PART SEVEN
HEECHEE
TREASURES
Planets were nice, and pictures of stars were nice, but what everyone really wanted were some more samples of Heechee technology. There wasn't any doubt that there was some of the stuff waiting to be found—somewhere. The ships proved that. The little morsels picked up in the tunnels of Venus had proved it even earlier. But they just whetted the human appetite for more of these wonders.
Fourteen months after the program officially started, a mission got lucky.
Their ship was what was generally called a Five, but the system had not yet begun to operate in a standardized way. This time only four volunteers went along. They were officially chosen by the four Earth powers that had established the Gateway Corporation (the Martians took an interest later), and so they were an American, a Chinese, a Soviet, and a Brazilian. They had learned from the experience of Colonel Kaplan and others who had gone before. They brought along enough food, water, and oxygen to last them for six months; they were taking no chances this time.
As it happened, they didn't need all those provisions. Their ship brought them back in forty-nine days, and they didn't come back empty-handed.
Their destination had turned out to be an orbit around a planet about the size of the Earth. They had managed to make the lander work, and three of them had actually used it to set foot on the surface of the planet.
For the first time in human history, men walked on the surface of a heavenly body that was not part of the Sun's entourage.
First impressions were a bit disappointing. The four-power party discovered quickly enough that the planet had had some bad times. Its surface was seared, as though by great heat, and parts of it made their radiation detectors squeal. They knew they could not stay there long. But a mile or less from the lander, down a barren slope from the mountaintop mesa where they had landed, they found some rock and metal formations that looked artificial, and poking around them they dug up three items they thought worth bringing home. One was a flat tile with a triangular design still visible on its glazed surface. The second was a ceramic object about the size of a cigar, with thread markings—a bolt? The third was a yard-long metal cylinder, made of chromium and pierced with a couple of holes; it could have been a musical instrument, or part of a machine—even a Hilsch tube.
Whatever they were, they were artifacts.
When the four-power crew proudly displayed their trophies back on the Gateway asteroid, they created an immense stir. None of the three looked like a major technological breakthrough. Nevertheless, if such things could be found, then there were certainly others—and no doubt things that would be of a lot more practical value.
That was when the interstellar gold rush began in earnest.
It was a long time before anyone got that lucky again. Overall, the statistics on missions out of the Gateway asteroid showed that four out of five trips came back with nothing to show but some pictures and instrument readings. Fifteen percent never came back at all. It was only one ship out of twenty that brought back any tangible piece of Heechee technology, and most of those things were only curiosities—but the very few that were more than curiosities were treasures beyond price.
They were few and far between, to be sure. The exploration of Venus had shown that was probable, for in all the hundreds of miles of Heechee tunnels under the surface of the planet Venus no more than a dozen gadgets had been found.
To be sure, some of those meant big profits for those who learned to copy them. The anisokinetic punch was a marvel. Hammer it on one end, and the force of the blow came out at the side. What was even more marvelous was that scientists managed to figure out how it worked, and its principle had applications in every area of construction, manufacture, and even home repair. The fire-pearls were a mystery. So were the so-called prayer fans.
Then, of course, humans reached the Gateway asteroid, and that fleet of ships was the biggest treasure trove of all. But all there was on the asteroid were the ships themselves. The ships were empty of anything but their operating gear. The whole asteroid was empty, almost surgically clean . . . as though the Heechee had deliberately left the ships but removed everything else that could be of value.
Over a period of twenty years and more the Gateway explorers went out to seek whatever could be found. They came back with pictures and stories, and kinds of living things and minerals; but of Heechee artifacts they found very few.
That was why so, many Gateway prospectors died poor—or just died.