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that resembled electrical test probes but turned out to be spare parts for
other Heechee machines.
It was a grand success. They wound up millionaires-or, at least, the survivors
did.
That find was lying right on the surface of the planet. But before long the
Gateway prospectors learned that planet surfaces were not the most likely
places to look for examples of Heechee treasures. Under the surface was much,
much richer.
One thing was clear early on about the vanished Heechee: they liked tunnels.
The Heechee tunnels that honeycombed parts of the planet Venus weren't unique.
As explorations retraced the old interstellar trails they found examples of
them everywhere the Heechee had gone. The inside of the Gateway asteroid was a
maze of tunnels; so were the "other Gateways" that turned up as the
explorations progressed. Nearly every planet the Heechee had left any signs on
at all had tunnels dug into it, lined with Heechee metal. Where the surface
conditions were unpleasant (as on Venus), the tunnels were extensive and
complex. But even so fair a world as Peggy's Planet had a few of them. The
anthropologically trained scientists called Heecheeologists, trying
passionately to figure out what these vanished people were like, supposed that
they came from a burrowing race, like gophers, rather than an arboreal one,
like people. The Heecheeologists turned out to be right ... but it was a long
time before any of them were sure of it.
All the tunnels looked pretty much alike. They were lined with a dense, hard,
metallic substance that glowed in the dark: it was called
Heechee metal. In the first tunnels humans encountered, on Venus and on the
Gateway asteroid itself, the glow was a pale blue. Blue was by far the
commonest of Heechee-metal colors, but inside the Heechee ships there were
some parts that were made of a golden Heechee metal, and later on the
explorers found Heechee metal that glowed red or green.
No one really knew why Heechee metal came in different colors. The
Heecheeologists were not much help. All they could tell about the occasional
variation in the color of Heechee metal was that it seemed clear that the
tunnels of bluish metal were generally the ones poorest in Heechee artifacts:
Gold, red, and green almost always had more treasures to be found by the
explorers.
Of course, until men and women began to learn how to explore the galaxy in the
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Heechee ships, they were limited to the blue-glowing tunnels of Gateway and
Venus. And in them the treasures to be found were sparse, though sometimes of
great value. In the tunnels found on the most productive planets, the metal
walls started out blue, and then became another color just where the largest
collections of useful tools were located. No one knew why ... but then, no one
knew much about the Heechee at all, just then.
MISSION HEATER
Wu Fengtse had chosen to ship out in a One. That had its advantages, and its
faults. The biggest advantage was that if there was nothing to land on, and
the only reward would be some kind of science bonus for observations, he could
keep it all himself.
It didn't happen that way, though. When he came out of FTL drive, he found
himself in orbit around a more or less Earth-type planet.
So Wu had to face the problem of every single prospector: If he took his
lander down to the surface of the planet, no one would be left in the ship. If
anything happened to him on the surface, no one would be there to rescue him.
He was completely on his own.
His other problem was that "Earth-type" was only a very approximate
description of the world he had to explore. "Earth-type" meant that the planet
was about the right size, and that it had an atmosphere and a temperature
range that permitted water vapor in the air, liquid water in its shallow seas,
and frozen water on its colder parts. It wasn't heaven, though. Its colder
parts included nearly all of the planet. Its best zone was around the equator,
and that was not much unlike Labrador.
If there ever had been anything on any other part of its surface, it was now
covered with thousands of feet of ice. There was no point in landing on a
glacier; Wu had no way of digging down to whatever lay under it. After a lot
of searching Wu found a bare outcropping of rock and landed there. By then he
wasn't very optimistic anymore. The environment did not look promising-but his
instruments gave him better news than he had expected.
There was a tunnel.
Wu had practiced tunnel entry. He even had the necessar~y equipment. Sweating
the big power drills into place and erecting the bubble shelter that would
protect it from the outside air took all of his strength, and enough time to
use up the bulk of his supplies. But he got in.
It was a blue-lined tunnel.
That was discouraging, but as he moved along it he caught glimpses of other
colors. When he got to a red segment he found a huge machine-later on, experts
decided from his description that it had been a tunnel digger-but he didn't
have the strength to lift it, or the equipment (or the courage, for that
matter) to try to hack pieces off it. In the green part of the tunnel were
bolts of what Wu first took to be cloth but turned out to be the crystalline
sheeting the "prayer fans" were made of. In the gold was-the gold.
There were stacks and stacks of little hexagonal Heechee-metal boxes, all
sealed. All heavy.
Wu couldn't carry them all, and his energy was running out. He managed to get
two of them back to the lander and then took off, with every intention of
coming back in a Five.
Unfortunately, when he was safely back on Gateway it turned out that no Five
would accept the program that had brought him there. Neither would any of the
Threes or Ones that were lying in their docks, waiting for crews.
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