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centers of mothballed Heechee apparatus all over the Galaxy . . . including,
often enough, mothballed human Gateway prospectors who had got that far and
couldn't get back.
I should, I think, tell you a little more about the annals of the
Heechee, to explain just why they were so fearful.
As a matter of routine, hundreds of Heechee ships were constantly being
deployed on voyages of exploration and discovery. The Heechee were as
inquisitive as human beings, and as stubbornly determined to find out
everything that could be found.
There were a good many theoretical problems in science that made them itch to
learn the answers. What was the truth, they wanted to know, behind the
"missing mass"-the fact that all the observable matter in the universe did not
seem to weigh enough to account for the observed motion of galaxies? Did
protons really decay? Was there something before the Big Bang, and if so,
what?
Human scientists worried about all these questions, too, in the days before we
met the Heechee. The Heechee had a big advantage over those early humans (my
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meat progenitor included). They could go out and take a look.
So they did. They sent out expeditions to study novae and supernovae and
neutron stars and white dwarfs and pulsars. They measured the flow of matter
between pairs of close binaries, and they metered the flux of radiation from
the infall of gas around black holes. They even learned to look inside the
Schwarzschild barrier around black holes, a trick which led to some useful
technology later on; and I do not even speak of their equally great curiosity
about the ways particles fit together to make atoms, atoms joined into
molecules, and molecules became living things like themselves.
I can easily summarize exactly what it was that the Heechee wanted in the way
of knowledge. They wanted it all.
But of all their quests none was more urgent, or more assiduously pursued,
than the search for inteffigent life in the universe other than their own.
Over time, the Heechee found a couple of examples-or almost did. The first was
a chance discovery that brought quick joy and almost instant disappointment. A
small, icy planet, hardly worth a second look in the normal course of events,
surprised them by showing some curious anomalies in its magnetic field. No one
was greatly interested at first. Then, on a routine
sweep, a Heechee-manned exploration ship checked out the reports from the
instrument-only robot investigators. The planet was more than 200 AU from its
parent not-very-bright K-3 star, certainly not the sort of place where you
would expect life to develop. Its surface temperature was only about 200 K and
nothing stirred on its glacial surface. But when the Heechee investigators
sounded the ice, they found great masses of metal buried in it. Echoes showed
the metal to be in regular shapes. When, excitedly, the crew called for
thermal borers and sent them down to investigate, they found buildings!
Factories! Machines!
And nothing living at all.
They faced the disheartening fact that once there had been intelligent life on
that planet, well up to early industrial standards by the remnants they
disinterred, but it was there no longer.
Dating the ice cores showed that they were half a million years too late to
find anyone alive, and that wasn't the worst of it. The worst was a finding by
the geologists and geochemists that said, inarguably, that that particular
planet could not have evolved in that particular orbit; its composition was
like that of Venus, the Earth, and Mars, the kind found only close to a
primary.
Something had hurled it so far from its sun that it froze.
Of course, it could have been some astronomical accident like the
(however statistically unlikely) near passage of another star. But none of the
Heechee could believe that (though they wanted to).
Then they found the second heartbreak.
It wasn't a heartbreak at once. It was a bright hope that persisted for a long
time-more than a century! It began when a Heechee vessel caught the scent of a
radio transmission, tracked it down, and found a genuine, incontestable
artifact of a highly technological civilization traveling through interstellar
space.
It did not have a living crew. It couldn't have, except perhaps for microbes.
The object was a vast, gossamer, metal spiderweb, a thousand kilometers across
but so fairy-silk flimsy that the whole thing weighed less than a fingernail.
It did not take the Heechee long to realize what they had. Where the wires
joined were transistor-like things and strips of piezoelectric materials. The
object was a calculator. It was also a computer, a camera, a radio
transmitter, all wonderfully crafted into a gauzy web you could crush into the
palm of your hand.
It was a robot sailship, propelled by light.
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