hatching the phoenix
FREDERIK POHL
 
 
A seminal figure whose career spans almost the entire development of mod­ern SF, 
Frederik Pohl has been one of the genre’s major shaping forces — as writer, 
editor, agent, and anthologist—for more than fifty years. He was the founder of 
the Star series, SF’s first continuing anthology series, and was the editor of 
the Galaxy group of magazines from 1960 to 1969, during which time Galaxy’s 
sister magazine, Worlds of If, won three consecutive Best Professional Magazine 
Hugos. As a writer, he has won Nebula and Hugo Awards several times (making him 
the only person ever to have won the Hugo both as editor and as writer), as well 
as the American Book Award and the French Prix Apollo. His many books include 
several written in collaboration with the late C. M. Kornbluth—such as The Space 
Mer­chants, Wolfbane, and Gladiator-at-Law—and many solo novels, including Man 
Plus, The Coming of the Quantum Cats, A Plague of Pythons, Slave Ship, Jem, The 
World at the End of Time, and Mining the Oort. Among his many collections are 
The Gold at the Starbow’s End, The Years of the City, Critical Mass (in 
collaboration with Kornbluth), In the Problem Pit, Pohlstars, and The Best of 
Frederik Pohl. He also wrote a nonfiction book in collaboration with the late 
Isaac Asimov, Our Angry Earth, and an autobiography, The Way the Future Was. His 
most recent books are the novels O Pioneer!, The Siege of Eternity, and The Far 
Shore of Time. Coming up soon is a new nonfiction book, Chasing Science. His 
stories have appeared in our Second and Tenth Annual Collections.
 
Pohl’s most famous book is probably Gateway, a book which won both the Nebula 
and the Hugo, and which is widely regarded as one of the best novels of the 
‘70s. It’s also the book in which he introduced the Heechee, a race of enigmatic 
and (seemingly) long-vanished aliens whose discarded technology enables humanity 
to begin the exploration of the Galaxy — a series that Pohl would return to 
several times throughout the rest of the ‘80s and into the ‘90s,--with sequels 
such as Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Heechee Rendezvous, The Annals of the 
Heechee, and The Gateway Trip.
 
Occasionally, Pohl writes about the Heechee in shorter format as well. There 
were two Heechee stories published this year, for instance, including the 
intriguing novella that follows, in which he takes us far across the galaxy and 
deep into the past to show us that, no matter how alien the setting, some things 
don’t change—alas!
 
* * * *
 
 
CHAPTER I
 
      W
e were only about half a day out when we crossed the wavefront from the Crab 
supernova. I wouldn’t even have noticed it, but my shipmind, Hypatia, is 
programmed to notice things that might interest me. So she asked me if I wanted 
to take a look at it, and I did.
 
Of course I’d already seen the star blow up two or three times in simulations, 
but as a flesh-and-blood human being I like reality better than simulations — 
most of the time, anyway. Hypatia had already turned on the Heechee screen, but 
it showed nothing other than the pebbly gray blur that the Heechee use. Hypatia 
can read those things, but I can’t, so she changed the phase for me.
 
What I was seeing then was a field of stars, looking exactly like any other 
field of stars to me. It’s a lack in me, I’m sure, but as far as I’m concerned 
every star looks like all the other stars in the sky, at least until you get 
close enough to it to see it as a sun. So I had to ask her, “Which one is it?”
 
She said, “You can’t see it yet. We don’t have that much magnification. But keep 
your eyes open. Wait a moment. Another moment. Now, there it is.”
 
She didn’t have to say that. I could see it for myself. Suddenly a point of 
light emerged and got brighter, and brighter still, until it outshone everything 
else on the screen. It actually made me squint. “It happens pretty fast,” I 
said.
 
“Well, not really that fast, Klara. Our vector velocity, relative to the star, 
is quite a lot faster than light, so we’re speeding things up. Also, we’re 
catching up with the wavefront, so we’re seeing it all in reverse. It’ll be gone 
soon.”
 
And a moment later it was. Just as the star was brightest of all, it unexploded 
itself. It became a simple star again, so unremarkable that I couldn’t even pick 
it out. Its planets were unscorched again, their populations, if any, not yet 
whiffed into plasma. “All right,” I said, somewhat impressed but not enough to 
want Hy­patia to know it, “turn the screen off and let’s get back to work.”
 
Hypatia sniffed —she has built herself a whole repertoire of human behaviors 
that I had never had programmed into her. She said darkly, “We’d better, if we 
want to be able to pay all the bills for this thing. Do you have any idea what 
this is costing?”
 
Of course, she wasn’t serious about that. I have problems, but being able to pay 
my bills isn’t one of them.
 
