2 What Happened on Peggy’s Planet

 

Meanwhile, on Peggy’s Planet my friend Audee Walthers was looking for a particular shebeen for a particular man.

I say he was my friend, although I hadn’t given him a thought in years. He had done me a favor once. I hadn’t forgotten it, exactly-that is, if anybody had said to me, “Say, Robin, do you remember that Audee Walthers put his tail on the line so you could borrow a ship when you needed to?” I would have said indignantly, “Hell, yes! I wouldn’t forget a thing like that.” But I hadn’t been thinking about it every minute, either, and as a matter of fact I had no idea at that moment where he was or even if he was still alive.

Walthers should have been easy to remember, because he looked rather unusual. He was short and not handsome. His face was wider at the jaw than at the temples, which made him look a little like a friendly frog. He was also married to a beautiful and dissatisfied woman less than half as old as he. Her age was nineteen; her name was Dolly. If Audee had asked my advice, I would have told him that such May and December affairs cannot work out-unless, of course, as in my case, December is remarkably rich. But he desperately wanted it to work out, because he loved his wife very much, and so he worked like a slave for Dolly. Audee Walthers was a pilot. Any kind of pilot. He had piloted airbodies on Venus. When the big Earth transport (which constantly reminded him of my existence since I owned a share in it and had renamed it after my wife) was in orbit at Peggy’s he piloted shuttlecraft to load and unload it, between times he piloted whatever he could rent on Peggy’s for whatever tasks a charter demanded. Like most everybody else on Peggy’s, he had come 4 X 1O’° kilometers from the place where he was born to scratch out a living, and sometimes he made it and sometimes he did not. So when he came back from one charter and Adjangba told him there was another to be had, Walthers scrambled to get it. Even if it meant searching every bar in Port

Hegramet to find the charter party. That wasn’t easy. For a “city” of four thousand, Port Hegramet was bar-saturated. There were scores, and the obvious ones-the hotel cafe, the airport pub, the big gambling casino with Port Hegramet’s only floorshow-weren’t where the Arabs who were his next charter were. Nor was Dolly in the casino, where she might have been performing with her puppet show, or at home, or at least not to answer the phone. Half an hour later Walthers was still walking the ill-lit streets in search of his Arabs. He was no longer in the richer, more Western parts of the city, and when he finally found them it was in a shebeen at the edge of town, having an argument.

All of the buildings in Port Hegramet were temporary. That was a necessary consequence of its being a colony planet; every month, when the new immigrants arrived in the big Heechee Heaven transport from Earth, the population exploded like a balloon at the hydrogen valve.

Then it gradually shrank for a few weeks, as the colonists were moved out to plantations and lumbering sites and mines. It never collapsed quite to the former level, so each month there were a few hundred new residents, a few score new dwellings built and a few old ones swallowed up. But this shebeen was most obviously temporary of all. It was only three slabs of construction plastic propped together for walls, a fourth laid over them as a roof and the street side open to the warm Peggy’s air. Even so it was smoky and hazy inside, smoke of tobacco and smoke of hemp laced with the beery, sour smell of the home-brewed liquor they sold.

Walthers recognized his quarry at once from his agent’s description. There were not many like him in Port Hegramet-many Arabs, of course, but how many rich ones? And how many old ones? Mr. Luqman was even older than Adjangba, fat and bald, and each one of his plump fingers wore a ring, many of them diamonds. He was with a group of other Arabs at the back of the shebeen, but as Walthers started toward them the barwoman put out a hand. “Private party,” she said. “They pay. You leave alone.”

“They’re expecting me,” Walthers said, hoping it was true.

“For what?”

“Now, that’s none of your damn business,” Walthers said angrily, estimating the chances of what would happen if he just pushed past her. She was no threat, skinny, dark-skinned young woman with great blue-glowing metal hoops dangling from her ears; but the big man with the bullet-shaped head who was sitting in a corner and watching what was going on was something else again. Fortunately Mr. Luqman saw Walthers and stumbled blearily toward him. “You are my pilot,” he announced. “Come have a drink.”

“Thank you, Mr. Luqman, but I’ve got to get home. I just wanted to confirm the charter.”

“Yes. We shall go with you.” He turned and gazed toward the others in his party, who were having a furious argument about something. “Will you have a drink?” he asked over his shoulder.

The man was drunker than Walthers had realized. He said again, “Thanks, but no. Would you like to sign the charter contract now, please?”

