Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online Page A

step is to turn them on to over rated capacity. They could get damaged. And we could get stuck.”
    “What do we do if we hear from Earth and they make it an order?” I asked.
    Payter cut in ahead of her. “We bargain,” he said, nodding sagely. “They want us to take extra risks, they give us extra pay.”
    “Are you going to do the bargaining, Pa?”
    “You bet I am. And listen. Suppose it don’t work. Suppose we have to go back. You know what we do then?” He nodded to us again. “We load up the ship with everything we can carry. We find little machines that we can take out, you know? Maybe we see if they work. We stuff that ship with everything it can hold, throw away everything we can spare. Leave most of the side-. cargos here and load on big machines outside, you see? We could come back with, God, I don’t know, another twenty, thirty million dollars’ worth of artifacts.”
    “Like prayer fans!” Janine cried, clapping her hands. There were piles of them in the room where Payter had found the food. There were other things there, too, a sort of metal-mesh couch, tulip-shaped things that looked like candleholders on the walls. But hundreds of prayer fans. By my quick guess, at a thousand dollars each, there was half a million dollars’ worth of prayer fans in that room alone, delivered to the curio markets in Chicago and Rome. . . if we lived to deliver them. Not counting all the other things I could think of, that I was inventorying in my mind. I wasn’t the only one.
    “Prayer fans are the least of it,” Lurvy said thoughtfully. “But that’s not in our contract, Pa.”
    “Contract! So what are they going to do with us, shoot us? Cheat us? After we give up eight years of our lives? No. They’ll give us the bonuses.”
    The more we thought about it, the better that sounded. I went to sleep thinking about which of the gadgets and what-you-call‘ems I’d seen could be carried back, and what among them seemed the most valuable, and had my first pleasant dreams since we had tested the thruster-
    And woke up with Janine’s urgent whisper in my ear. “Pop? Paul? Lurvy? Can you hear me?”
    I swam up to a sitting position and looked around. She wasn’t speaking in my ear; it was my radio. Lurvy was awake beside me, and Payter came hurrying around a corner to join us, their radios going too. I said, “We hear you, Janine. What-“
    “Shut up!” the whisper came, hissing out with white sound as though her lips were pressed against the microphone. “Don’t answer me, just listen. There’s someone here.”
    We stared at each other. Lurvy whispered, “Where are you?”
    “I said shut up! I’m out at the far docking area, you know? Where we found that food. I was looking for something we could bring back with us, like Pop said, only- Well, I saw something on the floor. Like an apple, only it wasn’t-kind of reddish brown on the outside and green on the inside, and it smelled like- I don’t know what it smelled like. Strawberries. And it wasn’t any hundred thousand years old, either. It was fresh. And I heard-wait a minute.”
    We did not dare answer, just listened to her breathing for a moment. When she spoke again her whisper sounded scared. “It’s coming this way. It’s between me and you, and I’m stuck. I-keep thinking it’s a Heechee, and it’s going to be-“
    Her voice stopped. We heard her gasp; then, out loud, “Don’t you come any closer!”
    I had heard enough. “Let’s go,” I said, jumping toward the corridor. Payter and Lurvy were right behind me as we hurried in long, swimming leaps down the blue-walled tunnel. When we got near the docks we stopped, looking around irresolutely.
    Before we could make a decision on which way to search, Janine’s voice came again. It was neither whisper nor terrified cry. “He-he stopped when I told him,” she said unbelievingly. “And I don’t think he’s a Heechee. He looks like just an ordinary person to me-well, kind of