I wasn’t always this solvent. When I was a kid on that chunk of burned-out hell 
they call the planet Venus, driving an airbody around its baked, bleak surface 
for the tourists all day and trying not to spend any of my pay all night, what I 
wanted most was to have money. I wasn’t hoping for a whole lot of money. I just 
wanted enough money so that I could afford Full Medical and a place to live that 
didn’t stink of rancid seafood. I wasn’t dreaming on any vast scale.
 
It didn’t work out that way, though. I never did have exactly that much money.
 
First I had none at all and no real hopes of ever getting any. Then I had much, 
much more than that, and I found out something about having a lot of money. When 
you have the kind of money that’s spelled M*O*N*E*Y, it’s like having a kitten 
in the house. The money wants you to play with it. You can try to leave it 
alone, but if you do it’ll be crawling into your lap and nibbling at your chin 
for attention. You don’t have to give in to what the money wants. You can just 
push it away and go about your business, but then God knows what mischief it’ll 
get into if you do, and anyway then where’s the fun of having it?
 
So most of the way out to the PhoenixCorp site, Hypatia and I played with my 
money. That is, I played with it while Hypatia kept score. She remembers what I 
own better than I do — that’s her nature, being the sort of task she was 
designed to do — and she’s always full of suggestions about what investments I 
should dump or hold or what new ventures I should get into.
 
The key word there is “suggestions.” I don’t have to do what Hypatia says. 
Sometimes I don’t. As a general rule I follow Hypatia’s suggestions about four 
times out of five. The fifth time I do something different, just to let her know 
that I’m the one who makes the decisions here. I know that’s not smart, and it 
generally costs me money when I do. But that’s all right. I have plenty to 
spare.
 
There’s a limit to how long I’m willing to go on tickling the money’s tummy, 
though. When I had just about reached that point, Hypatia put down her pointer 
and waved the graphics displays away. She had made herself optically visible to 
humor me, because I like to see the person I’m talking to, wearing her 
fifth-century robes and coronet of rough-cut rubies and all, and she gave me an 
inquiring look. “Ready to take a little break, Klara?” she asked. “Do you want 
something to eat?”
 
Well, I was, and I did. She knew that perfectly well. She’s continually 
moni­toring my body, because that’s one of the other tasks she’s designed to do, 
but I like to keep my free will going there, too. “Actually,” I said, “I’d 
rather have a drink. How are we doing for time?”
 
“Right on schedule, Klara. We’ll be there in ten hours or so.” She didn’t move — 
that is, her simulation didn’t move—but I could hear the clink of ice going into 
a glass in the galley. “I’ve been accessing the PhoenixCorp shipmind. If you 
want to see what’s going on ... ?”
 
“Do it,” I said, but she was already doing it. She waved again —pure theater, of 
course, but Hypatia’s full of that—and we got a new set of graphics. As the 
little serving cart rolled in and stopped just by my right hand, we were looking 
through PhoenixCorp’s own visuals, and what we were looking at was a dish-shaped 
metal spiderweb, with little things crawling across it. I could form no precise 
picture of its size, because there was nothing in the space around it to compare 
it with. But I didn’t have to. I knew it was big.
 
“Have one for yourself,” I said, lifting my glass.
 
She gave me that patient, exasperated look and let it pass. Sometimes she does 
simulate having a simulated drink with me while I have a real one, but this time 
she was in her schoolteacher mode. “As you can see, Klara,” she informed me, 
“the shipment of optical mirror pieces has arrived, and the drones are putting 
them in place on the parabolic dish. They’ll be getting first light from the 
planet in an hour or so, but I don’t think you’ll care about seeing it. The 
resolution will be poor until they get everything put together; that should take 
about eighteen hours. Then we should have optimal resolution to observe the 
planet.”
 
“For four days,” I said, taking a pull at my glass.
 
She gave me a different look —still the schoolteacher, but now a schoolteacher 
putting up with a particularly annoying student. “Hey, Klara. You knew there 
wouldn’t be much time. It wasn’t my idea to come all the way out here anyway. We 
could have watched the whole thing from your island.”
 
I swallowed the rest of my nightcap and stood up. “That’s not how I wanted to do 
it,” I told her. “The trouble with you simulations is that you don’t appreciate 
what reality is like. Wake me up an hour before we get there.”
 
And I headed for my stateroom, with my big and round and unoccupied bed. I 
didn’t want to chat with Hypatia just then. The main reason I had kept her busy 
giving me financial advice so long was that it prevented her from giving me 
advice on the thing she was always trying to talk me into, or that one other big 
thing that I really needed to make up my mind about, and couldn’t.
 
* * * *
 
The cart with my black coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice —make that quote 
“fresh-squeezed” unquote orange juice, but Hypatia was too good at her job for 
me to be able to tell the difference — was right by my bed when she woke me up. 
“Ninety minutes to linkup,” she said cheerily, “and a very good morning to you. 
Shall I start your shower?”
 