Luqman turned back to stare at the printout in Walthers’ hand. “The contract?” He thought it over for a moment. “Why must we have a contract?”

“It’s customary, Mr. Luqman,” said Walthers, patience ebbing rapidly. Behind him the Arab’s companions were shouting at each other, and Luqman’s attention was wavering between Walthers and the arguing group.

And that was another thing. There were four people involved in the argument-five if you counted Luqman himself. “Mr. Adjangba said there would be four of you altogether,” Walthers mentioned. “There’s a surcharge if there are five.”

“Five?” Luqman focused on Walthers’ face. “No. We are four.” Then his expression changed and he smiled fondly. “Oh, you are thinking that crazy man is one of us? No, he will not go with us. He will go to his grave, perhaps, if he insists on telling Shameem what the Prophet meant in his teachings.”

“I see,” said Walthers. “Then if you’ll just sign-“

The Arab shrugged and took the printout sheet from Walthers. He spread it on the zinc-topped bar and painfully began to read it, a pen in his hand. The argument grew louder, but Luqman seemed to have abolished it from his mind.

Most of the shebeen’s clientele was African, what looked like Kikuyu on one side of the room and Masai on the other. At first glance, in that company, the people at the quarrelsome table had seemed all alike. Now Walthers saw his mistake. One of the arguing men was younger than the others, and shorter and leaner. His skin color was darker than most Europeans’, but not as dark as the Libyans’; his eyes were as black as theirs, but not kohled.

It was none of Walthers’ business.

He turned his back and waited patiently, anxious to leave. Not just because he wanted to see Dolly. Port Hegramet was somewhat hostilely ethnic. Chinese mostly stayed with Chinese, Latin Americans in their barrio, Europeans in the European quarter-oh, not neatly, and certainly not always peacefully. The divisions were sharp even among the subdivisions. Chinese from Canton did not get along with Chinese from Taiwan, the Portuguese had little in common with the Finns, and the once-Chileans and former Argentines still quarreled. But Europeans were definitely not urged to come into African drinking spots, and when he had the signed charter he thanked Luqman and left quickly and with some relief. He had gone less than a block when he heard louder cries of rage behind him, and a scream of pain.

On Peggy’s Planet you mind your own business as much as you can, but Walthers had a charter to protect. The group he saw beating up one individual might well have been the African bouncers attacking the leader of his charter party. That made it his business. He turned and ran back-a mistake that, believe me, he regretted very deeply for a long time afterward.

By the time Walthers got there the assailants were gone, and the whimpering, bleeding figure on the sidewalk was not one of his charter party. It was the young stranger; and he clutched at Walthers’ leg.

“Help me and I will give you fifty thousand dollars,” he said blurrily, his lips thick and bloody.

“I’ll go look for a public patrolman,” Walthers offered, trying to disengage himself.

“No patrol! You help me kill those persons and I will pay,” snarled the man. “I am Captain Juan Henriquette Santos-Schinitz, and I can well afford to buy your services!”

Of course, I knew nothing of this at the time. On the other hand, Walthers didn’t know that Mr. Luqman was working for me. That didn’t matter. There were tens of thousands of people working for me, and whether or not Walthers knew who they were made no difference at all. The bad thing was that he didn’t recognize Wan, for he had never heard of him, except generally. That made a very big difference to Walthers in the long run.

I knew Wan particularly. I had met him first when he was a wolf-child, brought up by machines and nonhumans. I called him a non-friend when I was running through the catalog of my acquaintances for you. I knew him, all right. But he was never socialized enough to be a friend to anyone.

He was even, you could say, quite an enemy-not just to me but to the whole human race-in the days when he was a scared and lecherous youth, dreaming into his couch out in the Oort Cloud and neither knowing nor caring that his dreams were driving everybody else nuts. That wasn’t his fault, to be sure. It wasn’t even his fault that the wretched and raging terrorists had found inspiration in his example and were driving us all nuts again, whenever they could manage it-but if we get into questions of “fault,” and that related term “guilt,” we’ll be right back with Sigfrid von Shrink before you know it, and what I’m talking about now is Audee Walthers.

