6-The Gateway Trip: Tales and Vignettes of the Heechee by Frederik Pohl

Author:Frederik Pohl [Pohl, Frederik]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, General, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9780345375445
Google: rovfAAAACAAJ
Publisher: Del Rey Book: November 1990
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Mission BURNOUT

Of the nearly thousand Heechee vessels found on Gateway, only a few dozen were armored, and most of those were Fives. An armored Three was a rarity, and when the crew of Felicia Monsanto, Greg Running Wolf, and Daniel Pursy set out in one they knew there was a certain element of danger; its course setting might take them to some really nasty place.

But when they came out of FTL and looked around they had a moment of total rapture. The star they were near was quite sunlike, a G-2 the same size as Earth's Sol; they were orbiting a planet within the livable zone from the star, and their detectors showed Heechee metal in large quantities!

The biggest concentration was not on the planet. It was an asteroid in an out-of-ecliptic orbit—a lot like Gateway —and it had to be another of those abandoned parking garages for Heechee ships! When they approached it they saw that the guess was correct....But they also saw that the asteroid was empty. There were no ships. There were no artifacts at all. It was riddled with tunnels, just like Gateway, but the tunnels were vacant. Worse than that, the whole asteroid seemed in very bad shape, as though it were far older, and had had a far harder life, than Gateway itself.

That puzzle cleared itself up when, with the last of their resources, two of the crew ventured down to the planet itself.

It had been a living planet once. It had life now, in fact, but in scant numbers and only in its seas—algae and sea-bottom invertebrates, nothing more. Somehow or other the planet had been seared and ravaged ... and the culprit was in view.

Six and a half light-years away from that system they discovered a neutron star. Like most neutron stars, it was a pulsar, but as their ship was nowhere near its axis of radiation they could hardly detect its jets. But it was a radio source, and their instruments showed that it was there, the remnant of a supernova.

The rest of the story the experts on Gateway filled in for them when they returned. That solar system had been visited by the Heechee, but it was in a bad neighborhood. After the Heechee left—probably knowing what was about to happen—the supernova exploded. The planet had been baked. Its gases had been driven off, and most of its seas boiled away. As the hellish heat died away a thin new atmosphere was cooked out of the planet's crust, and the remaining water vapor had come down in incredible torrents of rain, scouring away mountain valleys, burying plains in silt, leaving nothing... and all of that had happened hundreds of thousands of years before.

Monsanto, Running Wolf, and Pursy got a science bonus for their mission—a small one, a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to be divided among the three of them.

By Gateway standards, that wasn't serious money. It was enough to pay their bills on Gateway for a few extra weeks. It was not nearly enough to retire on.

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