I said, “Um.” Ninety minutes is not a second too long for me to sit and swallow 
coffee, staring into space, before I have to do anything as energetic as getting 
into a shower. But then I looked into the wall mirror by the bed, didn’t like 
what I saw, and decided I’d better spruce myself up a little bit.
 
I was never what you’d call a pretty woman. My eyebrows were a lot too heavy, 
for one thing. Once or twice over the years I’d had the damn things thinned down 
to fashion-model proportions, just to see if it would help any. It didn’t. I’d 
even messed around with my bone structure, more cheekbones, less jaw, to try to 
look a little less masculine. It just made me look weak-faced. For a couple of 
years I’d gone blonde, then tried redhead once but checked it out and made them 
change it back before I left the beauty parlor. They were all mistakes. They 
didn’t work. Whenever I looked at myself, whatever the cosmetologists and the 
medical fixer-uppers had done, I could still see the old Gelle-Klara Moynlin 
hiding there behind all the trim. So screw it. For the last little while I’d 
gone natural.
 
Well, pretty natural, anyway. I didn’t want to look old.
 
I didn’t, of course. By the time I was bathed and my hair was fixed and I was 
wearing a simple dress that showed off my pretty good legs, actually, I looked 
as good as I ever had. “Almost there,” Hypatia called. “You better hang on to 
some­thing. I have to match velocities, and it’s a tricky job.” She sounded 
annoyed, as she usually does when I give her something hard to do. She does it, 
of course, but she complains a lot. “Faster than light I can do, slower than 
light I can do, but when you tell me to match velocity with somebody who’s doing 
exactly c you’re into some pretty weird effects, so —Oh, sorry.”
 
“You should be,” I told her, because that last lurch had nearly made me spill my 
third cup of coffee. “Hypatia? What do you think, the pearls or the cameo?”
 
She did that fake two- or three-second pause, as though she really needed any 
time at all to make a decision, before she gave me the verdict. “I’d wear the 
cameo. Only whores wear pearls in the daytime.”
 
So of course I decided to wear the pearls. She sighed but didn’t comment. “All 
right,” she said, opening the port. “We’re docked. Mind the step, and I’ll keep 
in touch.”
 
I nodded and stepped over the seals into the PhoenixCorp mother ship.
 
There wasn’t any real “step.” What there was was a sharp transition from the 
comfortable one gee I kept in my own ship to the gravityless environment of the 
PhoenixCorp ship. My stomach did a quick little flip-flop of protest, but I 
grabbed a hold-on bar and looked around.
 
I don’t know what I’d expected to find, maybe something like the old Gateway 
asteroid. PhoenixCorp had done itself a lot more lavishly than that, and I began 
to wonder if I hadn’t maybe been a touch too open-handed with the financing. The 
place certainly didn’t smell like Gateway. Instead of Gateway’s sour, ancient 
fug, it had the wetly sweet smell of a greenhouse. That was because there were 
vines and ferns and flowers growing in pots all around the room — spreading out 
in all directions, because of that zero-gee environment, and if I’d thought 
about that ahead of time, I wouldn’t have worn a skirt. The only human being in 
sight was a tall, nearly naked black man who was hanging by one toe from a wall 
bracket, exercising his muscles with one of those metal-spring gadgets. 
(“Hum­phrey Mason-Manley,” Hypatia whispered in my ear. “He’s the 
archeologist-anthropologist guy from the British Museum.”) Without breaking his 
rhythm, Humphrey gave me a look of annoyance.
 
“What are you doing here, miss? No visitors are permitted. This is private 
prop­erty, and — “
 
Then he got a better look at me and his expression changed. Not to welcoming 
exactly, but to what I’d call sort of unwillingly impressed. “Oh, crikey,” he 
said. “You’re Gelle-Klara Moynlin, are you not? That’s a bit different. Welcome 
aboard, I guess.”
 
* * * *
 
CHAPTER II
 
It wasn’t the most affable greeting I’d ever had. However, when Humphrey 
Mason-Manley woke up the head engineer for me, she turned out to be a lot more 
courteous. She didn’t have to be, either. Although I had put up the seed money 
to get the project started, PhoenixCorp was set up as a nonprofit institution, 
owned by nobody but itself. I wasn’t even on the board.
 
The boss engineer’s name, Hypatia whispered to me, was June Thaddeus Terple — 
Doctor Terple. I didn’t really need the reminder. Terple and I had met before, 
though only by screen, when she was trying to scare up money for this venture 
and somebody had given her my name. In person she was taller than I’d thought. 
She looked to be about the age I looked to be myself, which is to say, 
charitably, thirtyish. She was wearing a kind of string bikini, plus a workman’s 
belt of little pouches around her waist so she could keep stuff in it. She took 
me into her office, which was a sort of wedge-shaped chamber with nothing much 
visible in it but handholds on the walls and a lot more of those flowering 
plants. “Sorry I wasn’t there to meet you, Dr. Moynlin,” she said.
 