Walthers was no angel of mercy, but he couldn’t leave the man in the street. When he helped the bleeding man into the little apartment he shared with Dolly, Walthers was far from clear in his mind why he was doing it. The man was in bad shape, true. But that was what first-aid stations were for, and besides, the victim was singularly unwinning in his ways. All the way to the quarter called Little Europe, the man was reducing his cash offer and complaining that Walthers was a coward; by the time he sprawled on Walthers’ folding bed the cash promise was two hundred and fifty dollars, and the reflections on Walthers’ character had been incessant.

At least the man’s bleeding had stopped. He pushed himself up and stared contemptuously around the flat. Dolly wasn’t home yet, and she had, of course, left the place in a mess-undisposed-of dirty dishes on the fold-down table, her hand puppets scattered all over, underwear drying over the sink, and a sweater hanging on the doorknob. “This is a filthy

 

What Robin says needs some explication here, too. The Heechee were very interested in living things, particularly in life that was intelligent or had the promise of becoming so. They had a device that let them listen in on the feelings of creatures worlds away.

What was wrong with the device was that it transmitted as well as received. The operator’s own emotions were perceived by the subjects. If the operator was upset or depressed-or insane-the consequences were very, very bad. The boy Wan had such a device when he was marooned as an infant. He called it a dream couch-academics later renamed it the telempathic psychokinetic transceiver-and when he used it the events Robin so subjectively describes occurred.

 

place,” the undesired guest said conversationally. “This is not worth two hundred fifty dollars, even.”

A hot response came to Walthers’ lips. He pushed it back with all the others he had been repressing for the last half hour; what was the point? “I’ll get you cleaned up,” he said. “Then you can get out. I don’t want your money.”

The bruised lips attempted a sneer. “How foolish of you to say that,” the man said, “since I am Captain Juan Henriquette Santos-Schmitz. I own my own spacecraft, I have royalty shares in the transport vessel that feeds this planet, among other very important enterprises, and I am said to be the eleventh wealthiest person in the human race.”

“I never heard of you,” Walthers grumbled, running warm water into a basin. But it wasn’t true. It had been a long time ago, yes, but there was something, there was a memory. Somebody who had been on the PV news shows every hour for a week, then every week for a month or two. No one is more securely forgotten than the one-month famous, ten years later. “You’re the kid who was raised in the Heechee habitat,” he said suddenly, and the man whined:

“Exactly, ouch! You are hurting me!”

“Then just hold still,” said Walthers, and wondered just what to do with the eleventh wealthiest person in the human race. Dolly would be thrilled to meet him, of course. But after Dolly got over being thrilled, what schemes would she be hatching for Walthers to tap all that wealth and buy them an island plantation, a summer home in the Heather Hills or a trip home? Would it, in the long run, be better to hold the man here under some pretext until Dolly got home-or to ease him out and simply tell her about it?

Dilemmas pondered over long enough solve themselves; this one solved itself when the door lock pinged and crackled, and Dolly walked in.

Whatever Dolly looked like around the house-sometimes with her eyes streaming from an allergy to Peggy’s Planet’s flora, often grouchy, seldom with her hair brushed-when she went out she dazzled. She obviously dazzled the unexpected guest as she came in the door, and, although he had been married to that striking slim figure and that impassive alabaster face for more than a year, and even knew the rigid dieting that produced the first and the dental flaw that required the second, she pretty nearly dazzled Walthers himself.

Walthers greeted her with a hug and a kiss; the kiss was returned, but not with full attention. She was peering past him at the stranger. Still holding her, Walthers said, “Darling, this is Captain Santos-Schmitz. He was in a fight, and I brought him here-“

She pushed him away. “Junior, you didn’t!”

It took him a moment to realize her misunderstanding. “Oh, no, Dolly, the fight wasn’t with me. I just happened to be nearby.”

Her expression thawed and she turned to the guest. “Of course you’re welcome here, Wan. Let me see what they did to you.”

Santos-Schmitz preened himself. “You know me,” he said, allowing her to dab at the bits of bandage Walthers had already applied.

“Of course, Wan! Everyone in Port Hegraniet 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 fidgety. “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 Peggy’s Planet. Luqman and one of the other men were buried in false-color satellite bolos 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 bad 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 bad 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 Peggy’s 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 Peggy’s 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 Peggy’s-not counting, of course, people like Audee’s oil prospectors. The prospectors paid full fare to get to Peggy’s 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 billy 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 bad 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 around with the geophone spikes. One day they had him digging for the tick-like creatures that were the Peggy’s 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 tick-like 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. Peggy’s, 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 Peggy’s 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, “Junior’s jealous of Vollee!”

