“It is an absolute statistical certainty,” said Francy, smiling back to show that he agreed to the rules of the game. He had been practicing his English, which was pretty good to start with, and now he was almost accent-free. He also possessed German, Russian, and fair amounts of the other romance languages to go with his Portuguese, as we had discovered when we tried some of our language-tape conversation on each other and found he understood us better than we understood ourselves. “Nevertheless, people go.”
Klara and I were silent for a moment, and then she laughed. “Some do,” she said.
I cut in quickly, “It sounds as if you want to go yourself, Francy.”
“Have you ever doubted it?”
“Well, yes, actually I have. I mean, you’re in the Brazilian Navy. You can’t just take off, can you?”
He corrected me: “I can take off at any time. I simply cannot go back to Brazil after that.”
“And it’s worth that to you?”
“It’s worth anything,” he told me.
“Even—” I pressed, “if there’s the risk of not coming back, or of getting messed up like the return today?” That had been a Five that had landed on a planet with some sort of plant life like poison ivy. It had been a bad one, we had heard.
“Yes, of course,” he said.
Klara was getting restless. “I think,” she said, “I want to go to sleep now.”
There was some extra message in the tone of her voice. I looked at her and said, “I’ll walk you back to your room.”
“That’s not necessary, Rob.”
“I’ll do it anyhow,” I said, ignoring the message. “Good night, Francy. See you next week.”
Klara was already halfway to the downshaft, and I had to hurry to catch up to her. I caught the cable and called down to her, “If you really want me to, I’ll go back to my own place.”
She didn’t look up, but she didn’t say that was what she wanted, either, so I got off at her level and followed her to her rooms. Kathy was sound asleep in the outer room, Hywa drowsing over a holodisk in our bedroom. Klara sent the maid home and went in to make sure the child was comfortable. I sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for her.
“Maybe I’m premenstrual,” Klara said when she came back. “I’m sorry. I just feel edgy.”
“I’ll go if you want me to.”
“Jesus, Rob, quit saying that!” Then she sat down next to me and leaned against me so that I would put my arm around her. “Kathy’s so sweet,” she said after a moment, almost wistfully.
“You’d like to have one of your own, wouldn’t you?”
“I will have one of my own.” She leaned back, pulling me with her. “I wish I knew when, that’s all. I need a lot more money than I have to give a kid a decent life. And younger.”
Professor Hegramet. We have no idea what the Heechee looked like except for inferences. Probably they were bipeds. Their tools fit human hands tolerably well, so probably they had hands. Or something like them. They seem to have seen pretty much the same spectrum as we do. They must have been smaller than us — say, a hundred and fifty centimeters, or less. And they had funny-looking rumps.
Question. What do you mean, funny-looking rumps?
Professor Hegramet. Well, did you ever look at the pilot’s seat in a Heechee ship? It’s two flat pieces of metal joined in a V shape. You couldn’t sit in it for ten minutes without pinching your bottom off. So what we have to do, we stretch a webbing seat across them. But that’s a human addition. The Heechee didn’t have anything like that.
So their bodies must have looked more or less like a wasp’s, with this big abdomen hanging down, actually extending below the hips, between the legs.
Question. Do you mean they might have had stingers like wasps?
Professor Hegramet. Stingers. No. I don’t think so. But maybe. Or maybe they had hell’s own set of sex organs.
We lay there for a moment, and then I said into her hair, “That’s what I want, too, Klara.”
She sighed. “Do you think I don’t know that?” Then she tensed and sat up. “Who’s that?”
Somebody was scrabbling at the door. It wasn’t locked; we never did that. But nobody ever came in without being invited, either, and this time someone did.
“Sterling!” Klara said, surprised. She remembered her manners: “Rob, this is Sterling Francis, Kathy’s father. Rob Broadhead.”
“Hello,” he said. He was much older than I’d thought that little girl’s father would be, at least fifty, and looking very much older and more weary than seemed natural. “Klara,” he said, “I’m taking Kathy back home on the next ship. I think I’ll take her tonight, if you don’t mind. I don’t want her to hear from somebody else.”
Klara reached out for my hand without looking at me. “Hear what?”
“About her mother.” Francis rubbed his eyes, then said, “Oh, didn’t you know? Jan’s dead. Her ship came back a few hours ago. All four of them in the lander got into some kind of fungus; they swelled up and died. I saw her body. She looks—” He stopped. “The one I’m really sorry for,” he said, “is Annalee. She stayed in orbit while the others went down, and she brought Jan’s body back. I guess she was kind of crazy. Why bother? It was too late to matter to Jan… Well, anyway. She could only bring two of them, that was all the room in the freezer, and of course her rations—” He stopped again, and this time he didn’t seem able to talk anymore.
So I sat on the edge of the bed while Klara helped him wake the child and bundle her up to take her back to his own rooms. While they were out, I dialed a couple of displays on the PV, and studied them very carefully. By the time Klara came back I had turned off the PV and was sitting cross-legged on the bed, thinking hard.
“Christ,” she said glumly. “If this night isn’t a bummer.” She sat down at the far corner of the bed. “I’m not sleepy after all,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go up and win a few bucks at the roulette table.”
“Let’s not,” I said. I’d sat next to her for three hours the night before, while she first won ten thousand dollars and then lost twenty. “I have a better idea. Let’s ship out.”
She turned full around to look at me, so quickly that she floated up off the bed for a moment. “What?”
“Let’s ship out.”
She closed her eyes for a moment and, without opening them, said, “When?”
“Launch 29-40. It’s a Five, and there’s a good crew: Sam Kahane and his buddies. They’re all recovered now, and they need two more to fill the ship.”
She stroked her eyelids with her fingertips, then opened them and looked at me. “Well, Rob,” she said, “you do have interesting suggestions.” There were shades over the Heechee-metal walls to cut down the light for sleeping, and I had drawn them; but even in the filtered dimness I could see how she looked. Frightened. Still, what she said was: “They’re not bad guys. How do you get along with gays?”
“I leave them alone, they leave me alone. Especially if I’ve got you.”
“Um,” she said, and then she crawled over to me, wrapped her arms around me, pulled me down and buried her head in my neck. “Why not?” she said, so softly that I was not at first sure I had heard her.
When I was sure, the fear hit me. There had always been the chance she would say no. I would have been off the hook. I could feel myself shaking, but I managed to say, “Then we’ll file for it in the morning?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said, her voice muffled. I could feel her trembling as much as I was. “Get on the phone, Rob. We’ll file for it now. Before we change our minds.”
The next day I quit my job, packed my belongings into the suitcases I had brought them in, and turned them over for safekeeping to Shicky, who looked wistful. Klara quit the school and fired her maid — who looked seriously worried — but didn’t bother about packing. She had quite a lot of money left, Klara did. She prepaid the rent on both her rooms and left everything just the way it was.