“I’m not a doctor of anything, except honorary, and Klara’s good enough.”
 
She bobbed her head. “Anyway, of course you’re welcome here any time. I guess 
you wanted to see for yourself how we’re coming along.”
 
“Well, I did want that, yes. I also wanted to set something up, if you don’t 
mind.” That was me returning courtesy for courtesy, however unnecessary it was 
in either direction. “Do you know who Wilhelm Tartch is?”
 
She thought for a moment. “No.”
 
So much for his galaxywide fame. I explained. “Bill’s a kind of roving reporter. 
He has a program that goes out all over, even to the Heechee in the Core. It’s 
sort of a travelogue. He visits exciting and colorful places and reports on them 
for the stay-at-homes.” He was also my present main lover, but there wasn’t any 
reason to mention that to Terple; she would figure it out for herself fast 
enough.
 
“And he wants to do PhoenixCorp?”
 
“If you don’t mind,” I said again. “I did clear it with the board.”
 
She grinned at me. “So you did, but I sort of lost track of it. We’ve been 
deploying the drones, so it’s been kind of busy.” She shook herself. “Anyway, 
Hans tells me your shipmind displayed the actual supernova explosion to you on 
the way out.”
 
“That’s right, she did.” In my ear Hypatia was whispering that Hans was the name 
of their shipmind, as though I couldn’t figure that out for myself.
 
“And I suppose you know what it looks like from Earth now?”
 
“Well, sort of.”
 
I could see her assessing how much “sort of” amounted to, and deciding to be 
diplomatic to the money person. “It wouldn’t hurt to take another look. Hans! 
Telescopic view from Earth, please.”
 
She was looking toward one end of her office. It disappeared, and in its place 
we were looking out at a blotchy patch of light. “That’s it. It’s called the 
Crab Nebula. Of course, they named it that before they really knew what it was, 
but you can see where they got the name.” I agreed that it did look a little 
like some sort of deformed crab, and Terple went on. “The nebula itself is just 
the gases and stuff that the supernova threw off, a thousand years or so later. 
I don’t know if you can make it out, but there’s a little spot in the middle of 
it that’s the Crab pulsar. That’s all that’s left of the star. Now let’s look at 
the way it was before it went super.”
 
Hans wiped the nebula away, and we were looking into the same deep, black space 
Hypatia had shown me already. There were the same zillion stars hanging there, 
but as the shipmind zoomed the picture closer, one extraordinarily bright one 
appeared. “Bright” didn’t do it justice. It was a blazing golden yellow, 
curiously fuzzy. It wasn’t really hot. It couldn’t be; the simulation was only 
optical. But I could almost feel its heat on my face.
 
“I don’t see any planet,” I offered.
 
“Oh, you will, once we get all the optical segments in place.” Then she 
inter­rupted herself. “I forgot to ask. Would you like a cup of tea or 
something?”
 
“Thanks, no. Nothing right this minute.” I was peering at the star. “I thought 
it would be brighter,” I said, a little disappointed.
 
“Oh, it will be, Klara. That’s what we’re building that five-hundred-kilometer 
mirror for. Right now we’re just getting the gravitational lensing from the 
black hole we’re using—there’s a little camera in the mirror. I don’t know if 
you know much about black holes, but—oh, shit,” she interrupted herself, 
suddenly stricken. “You do know, don’t you? I mean, after you were stuck in one 
for thirty or forty years ...”
 
She looked as though she had inadvertently caused me great pain. She hadn’t. I 
was used to that sort of reaction. People rarely brought up the subject of black 
holes in my presence, on the general principle that you don’t talk about rope 
when there’s been a hanging in the house. But the time I was trapped in one of 
them was far back in the past. It had gone like a flash for me in the black 
hole’s time dilation, whatever the elapsed time was on the outside, and I wasn’t 
sensitive about it.
 
On the other hand, I wasn’t interested in discussing it one more damn time, 
either, so I just said, “My black hole didn’t look like that. It was a creepy 
kind of pale blue.”
 
Terple recovered quickly. She gave me a wise nod of the head. “That would have 
been Cerenkov radiation. Yours must have been what they call a naked 
singularity. This one’s different. It’s wrapped up in its own ergosphere and you 
can’t see a thing. Most black holes produce a lot of radiation —not from 
them­selves, from the gases and stuff they’re swallowing —but this one has 
already swal­lowed everything around it. Anyway.” She paused to recollect her 
train of thought. Then she nodded. “I was telling you about the gravitational 
lensing. Hans?”
 
