Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

by Frederik Pohl

  Hanging there, creeping through space, on a trip that a Heechee ship could have done in a day—if we had had one, and could have made it do what we wanted it to—I felt a kind of a sympathy with Payter’s old man. It wasn’t that different with us. All we were missing was the cowflop.

  Day 1284. The course change went very smoothly, after we all struggled into our life-support systems and wedged ourselves into our acceleration seats, neatly fitted to our air and vital-signs packs. Considering the tiny delta-V involved, it was hardly worth the effort. Not to mention that there wouldn’t be much use in life-support systems if anything went wrong enough for us to need them, five thousand A.U.s from home. But we did it by the book, because that was the way we had been doing it for three and a half years.

  And—after we had turned, and the chemical rockets had done their thing and stopped and let the ion-thrusters take over again, and after Vera had fumbled and clucked and hesitantly announced that it looked all right, as far as she could tell, of course pending confirmation some weeks later from Earth—we saw it! Lurvy was the first one out of her seat and at the visuals, and she snapped it into focus in a matter of seconds.

  We hung around, staring at it. The Food Factory!

  It jiggled annoyingly in the speculum, hard to keep in focus. Even an ion rocket contributes some vibration to a spaceship, and we were still a long way off. But it was there. It gleamed faintly blue in the darkness punctuated by stars, strangely shaped. It was the size of an office building and more oblong than anything else. But one end was rounded, and one side seemed to have a long, curved slice taken out of it. “Do you think it’s been hit by something?” Lurvy asked apprehensively.

  “Ah, not in the least,” snapped her father. “It is how it was constructed! What do we know of Heechee design?”

  “How do you know that?” Lurvy asked, but her father didn’t answer that; didn’t have to, we all knew that he had no way to know, was only speaking out of hope, because if it was damaged we were in trouble. Our bonuses were good just for going out there, but our hopes for real payoff, the only kind of payoff that would pay for seven round-trip years of misery, rested on the Food Factory being operable. Or at least studyable and copyable. “Paul!” Lurvy said suddenly. “Look at the side that’s just turning away—aren’t those ships?”

  I squinted, trying to make out what she saw. There were half a dozen bulges on the long, straight side of the artifact, three or four smallish ones, two quite large. They looked like pictures I had seen of the Gateway asteroid, right enough, as far as I could tell. But—“You’re the ex-prospector,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “I think they are. But, my God, did you see those two end ones? They were huge. I’ve been in Ones and Threes, and I’ve seen plenty of Fives. But nothing like that! They’d hold, I don’t know, maybe fifty people! If we had ships like that, Paul—If we had ships like that—”

  “If, if,” snarled her father. “If we had such ships, and if we could make them go where we wanted, yes, the world would be ours! Let us hope they still work. Let us hope any part of it works!”

  “It will, Father,” caroled a sweet voice from behind us, and we turned to see Janine, propped with one knee under the digester hose, holding out a squeeze bottle of our best home-made genuine recycled grain neutral spirits. “I’d say this really calls for a celebration.” She smiled.

  Lurvy looked at her thoughtfully, but her control was in good shape and she only said, “Why, that’s a nice idea, Janine. Pass it around.”

  Janine took a ladylike small swig and handed it to her father. “I thought you and Lurvy might like a nightcap,” she said, after clearing her throat—she had just graduated to drinking the hard stuff on her fourteenth birthday, still did not like it, insisted on it only because it was an adult prerogative.

  “Good idea,” Payter nodded. “I have been up now for, what is it, yes, nearly twenty hours. We will all need our rest when we touch down,” he added, handing the bottle to my wife, who squeezed two ounces into her well-practiced throat and said:

  “I’m not really sleepy yet. You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to play Trish Bover’s tape again.”

  “Oh, God, Lurvy! We’ve all seen it a zillion times!”

  “I know, Janine. You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to, but I kept wondering if one of those ships was Trish’s and—Well, I just want to look at it again.”