“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 Peggy’s 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. Peggy’s Planet had some traps concealed beneath its gentle facade.

As non-Terran worlds go, Peggy’s 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 Peggy’s 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 Peggy’s. The smartest anims~1 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.

The ragged-ass uranium prospectors hadn’t been careful. By the time the violent tropical sunrise exploded over the jungle, and Walthers set his aircraft down in the nearest clearing, one of them had died of it.

The medical team had no time for a DOA, so they flocked around the barely living ones and sent Walthers off to dig a grave. For a time he had hopes to pass the chore on to the sheepherders, but their flocks were scattered all over. As soon as Walthers’ back was turned, so were the shepherds.

The DOA looked at least ninety and smelled like a hundred and ten, but the tag on his wrist described him as Selini Yasmeneh, twenty-three, born in a shantytown south of Cairo. The rest of his life story was easy to read. So he had scrabbled for an adolescence in the Egyptian slums, hit the miracle odds-against chance of a passage for a new life on Peggy’s, sweltered in the ten-tiered bunks of the transport, agonized through the

 

Of course, you realize the “wimpiness” Robin is excusing here isn’t that of Audee Walthers. Robin was never a wimp, except in the need to reassure himself from time to time that he wasn’t. Humans are so strange!

 

landing in the deorbiting capsule-fifty colonists strapped into a pilotless pod, deorbited by a thrust from outside, shaken into terror on entry, the excrement jolted out of them as the parachutes popped open. Nearly all the capsules did in fact land safely. Only about three hundred colonists, so far, had been crushed or drowned. Yasmeneh was that lucky, at least, but when he tried to change careers from farming barley to prospecting heavy metals, his luck ran out because his party forgot to be careful. The tubers they’d fed themselves on when their store-bought food ran out contained, like almost every obvious food source on Peggy’s, a vitamin C antagonist that had to be experienced to be believed. They hadn’t believed even then. They knew about the risk. Everybody did. They just wanted one more day, and then another day, and another, while their teeth loosened and their breath grew foul, and by the time the sheepherders stumbled across their camp, it was too late for Yasmeneh, and pretty close to the same for the others.

Walthers had to fly the whole party, survivors and rescuers together, to the camp where someday the loop would be built, and already there were at least a dozen permanent habitations. By the time he got back at last to the Libyans, Mr. Luqman was furious. He hung on the door of Walthers’ plane and shouted at him. “Thirty-seven hours away! It is outrageous! For the exorbitant charter we pay you we expect your services!”

“It was a matter of life or death, Mr. Luqman,” Walthers said, trying to keep the irritation and fatigue out of his voice as he postflighted the plane.

“Life is the cheapest thing there is! And death comes to us all!”

Walthers pushed past him and sprang down to the ground. “They were fellow Arabs, Mr. Luqman-“

“No! Egyptians!”

“-well, fellow Moslems, anyway-“

“I would not care if they were my own brothers! Our time is precious!

Very large affairs are at stake here!”

Why try to restrain his own anger? Walthers snarled, “It’s the law, Luqman. I only lease the plane; I have to provide emergency services when called on. Read your fine print!”

It was an unanswerable argument, and how infuriating it was when Luqman made no attempt to answer it but simply responded by heaping onto Walthers all the tasks that had accumulated in his absence. All to be completed at once. Or sooner. And if Walthers hadn’t had any sleep, well, we would all sleep forever one day, would we not?

So, sleepless as he was, Walthers was flying magnetosonde traces within the next hour-prickly, tetchy work, towing a magnetic sensor a hundred meters behind the plane and trying to keep the damned unwieldy thing from snagging in a tree or plunging itself into the ground. And in the moments of thought between the demands of, really, trying to fly two aircraft at once, Walthers thought somberly that Luqman had lied; it would have made a difference if the Egyptians had been fellow-Libyans, much less brothers. Nationalism had not been left back on Earth. There had been border clashes already, gauchos versus rice farmers when the cattle herds went looking for a drink in the paddies and trampled the seedlings; Chinese versus Mexicans when there was a mistake in filing land claims; Africans versus Canadians, Slays versus Hispanics for no reason at all that any outsider could see. Bad enough. What was worse was the bad blood that sometimes surfaced between Slav and Slav, between Latino and Latino.

