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Those first shiploads of Heechee specialists had been standing by, waiting for
just that summons.
Probably none of them had actually expected to get it-"Not on my shift,
anyway!" each one of them might have prayed, if Heechee had prayed, or at
least asked of massed ancestral minds. Those crews had been standing by for a
good long while-thousands of centuries, by galactic time. Even by the clocks
in the core it had been a matter of decades.
No one crew stayed on standby for that long. They rotated at intervals of what
local time measured as the equivalent of eight or nine months, then returned
to their normal homes and habits. It was a lot like National Guard service in
the old days in the United States. Like National Guardsmen, too, the surprise
was ugly when the emergency they were standing by for turned out to be real,
and immediate.
Half the Heechee had families. Half the ones with families had been allowed to
bring mate and offspring with them, just as peacetime American soldiers had
carried along wives and kids. The similarities ended there.
Peacetime soldiers suddenly called on to fight usually had the chance to send
their families out of the way. The Heechee didn't. The places they were
stationed in were the ships they set out in, and so in those first half dozen
ships the crews included pregnant females, infants, and a fair number of
school-age Heechee children. Most of these were terrified. Few wanted to go on
this mystery-bus excursion into the unknown. . . but then, much of the same
was true of the crews themselves.
None of this Audee saw with his own eyes, only in the communications screens
of Captain's spaceship. That was what he arrived in, and there he stayed.
By the beginning of the fifth hour of his visit to the core, another spaceship
had had time to reach them.
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The two ships docked. The second ship was much larger than Captain's. It had a
complement of nearly thirty, and all of them slid as rapidly as they could
through the mated hatches to observe this queer animal, this "human," at first
hand.
The first thing that happened was that three of the new Heechee, gently and
carefully, took Audee's pod away from him. So he was deprived at once of the
comforting presence of Twice. He understood the necessity; none of the new
Heechee spoke English, and anyway, they could get from the stored mind of the
Ancient Ancestor all the information she had been getting from him over weeks,
in far less time than he could say any of it. That was an explanation; it
didn't make the loss less acute.
-~
The second thing was that all his familiar Heechee shipmates were dragged away
into the roil of newcomers, standing packed against each other in knots around
each of the Heechee from the ship, talking and gesticulating and, yes,
smelling. The typical, ammomacal Heechee reek was overpowering, with so many
of them squeezed into the ship. Audee had almost forgotten the smell existed,
through custom; and besides, the Heechee who produced it were friends. The new
ones were all strangers.
The third thing was that half a dozen of the new Heechee clustered around him,
twittering and jabbering so fast that he could not make out the words. Finally
he understood that they were asking him to hold still. He gave the best
imitation he could of the Heechee upper-arm shrug of assent, wondering what he
was being asked to hold still for.
It turned out to be a complete physical examination. They had his clothes off
in no time, and in less time still they were poking, prodding, peering.
Slipping tiny, soft probes into ears and nostrils and anus. Nicking off
imperceptibly tiny specimens of skin and hair and toenails and mucus. None of
it was painful, but it was so damn undignified.
And already, Audee knew, a lot of time had passed back on Earth. The clock
that ticked so slowly in the core was spinning away days and months at a click
in the outside Galaxy.
The last thing that happened, or almost the last, was the most surprising of
all.
When they had finished giving him the most complete physical exam-
ination any human being had ever had in so short a time, they allowed him to
dress again. Then a short, pale female Heechee touched his shoulder
reassuringly. Speaking slowly and carefully, as to a cat, she said, "We have
finished with your Ancient Ancestor. You may have it back now."
"Thank you," Audee growled, snatching the pod away from her.
"Twice will tell you what you must do next." The female Heechee smiled-
the cheek-writhing that was the Heechee smile, of course.
"I bet she will," Audee said bitterly, strapping on the pod and bending down.
Twice sounded exhausted. She had been drained dry, and it had been an
ordeal for her; then she had been pumped full of instructions, and that wasn't
easy, either. "You are to make a speech," she announced at once. "Don't try to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]