She didn’t say what she wanted from Hans, but evidently he could figure it out 
for himself. The stars disappeared, and a sort of wall of misty white appeared 
in front of us. Terple poked at it here and there with a finger, drawing a 
little picture for me:
 
“That little dot on the left, that’s the Crabber planet we want to study. The 
circle’s the black hole. The arc on the right is our mirror, which is right at 
the point of convergence—where the gravitational lensing from the black hole 
gives us the sharpest image. And the little dot next to it is us, at the 
Cassegrain focus of the mirror. I didn’t show the Crabber sun —actually we have 
to avoid aiming the camera at it, because it could burn out our optics. Am I 
making sense so far?”
 
“So far,” I agreed.
 
She gave me another of those assessing looks, then said, “We’ll actually be 
doing our observing by looking toward the mirror, not toward the Crab planet. 
There too we’ll have to block out the star itself, or we won’t see the actual 
planet at all, but that’s just another of the things we’ll be adjusting. Then 
we’ll actually be looking diametrically away from the planet in order to observe 
it.”
 
I hadn’t been able to resist the temptation with Hypatia, and I couldn’t now 
with June Terple. “For four or five days,” I said in my friendliest voice.
 
I guess the tone wasn’t friendly enough. She looked nettled. “Listen, we didn’t 
put the damn black hole where it is. It took us two years of searching to find 
one in the right position. There’s a neutron star that we could’ve used. 
Orbitwise it was a better deal because it would have given us nearly eighty 
years to observe, but it’s just a damn neutron star. It wouldn’t have given us 
anywhere the same magnification, because a neutron star just doesn’t have 
anywhere near as much mass as a black hole, so the gravitational lensing 
would’ve been a lot less. We’ll get a lot more detail with our black hole. 
Anyway,” she added, “once we’ve observed from here we’ll move this whole lash-up 
to the neutron star for whatever additional data we can get—I mean, uh, if that 
seems advisable, we will.”
 
What she meant by that was if I was willing to pay for it. Well, I probably was. 
The capital costs were paid; it would only mean meeting their payroll for 
another eighty years or so.
 
But I wasn’t ready to make that commitment. To take her mind off it, I said, “I 
thought we were supposed to have almost thirty days of observing right here.”
 
She looked glum. “Radio observing. That’s why we built the mesh dish. But it 
turns out there’s no radio coming from the Crabber planet at all, so we had to 
get the mirror plates to convert it to optical. Took us over three weeks, which 
is why we lost so much observing time.”
 
“I see,” I said. “No radio signals. So there might not be any civilization there 
to observe, anyway.”
 
She bit her lip. “We know definitely that there’s life there. Or was, anyway. 
It’s one of the planets the Heechee surveyed long ago, and there were advanced 
living organisms there at the time —pretty primitive, sure, but they certainly 
looked as though they had the potential to evolve.”
 
“The potential to evolve, right. But whether they did or not we just don’t 
know.”
 
She didn’t answer that. She just sighed. Then she said, “As long as you’re here, 
would you like a look around?”
 
“If I won’t be in the way,” I said.
 
* * * *
 
Of course I was in the way. June Terple didn’t let it show, but some of the 
others barely gave me the courtesy of looking up when we were introduced. There 
were eight of them altogether, with names like Julia Ibarruru and Mark Rohrbeck 
and Humphrey Mason-Manley and Oleg Kekuskian and —well, I didn’t have to try to 
retain them all; Hypatia would clue me as needed. Humphrey Mason-Manley was the 
guy who’d been building his pecs when I came in. Julia was the one who was 
floating in a harness surrounded by fifteen or twenty 3-D icons that she was 
busy poking at and glowering at and poking at again, and she gave me no more 
than a quick and noncommittal nod. If my name meant anything to her, or to most 
of the others, they didn’t show any signs of being impressed. Especially 
Rohrbeck and Kekuskian didn’t, because they were sound asleep in their harnesses 
when we peeked in on them, and Terple had a finger to her lips. “Third shift,” 
she whis­pered when we’d closed the flaps on their cubicles and moved away. 
“They’ll be waking up for dinner in a little while, but let’s let them get their 
sleep. And there’s only one other. Let’s go find her.”
 
On the way to that one other member of the crew, Hypatia was whispering bits of 
biography in my ear. Kekuskian was the quite elderly and bisexual 
astrophysicist. Rohrbeck the quite young and deeply depressed program designer, 
whose marriage had just come painfully apart. And the one remaining person was. 
. .
 
Was a Heechee.                                                                   
                         
 
I didn’t have to be told that. Once you’ve seen any one Heechee, you know what 
they all look like; skeletally thin front to back, squarish, skull-like faces, 
their data pod, hanging between their legs where, if they were male, their balls 
should be, and if female (as this one turned out to be), there shouldn’t be 
anything much at all. Her name, Terple said, was Starminder, and as we entered 
her chamber she was working at a set of icons of her own. But as soon as she 
heard my name she wiped them and barreled over to me to shake my hand. “You are 
very famous among us in the Core, Gelle-Klara Moynlin,” she informed me, hanging 
on to my hand for support. “Because of your Moynlin Citizen Ambassadors, you 
see. When your Rebecca Shapiro person came to our city, she was invited to stay 
with the father of my husband’s family, which is where I met her. She was quite 
in­formative about human beings; indeed, it was because of her that I 
volunteered at once to come out. Do you know her?”
 