  Janine’s lips thinned, but the genes were strong and her control was as good as her sister’s when she wanted it to be—that was one of the things we were measured on, before they signed us for the mission. “I’ll dial it up,” she said, pushing herself over to Vera’s keyboard. Payter shook his head and retired to his own private, sliding the accordion-pleated barrier into place to shut us out, and the rest of us gathered around the console. Because it was tape we could get visual as well as sound, and in about ten seconds it crackled on and we could see poor, angry Trish Bover talking into the camera and saying the last words anybody would ever hear from her.

  Tragedy can only be tragic just so long, and we’d heard it all for three and a half years. Every once in a while we’d play the tape, and look at the scenes she had picked up with her hand-held camera. And look at them. And look at them, freeze-frame and blowup, not because we thought we’d get any more information out of them than Gateway Corporation’s people already had, although you never knew. Just because we wanted to reassure ourselves it was all worth it. The real tragedy was that Trish didn’t know what she had found.

  “This is Mission Report Oh-Seventy-Four Dee Nineteen,” she began, steadily enough. Her sad, silly face was even trying to smile. “I seem to be in trouble. I came out at a Heechee artifact kind of thing, and I docked, and now I can’t get away. The lander rockets work. But the main board won’t. And I don’t want to stay here till I starve.” Starve! After the boffins went over Trish’s photos they identified what the “artifact” was—the CHON-Food Factory they had been looking for.

  But whether it was worth it was still an open question, and Trish surely didn’t think it was worth it. What she thought was that she was going to die there, and for nothing, not even going to cash in her awards for the mission. And then at the end, what she finally did, she tried to make it back in the lander.

  She got into the lander and pointed it for the sun, and turned on the motors, and took a pill. Took a lot of pills; all she had. And then she turned the freezer up to max and got in and closed the door behind her. “Defrost me when you find me,” she said, “and remember my award.”

  And maybe somebody would. When they found her. If they found her. Which would likely be in about ten thousand years. By the time her faint radio message was heard by anybody, on maybe its five hundredth automatic repetition, it was too late to matter to Trish; she never answered.

  Vera finished playing the tape and quietly restowed it as the screen went dark. “If Trish had been a real pilot instead of one of those Gateway go-go prospectors, jump in and push the button and let the ship do its thing,” said Lurvy, not for the first time, “she would have known better. She would have used what little delta-V she had in the lander to kill some angular momentum instead of wasting it by pointing straight in.”

  “Thank you, expert rocket pilot,” I said, not for the first time either. “So she could’ve counted on being inside the asteroids a whole lot sooner, right? Maybe in as little as six or seven thousand years.”

  Lurvy shrugged. “I’m going to bed,” she said, taking a last squeeze from the bottle. “You, Paul?”

  “Aw, give me a break, will you?” Janine cut in. “I wanted Paul to help me go over ignition procedures for the ion-thrusters.”

  Lurvy’s guard went up at once. “You sure that’s what you want him to go over? Don’t pout, Janine. You know you’ve gone over it plenty already, and anyway it’s Paul’s job.”

  “And what if Paul’s out of action?” Janine demanded. “How do we know we won’t hit the crazy time just as we’
re doing it?”

  Well, nobody could know that, and as a matter of fact I had been forming the opinion that we would. It came in cycles of about a hundred and thirty days, give or take a dozen. We were pushing it close. I said, “Actually, I’m a little tired, Janine. I promise we’ll do it tomorrow.” Or whenever one of the others was awake at the same time—the important thing was not to be alone with Janine. In a ship with the total cubage of a motel room, you’d be surprised how hard that is to arrange. Not hard. Practically impossible.

  But I really wasn’t tired, and when Lurvy was tucked alongside me and out of it, her breathing too quiet to be called anything like a snore, but diagnostic of sleep all the same, I stretched against the sheets, wide awake, counting up our blessings. I needed to do that at least once a day. When I could find any to count.

