And so they’d be telling Tan so, and Naslan. “Is there some way you can communicate with Gateway? Because if there is, I’d better get a message off to them right away.”
Puzzlingly, Lon Alvarez gave Stan a doubtful look. “A message to who?”
“To the Gateway authorities, of course,” Stan snapped. “They’ll be waiting to hear from us.”
Alvarez glanced at the Heechee, then back at Stan. “I don’t think they’re exactly waiting, Mr. Avery. You know you’re in a black hole, don’t you?”
“A black hole?” Stan blinked at the man, and heard Estrella gasp beside him.
“That’s right. That’s what the Core is, you know. A big black hole, where the Heechee went to hide long ago, and inside a black hole there’s time dilation.” He looked at Stan to see if he was following this, but Stan’s muddled stare wasn’t reassuring. Alvarez sighed. “That means things go slower in a black hole. In this one, the dilation comes to about forty thousand to one, you see, so a lot of time has passed outside while you were here. How much? Well, when we left it would have been about, let’s see, about eleven years.”
XI
When Stan and Estrella could take no more they staggered back to those queer Heechee beds. They didn’t talk; there was too frighteningly much that needed to be talked about, and no good place for them to begin.
Estrella dropped off at once, but not Stan. His head was too full of arithmetic, and all the sums were scary. The man had said forty thousand to one! Why, that meant that every minute that passed here in the Heechee’s Core was more than a month in the outside world! An hour was five years! A day would be over a century, a week would be—
But then fatigue would no longer be denied. He fell into an uneasy sleep, but it didn’t last. There was too much haunting his dreams. But when he woke enough to reach out for Estrella her bunk was empty, and she was gone.
Stan staggered to his feet and went in search of her. It was urgent that he find her. Even more urgently, he wanted the two of them to get right back in their Five, if it would still work after everything the Heechee had done to it, and head for home…before everyone they knew was dead and gone.
Estrella wasn’t in the hallway, though there were voices coming from somewhere, lots of them. She wasn’t in the room they had entered in, either, though there were plenty of Heechee there looking very busy, about what Stan could not say. One of the Heechee took pity on him. He led Stan, chattering cheerfully, with plenty of those reassuring shoulder-pats, to still another entrance chamber. It was the biggest yet, and the most crowded, with a constant stream of Heechee going in and out of the port to a docked ship. The guide led Stan to the door and gently nudged him inside.
The ship was the biggest he’d ever seen, and it was full of people, both human and Heechee. When one of the humans looked up he saw that it was Estrella, and she was talking—yes, apparently talking—to a Heechee. She beckoned Stan over, holding up a flask of something brown. “It’s coffee, Stan,” she said with pleasure. “They’ve got a great kitchen on the immigrant ship. Want some?”
“Sure,” he said absently, staring at the Heechee. Incongruously, the creature was wearing a Texas sombrero, a sweatshirt that bore the legend Welcome to Houston, and what looked like cowboy boots. He stuck out an affable hand to Stan.
“Great seeing you again, Mr. Avery,” he said—in English! “What, you don’t remember me? I’m Doorwatcher. I was in charge of the entry lock when you and Ms. Pancorbo arrived.” And added proudly, “I went with the first party of ours to go Outside, as soon as we saw what was happening.”
“Nice to see you again,” Stan said faintly. “You, ah, speak English very well.”
Doorwatcher made a deprecating gesture with those skeletal hands. “I spent four years on your planet, so I had plenty of time to learn. Then when this ship of immigrants was leaving I came home.” Someone was chattering urgently to him in the Heechee language. He replied briefly, then sighed. “I’d better get back to work. All these new people! My second-in-command is really swamped. And I’m anxious to see my family, too. It’s been a long time for me…though they don’t even know I was gone!”
XII
When Stan tried to remember that very long day, that forty-thousand-days-in-a-day day, its events and discoveries flew wildly around in his mind like angry bees when the hive is attacked. The surprises were too many and too great. The new ship was a human-built ship, though using Heechee drive technology. The humans on it were immigrants, come to the Core to visit the Heechee for a few days or weeks (or centuries!), and that same ship was going to go right back for more. The Door—the floating dock they had come to—was swarming with other humans from previous ships, waiting for transportation to take them to one of the Heechee planets to go on display. Some of them were digni
taries from Gateway Corp or one of the nations of Earth, there to open embassies from the human race to the Heechee. Some were simply people who hadn’t liked the lives they had on Earth, and jumped at the chance for new ones in the Core. “Like us, Stan,” Estrella told him as he blearily tried to take it all in. “Like everybody who came to Gateway, and they’re going to get what they want here. The Heechee are wild to meet us, Stan. Every human being who gets here is going to live like a king.” And then she added worriedly, “Drink your coffee, hon. I think they put something in it to wake us up. You’ll need it.”
They had. It did. When Stan had swallowed his second flask of the stuff fatigue was banished, and his mind was racing. “What do you mean, live like a king?” he demanded.
“What I said, Stan,” she said patiently—or not all that patiently; she was on overdrive, too, her eyes sparkling in a way Stan had never seen before. “They’re welcoming us, Stan. They want to hear everything about the human race. They’re fascinated by the idea that we have different countries and cultures and all. When I told Doorwatcher about herding bison he begged me to come to his own planet and talk about it—seems he’d missed that when he was on Earth. He says they’ll give us our own home, and a wonderful home, too, and…and I don’t think they know anything about Istanbul, either, or human history, and they’ll want to hear it all from you—”
But Stan was shaking his head. “We won’t have time,” he announced.
Estrella stopped short, peering at him from under her dragging eyelid. “Why won’t we?” she asked, suddenly shot down from her enthusiasm.
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