I tried to remember Rebecca Shapiro. I had put up grant money for a good many 
batches of recruits since I funded the program, and she would have had to be one 
of the earliest of them. Starminder saw my uncertainty and tried to be helpful. 
“Young woman. Very sad. She sang music composed by your now-dead Wolfgang 
Amadeus Mozart for our people, which I almost came to enjoy.”
 
“Oh, right, that Rebecca,” I said, not very honestly. By then I’d paid the fare 
to the Core for—what? —at least two or three hundred Rebeccas or Carloses or 
Janes who volunteered to be Citizen Ambassadors to the Heechee in the Core 
because they had lives that were a shambles. That was a given. If their lives 
hadn’t been, why would they want to leave the people and places they wouldn’t 
ever come back to?
 
Because, of course, the Core was time-dilated, like any black hole. I knew what 
that meant. When you were time-dilated in the Core, where a couple of centuries 
of outside time went by every day, the problems you left behind got really old 
really fast. Time dilation was better than suicide — though, when you came to 
think of it, actually a kind of reverse suicide is pretty much what it was. You 
didn’t die yourself, but every troublesome person you’d ever known did while you 
were gone.
 
I wish all those Citizen Ambassadors of mine well. I hope it all works out for 
them ... but being in a black hole hadn’t done a thing for me.
 
* * * *
 
Once I’d met all the people on the PhoenixCorp ship, there wasn’t much else to 
see. I had misjudged my budget-watchers. Terple hadn’t been that spendthrift 
after all. If you didn’t count the opulent plantings —and they were there 
primarily to keep the air good —the PhoenixCorp ship actually was a pretty 
bare-bones kind of spacecraft. There were the sleeping quarters for the help, 
and some common rooms—the big one I’d come into when I first entered, plus a 
sort of dining room with beverage dispensers and netting next to the hold-ons to 
keep the meals from flying away, a couple of little rooms for music or virtuals 
when the people wanted some recreation. The rest of it was storage and, of 
course, all the machinery and instrumentation PhoenixCorp needed to do its job. 
Terple didn’t show me any of the hardware. I didn’t expect her to. That’s the 
shipmind’s business, and that sort of thing stays sealed away where no harm can 
come to it. So, unless somebody had been foolish enough to open up a lot of 
compartments that were meant to stay closed, there wouldn’t have been anything 
to see.
 
When we were finished, she finally insisted on that cup of tea —really that 
capsule of tea, that is — and while we were drinking it, holding with one hand 
to the hold-ons, she said, “That’s about it, Klara. Oh, wait a minute. I haven’t 
actually introduced you to our shipmind, have I? Hans? Say hello to Ms. 
Moynlin.”
 
A deep, pleasant male voice said, “Hello, Ms. Moynlin. Welcome aboard. We’ve 
been hoping you’d visit us.”
 
I said hello back to him and left it at that. I don’t particularly like chatting 
with machine intelligences, except my own. I finished my tea, slid the empty 
capsule into its slot, and said, “Well, I’ll get out of your way. I want to get 
back to my own ship for a bit anyway.”
 
Terple nodded and didn’t ask why. “We’re going to have dinner in about an hour. 
Would you like to join us? Hans is a pretty good cook.”
 
That sounded like as good an idea as any, so I told her that would be fine.
 
Then, as she was escorting me to the docking port, she gave me a sidewise look. 
“Listen,” she said, “I’m sorry we bombed out on the radio search. It doesn’t 
nec­essarily mean that the Crabbers never got civilized. After all, if somebody 
had scanned Earth any time before the twentieth century, they wouldn’t have 
heard any radio signals there, either, but the human race was fully evolved by 
then.”
 
“I know that, June.”
 
“Yes.” She cleared her throat. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
 
I said, “Of course not,” meaning that she could ask anything she wanted to, but 
whether or what I chose to answer was another matter entirely.
 
“Well, you put a lot of money into getting Phoenix started, just on the chance 
that there might have been an intelligent race there that got fried when their 
sun went super. What I’m wondering is why.”
 
The answer to that was simple enough. I mean, what’s the point of being just 
about the richest woman in the universe if you don’t have a little fun with your 
money now and then? But I didn’t say that to her. I just said, “What else do I 
have to do?”
 
* * * *
 
CHAPTER III
 
Well, I did have things to do. Lots of them, though most of them weren’t very 
important.
 