  This time I found a good one. Four thousand A.U. plus is a long trip—and that’s as the crow flies. Or, actually, as the photon fires, because of course there aren’t a lot of crows in near-interstellar space. Call it half a trillion kilometers, near enough. And we were spiraling out, which meant most of a revolution around the sun before we got there. Our track wasn’t just 25 light-days, it was more like 60. And, even power-on the whole way, we weren’t coming up to anything like the speed of light. Three and a half years…and all the way we were thinking, Jeez, suppose someone figures out the Heechee drive before we get there? It wouldn’t have helped us a bit. It would’ve been a lot more than three and a half years before they got around to doing all the things they wanted to do when that happened. And guess where on that list the job of coming after us would have been?

  So the good thing I found to dwell on was that at least we weren’t going to find the trip was for nothing, because we were almost there!

  All that remained was to strap the big ion-thrusters onto it…see if it worked…start the slow return trip, shoving the thing back down toward the Earth…and, somehow, survive till we got there. Call it, oh, another four years—

  I went back to cherishing the fact that we were almost there.

  The idea of mining comets for food wasn’t new, it went back to Krafft Ehricke in the 1950s anyway, only what he suggested was that people colonize them. It made sense. Bring along a little iron and trace elements—the iron to build a place to live in, the trace elements to turn CHON-chow into quiche lorraine or hamburgers—and you can live indefinitely on the food around you. Because that’s what comets are made of. A little bit of dust, a few rocks, and a hell of a lot of frozen gases. And what are the gases? Oxygen. Nitrogen. Hydrogen. Carbon dioxide. Water. Methane. Ammonia. The same four elements over and over again. CHON. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and what does CHON spell?

  Wrong. What comets are made of is the same thing you are made of, and what C-H-O-N spells is “food.”

  The Oort cloud was made up of millions of megaton-sized servings of chow. Back on Earth there were ten or twelve billion hungry people looking toward it and licking their lips.

  There was still a lot of argument about what comets were doing there, out in the cloud. It was still arguable about whether they even came in families. Öpik a hundred years ago said more than half the comets ever sighted fit into well-defined groups, so there, and so did his followers ever since. Whipple said bullshit, there’s not a group you can identify that has more than three comets in it. And so did his followers. Then Oort came along to try to make sense of it. His idea was that there was this great shell of comets all the hell around the solar system, and every once in a while the sun would reach out and pluck one out, and it would come loping in to perihelion. Then we would have Halley’s comet, or the one that was supposed to have been the Star of Bethlehem, or whatever. Then a bunch of the guys began kicking that around, asking why exactly that should happen. It turned out it couldn’t—not if you assume Maxwellian distribution for the Oort cloud. In fact, if you assume normal distribution, you also have to assume that there isn’t any Oort cloud in the first place. You can’t get the observed nearly parabolic orbits out of an Oort cloud; so said R. A. Lyttleton. But then somebody else said, well, who says the distribution can’t be non-Maxwellian? And so it proved. It’s all lumpy. There are clusters of comets, and great volumes of space with almost none.

  And while no doubt the Heechee had set their machine to graze in rich comet pastures, that had been a lot of hundreds of thousands of years ago, and it was now in a kind of cometary desert. If it worked, it had little left to work on. (Maybe it had eaten them all up?)

  I fell asleep wondering what CHON-food would taste like. It couldn’t be a lot worse than what we had been eating for three and a half years, which was mainly recycled us.

  Day 1285. Janine almost got to me today. I was playing chess with Vera, everybody asleep, happy enough, when her hands came around the big earpieces and covered my eyes. “Cut it out, Janine,” I said. When I turned around she was pouting.

  “I just wanted to use Vera,” she said.

  “For what? Another hot love letter to one of your movie stars?”

  “You treat me like a child,” she said. For a wonder, she was fully dressed; her face shone, her hair was damp and pulled down straight to the back of her neck. She looked like your model serious-minded young teenager. “What I wanted,” she said, “was to go over thruster alignments with Vera. Since you won’t help me.”

  One of the reasons Janine was along with us was that she was smart—we all were; had to be to be accepted for the mission. And one of the things she was smart at was getting at me. “All right,” I said, “you’re right, what can I say? Vera? Recess the game and give us the program for providing propulsion for the Food Factory.”