And Peggy’s could have been such a pretty world. It had everything- almost everything, if you didn’t count things like vitamin C; it had Heechee Mountain, with a waterfall called the Cascade of Pearls, eight hundred meters of milky torrent coming right off the southern glaciers it had the cinnamon-smelling forests of the Little Continent with its dumb, friendly, lavender-colored monkeys-well, not real monkeys. But cute. And the Glass Sea. And the Wind Caves. And the farms-especially the farms! The farms were what made so many millions and tens of millions of Africans, Chinese, Indians, Latinos, poor Arabs, Iranians, Irish, Poles; so many millions of desperate people so willing to go so far from Earth and home.

“Poor Arabs,” he had thought to himself but there were some rich ones, too. Like the four he was working for. When they talked about “very large affairs” they measured the scale in dollars and cents, that was clear. This expedition was not cheap. His own charter was in six figures, pity he couldn’t keep more of it for himself! And that was almost the least part of what they had spent for pop-up tents and sound-poppers, for microphone ranging and rock samplers; for the lease of satellite time for their false-color pictures and radar contour-mapping; for the instruments they paid him to drag around the terrain ... and what about the next step? Next they would have to dig. Sinking a shaft to the salt dome they had located, three thousand meters down, would cost in the millions- Except, he discovered, that it would not, because they too had some of that illegal Heechee technology Wan had told Dolly about.

The first thing human beings had learned about the long-gone Heechee was that they liked to dig tunnels, because examples of their work lay all about under the surface of the planet Venus. And what they had dug the tunnels with was a technological miracle, a field projector that loosened the crystalline structure of rock, converted it to a sort of slurry; that pumped the slurry away and lined the shaft with that dense, hard, blue-gleaming Heechee metal. Such projectors still existed, but not in private hands.

They did, however, seem to be available to the hands of Mr. Luqman’s party ... which implied not only money behind them but influence which implied somebody with muscle in the right places; and from casual remarks dropped in the brief intervals of rest and meals, Walthers suspected that somebody was a man named Robinette Broadhead.

The salt dome was definite, the drilling sites were chosen, the main work of the expedition was done. All that remained was checking out a few other possibilities and completing the cross-checks. Even Luqman began to relax, and the talk in the evenings turned to home. Home for all four of them turned out not to be Libya or even Paris. It was Texas, where they averaged 1.75 wives each and about half a dozen children in all. Not very evenly distributed, as far as Walthers could tell, but they were, probably purposely, unclear about details. To try to encourage openness Walthers found himself talking about Dolly. More than he meant to. About her extreme youth. Her career as an entertainer. Her hand puppets. He told them how clever Dolly was, making all the puppets herself-a duck, a puppy, a chimp, a clown. Best of all, a Heechee. Dolly’s Heechee had a receding forehead, a beaked nose, a jutting chin, and eyes that tapered back to the ears like an Egyptian wall painting. In profile the face was almost a single line slanting down-all imaginary, of course, since no one had ever seen a Heechee then.

The youngest Libyan, Fawni, nodded judiciously. “Yes, it is good that a woman should earn money,” he declared.

“It isn’t just the money. It helps keep her active, you know? Even so, I’m afraid she gets pretty bored in Port Hegramet. She really has no one to talk to.”

The one named Shameem also nodded. “Programs,” he advised sagely. “When I had but one wife I bought her several fine programs for company. She particularly liked the ‘Dear Abby’ and the ‘Friends of Fatima,’ I remember.”

“I wish I could, but there’s not much like that on Peggy’s yet. It’s very difficult for her. So I really can’t blame her if sometimes when I’m, you know, feeling amorous and she isn’t-“ Walthers broke off, because the Libyans were laughing.

“It is written in the Second Sura”-young Fawzi guffawed-“that

 

Walthers’ suspicion that Robin Broadhead financed the prospectors was well-founded. Walthers’ opinion of Robin’s motives-not so well-founded. Robin was a very moral man, but not normally a very legal one. He was also a man (as you see) who got a lot of pleasure out of dropping hints about himself, particularly when talking about himself in the third person.

 

woman is our field and we may go into our field to plow it when we will. So says Al-Baqara, the Cow.”

Walthers, suppressing resentment, essayed a joke: “Unfortunately my wife is not a cow.”

“Unfortunately your wife is not a wife,” the Arab scolded. “Back home in Houston we have for such as you a term: pussy-whipped. It is a shameful state for a man.”