The only one that was really important—to me —was overseeing the little island 
off Tahiti that I live on when I’m home. It’s a nice place, the way I’ve fixed 
it up. Most of my more-or-less family is there, and when I’m away I really miss 
them.
 
Then there are other important things, such as spending some time with Bill 
Tartch, who is a fairly sweet man, not to mention all the others like Bill 
Tartch who have come along over the years. Or such things as all the stuff I can 
buy with my money, plus figuring out what to do with the power that that kind of 
money gives. Put them all together, I had plenty to do with my life. And I had 
plenty of life to look forward to, too, especially if I let Hypatia talk me into 
immortality. 
 
So why wasn’t I looking forward to it?
 
When I came back into my ship, Hypatia was waiting for me—visible, in full 3-D 
simulation, lounging draped Roman-style on the love seat in the main cabin and 
fully dressed in her fifth-century robes.
 
“So how did you like your investment?” she asked sociably.
 
“Tell you in a minute,” I said, going to the head and closing the door behind 
me. Of course, a closed door makes no real difference with Hypatia. She can see 
me wherever I am on the ship, and no doubt does, but as long as a machine 
intelligence acts and looks human, I want it to pretend to observe human 
cour­tesies.
 
Hitting the head was the main reason I’d come back to my ship just then. I don’t 
like peeing in free fall, in those awful toilets they have. Hypatia keeps ours 
at a suitable gravity for my comfort, like the rest of the ship. Besides, it 
makes her nervous if I use any toilets outside the ship, because she likes to 
rummage through my excretions to see if I’m staying healthy.
 
Which she had been doing while I was in the head. When I came out, she didn’t 
seem to have moved, but she said, “Are you really going to eat their food?”
 
“Sure. Why not?”
 
“You’ve been running a little high on polyglycerides. Better you let me cook for 
you.”
 
Teasing her, I said, “June Terple says Hans is a better cook.”
 
“She said he’s a good cook,” she corrected me, “but so am I. I’ve been accessing 
him, by the way, so if there’s anything you’d like to know about the crew. . . 
.”
 
“Not about the crew, but Starminder said something about a Rebecca Shapiro. Who 
was she?”
 
“That data is not in the Phoenix shipmind’s stores, Klara,” she said, reproving 
me. “However...”
 
She whited out a corner of my lounge and displayed a face on it while she gave 
me a capsule biography of Rebecca Shapiro. Rebecca had been a dramatic soprano 
with a brilliant operatic future ahead of her until she got her larynx crushed 
in a plane crash. They’d repaired it well enough for most purposes, but she was 
never going to be able to sing “The Queen of the Night” again. So, with her life 
on Earth ruined, Rebecca had signed up for my program. “Any other questions?” 
Hypatia said.
 
“Not about Rebecca, but I’ve been wondering why they call their shipmind Hans.”
 
“Oh, that was Mark Rohrbeck’s idea; he wanted to name him after some old 
computer pioneer. The name doesn’t matter, though, does it? I mean, why did you 
decide to call me Hypatia?”
 
“Because Hypatia of Alexandria was a smart, snotty bitch,” I told her. “Like 
you.”
 
“Humph,” she said.
 
“As well as being the first great woman scientist,” I added, because Hypatia 
always likes to talk about herself.
 
“The first known one,” she corrected. “Who knows how many there were whose 
accomplishments didn’t manage to survive? Women didn’t get much of a break in 
your ancient meat world —or, for that matter, now.”
 
“You were supposed to be beautiful, too,” I reminded her. “And you died a virgin 
anyway.”
 
“By choice, Klara. Even that old Hypatia didn’t care much for all that messy 
meat stuff. And I didn’t just die. I was brutally murdered. It was a cold wet 
spring in a.d. 450, and a gang of those damn Nitrian monks tore me to shreds 
because I wasn’t a Christian. Anyway,” she finished, “you’re the one who picked 
my iden­tity. If you wanted me to be someone else, you could have given me a 
different one.”
 
She had me grinning by then. “I still can,” I reminded her. “Maybe something 
like Joan of Arc?”
 
She shuddered fastidiously at the idea of being a Christian instead of a 
gods-fearing Roman pagan and changed the subject. “Would you like me to put a 
call through to Mr. Tartch now?”
 
Well, I would and I wouldn’t. I had unfinished business to settle with Bill 
Tartch, but I wasn’t quite ready to settle it, so I shook my head. “I’ve been 
won­dering about these extinct people we’re trying to resurrect. Have you got 
any Heechee records of the planet that I haven’t seen yet?”
 
“You bet. More than you’ll ever want to watch.”
 
“So show me some.”
 
“Sure thing, boss,” she said, and disappeared, and all at once I was standing on 
an outcropping of rock, looking down on a bright, green valley where some 
funny-looking animals were moving around.
 
