Free Heechee rendezvous by Frederik Pohl Page B

around Peggy’s.
    The star charts on the S. Ya. were far more complicated than the ones Audee had used on the trip out. They came in two varieties. The most interesting one was Heechee. It had queer gold and gray-green markings that were only imperfectly understood, but it showed everything. The other, far less detailed but a lot more useful to human beings, was human-charted and English-labeled. Then there was the ship’s log to check, as it automatically recorded everything the ship did or saw. There was the whole internal system display-not the pilot’s concern, of course, except that if something went wrong the pilot needed to know about it. And all of this was new to Audee.
    The good part of that was that learning the new skills kept Walthers busy. Janie Yee-xing was there to teach him, and that was good, too, because she kept his thoughts busy in a different way ... except in those bad times just before he fell asleep.
    Since the S. Ya. was on a return trip it was almost empty. More than thirty-eight hundred colonists had gone out to Peggy’s Planet. Coming back, there were hardly any. The three dozen human beings in the ship’s crew; the military detachments maintained by the four governing nations of the Gateway Corp; and about sixty failed immigrants. They were the steerage. They had impoverished themselves to go out. Now they glumly bankrupted themselves to get back to whatever desert or slum they had fled, because, when push came to shove, they couldn’t quite hack pioneering in a new world. “Poor bastards,” Walthers said, circling to pass a work party of them cleaning air filters at a slave’s torpid pace; but Yeewig would have none of that.
    “Don’t waste your pity on them, Walthers. They had it made and they chickened out.” She snarled something in Cantonese at the work party, who resentfully moved minutely faster for a moment.
    “You can’t blame people for being homesick.”
    “Home! God, Walthers, you talk as if there was a ‘home’ left-you’ve been out in the boonies too long.”
    She paused at the junction of two corridors, one glowing blue with tracings of Heechee metal, the other gold. She waved at the party of armed guards in the uniforms of China, Brazil, the United States, and the Soviet Union. “Do you see them fraternizing?” she demanded. “Used to be they didn’t take this seriously. They’d pal around with the crew, they never carried weapons, it was just an all-expense-paid cruise in space for them. But now.” She shook her head and reached out abruptly to grab Walthers’ arm as he started to get closer to the guards. “Why don’t you listen to me?” she demanded. “They’ll give you hell if you try to go in there.”
    “What’s in there?”
    She shrugged. “The Heechee stuff they didn’t take out of the ship when they converted it. That’s one of the things they’re guarding-although,” she added, her voice lower, “if they knew the ship better they’d do a better job. But come on, we go this way.”
    Unraveling the Heechee maps was extremely difficult, especially as they showed clear indications that they were intended to be difficult to unravel. There were not many of them to go on. Two or three fragments found in vessels like the so-called Heechee Heaven or S. Va., and a nearly complete one found in an artifact circling a frozen planet around a star in Boötes. It was my personal opinion, though not supported by the official reports of the cartographical study commissions, that many of the haloes, check marks, and flickering indicia were meant as warning signs. Robin didn’t believe me then. He said I was a cowardly pudding of spun photons. By the time he came to agree with me, what he called me no longer mattered.
    Walthers followed willingly enough, grateful for the sight-seeing tour as much as for their destination. The S Ya. was far the biggest ship he, or any other human being, had ever seen, Heechee-built, very old-and still, in some ways,