“Now, listen,” Walthers began, reddening; and then clamped down again on his anger. Over by the cooking tent Luqman looked up from his meticulous measuring of the day’s brandy ration and frowned at the sound of the voices. Walthers forced a reassuring smile. “We shall never agree,” he said, “so let’s be friends anyway.” He sought to change the subject. “I’ve been wondering,” he said, “why you decided to look for oil right here on the equator.”

Fawzi’s lips pursed and he studied Walthers’ face closely before he replied. “We have had many indications of appropriate geology.”

“Sure you have-all those satellite photos have been published, you know. They’re no secret. But there’s even better-looking geology in the northern hemisphere, around the Glass Sea.”

“That is enough,” Fawzi interrupted, his voice rising. “You are not paid to ask questions, Walthers!”

“I was just-“

“You were prying where you have no business, that is what you were doing!”

And the voices were loud again, and this time Luqman came over with their eighty milliliters each of brandy. “Now what is it?” he demanded. “What is the American asking?”

“It does not matter. I have not answered.”

Luqman glared at him for a moment, Walthers’ brandy ration in his hand, and then abruptly he lifted it to his lips and tossed it down. Walthers stifled a growl of protest. It did not matter that much. He did not really want to be drinking companions with these people. And in any case it seemed Luqman’s careful measuring of milliliters had not kept him from a shot or two in private, earlier, because his face was flushed and his voice was thick. “Walthers,” he growled, “I would punish your prying if it was important, but it is not. You want to know why we look here, one hundred seventy kilometers from where the launch loop will be built? Then look above you!” He thrust a theatrical arm to the darkened sky and then lurched away, laughing. Over his shoulder he tossed, “It does not matter anymore anyway!”

Walthers stared after him, then glanced up into the night sky.

A bright blue bead was sliding across the unfamiliar constellations. The transport! The interstellar vessel S. Ya. Broadhead had entered high orbit. He could read its course, jockeying to low orbit and parking there, an immense, potato-shaped, blue-gleaming lesser moon in the cloudless sky of Peggy’s Planet. In nineteen hours it would be parked. Before then he had to be in his shuttle to meet it, to participate in the frantic space-to-surface flights for the fragile fractions of the cargo and for the favored passengers, or nudging the free-fall deorbiters out of their paths to bring the terrified immigrants down to their new home.

Walthers thanked Luqman silently for stealing his drink; he could afford no sleep that night. While the four Arabs slept he was breaking down tents and stowing equipment, packing his aircraft, and talking with the base at Port Hegramet to make sure he had a shuttle assignment. He had. If he was there by noon the following day they would give him a berth and a chance to cash in on the frantic round trips that would empty the vast transport and free it for its return trip. At first light he had the Arabs up, cursing and stumbling around. In half an hour they were aboard his plane and on the way home.

He reached the airport in plenty of time, although something inside him was whispering monotonously, Too late. Too late.

Too late for what? And then he found out. When he tried to pay for his fuel, the banking monitor flashed a red zero. There was nothing in the account he shared with Dolly.

Impossible!.—or not really impossible, he thought, looking across the field to where Wan’s lander had been ten days earlier and was no more. And when he took time to race over to the apartment he was not really surprised by what he found. Their bank account was gone. Dolly’s clothes were gone, the hand puppets were gone, and most gone of all was Dolly herself.

I was not thinking at all of Audee Walthers at that time. If I had been, I would surely have wept for him-or for myself. I would have thought that it was at least a good excuse for weeping. The tragedy of the dear, sweet lover gone away was one I knew well, my own lost love having locked herself inside a black hole years and years before.

But the truth is I never gave him a thought. I was concerned with self affairs. What occupied me most notably were the stabbings in my gut, but also I spent a lot of time thinking about the nastiness of terrorists threatening me and everything around me.

Of course, that was not the only nastiness around. I thought about my worn-out intestines because they forced me to. But meanwhile my store-bought arteries were slowly hardening, and every day six thousand cells were dying in my irreplaceable brain; and meanwhile stars slowed in their flight and the universe dragged itself toward its ultimate entropic death, and meanwhile-Meanwhile everything, if you stopped to think of it, was skidding downhill. And I never gave any of it a thought.

But that’s the way we do it, isn’t it? We keep going because we have schooled ourselves not to think of any of those “meanwhiles”-until, like my gut, they force themselves on us.