  “Certainly,” she said, “… Paul.” And the board disappeared, and in its place she built up a holo of the Food Factory. She had updated her specs from the telescopic views we had obtained, and so it was shown complete with its dust cloud and the glob of dirty snowball adhering to one side. “Cancel the cloud, Vera,” I ordered, and the blur disappeared and the Food Factory showed up like an engineering drawing. “Okay, Janine. What’s the first step?”

  “We dock,” she said at once. “We hope the lander facsimile fits, and we dock it. If we can’t dock we link up with braces to some point on the surface; either way, our ship becomes a rigid part of the structure, so we can use our thrust for attitude control.”

  “Next?”

  “We all dismount the number-one thruster and brace it to the aft section of the factory—there.” She pointed out the place on the holo. “We slave it to the board here, and as soon as it is installed we activate.”

  “Guidance?”

  “Vera will give us coordinates—oops, sorry, Paul.” She had been drifting out of orientation with me and Vera, and she caught my shoulder with her hand to pull herself back. She kept her hand there. “Then we repeat the process with the other five. By the time we have all six going we have a delta-V of two meters per second per second, running off the 239Pu generator. Then we start spreading the mirror foils—”

  “No.”

  “Oh, sure, we inspect all the moorings to see that they’re holding under thrust first; well, I take that for granted. Then we start with solar power, and when we’ve got it all spread we should be up to maybe two and a quarter meters—”

  “At first, Janine. The closer we get in, the more power we get. All right. Now let’s go through the hardware. You’re bracing our ship to the Heechee-metal hull; how do you go about it?”

  And she told me, and kept on telling me; and by gosh she knew it all. The only thing was her hand on my shoulder became a hand under my arm, and it moved across my chest, and began to roam; and all the time she was giving me the specs for cold-welding and how to get collimation for the thrusters, her face serious and concerned, and her hand stroking my belly. Fourteen years old. But she didn’t look fourteen, or feel fourteen, or smell fourteen—she’d been into Lurvy’s quarter of an ounce of remaining Chanel. What saved me was Vera; good thing, everything co
nsidered, because I was losing interest in saving myself. The holo froze while Janine was adding an extra strut to one of the thrusters, and Vera said, “Action message coming in. Shall I read it out for you…Paul?”

  “Go ahead.” Janine withdrew her hand slightly as the holo winked away, and the screen produced the message:

  We’ve been requested to ask you for a favor. The next outbreak of the 130-day syndrome is estimated to occur within the next two months. HEW thinks that a full-coverage visual of all of you describing the Food Factory and emphasizing how well things are going and how important it is will significantly reduce tensions and consequent damage. Please follow the accompanying script. Request compliance soonest possible so that we may tape and schedule broadcast for maximum effect.

  “Shall I give you the script?” Vera asked.

  “Go ahead—hard copy,” I added.

  “Very well…Paul.” The screen turned pale and empty, and she began to squirt out typed sheets of paper. I picked them up to read while I sent Janine off to wake up her sister and father. She didn’t object. She loved doing television for the folks back home, it always meant fan letters from famous people for the brave young astronette.

  The script was what you would expect. I programmed Vera to roll it for us line by line, and we could have read it in ten minutes. That was not to be. Janine insisted her sister had to do her hair, and even Lurvy decided she had to make up and Payter wanted his beard trimmed. By me. So, all in all, counting four rehearsals, we blew six hours, not counting a month’s power, on the TV broadcast. We all gathered before the camera, looking domestic and dedicated, and explained what we were going to be doing to an audience that wouldn’t be seeing it for a month, by which time we would already be there. But if it would do them any good, it was worth it. We had been through eight or nine attacks of the 130-day fever since we took off from Earth. Each time it had its own syndrome, satyriasis or depression, lethargy or light-hearted joy. I had been outside when one of them hit—that was how the big telescope got broken—and it had been about an even bet whether I would ever make it back inside the ship. I simply didn’t care. I was hallucinating loneliness and anger, being chased by apelike creatures and wishing I were dead. And back on Earth, with billions of people, nearly all of them affected to one degree or another, in one or another way, each time it hit it was pure hell. It had been building up for ten years—eight since it was first identified as a recurring scourge—and no one knew what caused it.