* * * *
 
That was the difference between PhoenixCorp’s major simulations and mine. Mine 
cost more. Theirs were good enough for working purposes, because they showed you 
pretty much anything you wanted to see, but mine put you right in the middle of 
it. Mine were full sensory systems, too, so I could smell and feel as well as I 
could see and hear. As I stood there, a warm breeze ruffled my hair, and I 
smelled a distinct reek of smoke. “Hey, Hypatia,” I said, a little surprised. 
“Have these people discovered fire?”
 
“Not to use, no,” she murmured in my ear. “Must’ve been a lightning strike up in 
the hills from the storm.”
 
“What storm?”
 
“The one that just passed. Don’t you see everything’s wet?”
 
Not on my rock, it wasn’t. The sun overhead was big and bright and very hot.
 
It had already baked the rock dry, but I could see that the jumble of dark green 
vines at the base of my rock was still dripping, and when I turned around I 
could see a splotch of burning vegetation on the distant hill.
 
The valley was more interesting. Patches of trees, or something like trees; a 
herd of big, shaggy creatures, Kodiak bear-sized but obviously vegetarians 
because they were industriously pushing some of the trees over to eat their 
leaves; a pair of rivers, a narrow, fast-moving one with little waterfalls that 
came down from the hills to my left and flowed to join a broader, more sluggish 
one on the right to make a bigger stream; a few other shaggy creatures, these 
quite a lot bigger still, feeding by themselves on whatever was growing in the 
plain—well, it was an interesting sight; maybe a little like the great American 
prairie or the African veldt must have looked before our forebears killed off 
all the wild meat animals.
 
The most interesting part of the simulation was a pack of a dozen or so 
predators in the middle distance, circling furtively around a group of three or 
four creatures I couldn’t easily make out. I pointed. “Are those the ones?” I 
asked Hypatia. And when she said they were, I told her to get me up closer.
 
At close range I could see the hunted ones looked something like pigs — that is, 
if pigs happened to have long, skinny legs and long, squirrelly tails. I noticed 
a mommy pig baring her teeth and trying to snap at the predators in all 
directions at once, and three little ones doing their best to huddle under the 
mother’s belly. It was the predators I was paying attention to. They looked 
vaguely primate. That is, they had apelike faces and short tails. But they 
didn’t look like any primate that ever lived on Earth, because they had six 
limbs: four that they ran on, and two more like arms, and in their sort-of hands 
they held sharp-edged rocks. As they got into position, they began hurling the 
rocks at the prey.
 
The mother pig didn’t have a chance. In a couple of minutes, two of her babies 
were down and she was racing away with that long tail flicking from side to side 
like a metronome, and the surviving piglet right behind her, its tail-flicks 
keeping time with its mother’s, and the six-limbed predators had what they had 
come for.
 
It was not a pretty scene.
 
I know perfectly well that animals live by eating, and I’m not sentimental about 
the matter —hell, I eat-steak! (Not always out of a food factory, either.) All 
the same, I didn’t like watching what was happening on this 
half-million-year-old alien veldt, because one of the piglets was still alive 
when the wolf-apes began eating it, and its pitiful shrieking got to me.         
  
 
So I wasn’t a bit sorry when Hypatia interrupted me to say that Mr. Tartch 
hadn’t waited for me to call him and was already on the line.
 
* * * *
 
Nearly all of my conversations with Bill Tartch get into some kind of intimate 
area. He likes that kind of sexy talk. I don’t particularly, so I tried to keep 
the call short. The basic facts he had to convey were that he missed me and 
that, unspokenly, he looked as good as ever—not very tall, not exactly handsome 
but solidly built and with a great, challenging I-know-what-fun-is-all-about 
grin —and that he was just two days out. That’s not a lot of hard data to get 
out of what was more than a quarter-hour of talk capsuled back and forth over 
all those light-years. I guess, but the rest was private; and when I was 
finished, it was about time to get dressed for dinner with the PhoenixCorp 
people.
 
Hypatia was way ahead of me, as usual. She had gone through my wardrobe and used 
her effectuators to pull out a dressy pants suit for me, so I wouldn’t have a 
skirt to keep flying up, along with a gold neckband that wouldn’t be flopping 
around my face as the pearls had. They were good choices; I didn’t argue. And 
while I was getting into them she asked chattily, “So did Mr. Tartch say thank 
you?”
 
I know Hypatia’s tones by now. This one made my hackles rise. “For what?”
 
“Why, for keeping his career going,” she said, sounding surprised. “He was 
pretty much washed up until you came along, wasn’t he? So it’s only appropriate 
that he should, you know, display his gratitude.”
 
“You’re pushing your luck,” I told her as I slipped into a pair of jeweled 
stock­ings. Sometimes I think Hypatia gets a little too personal, and this time 
it just wasn’t justified. I didn’t have to do favors to get a man. Christ, the 
problem was to fend them off! It’s just that when it’s over I like to leave them 
a little better off than I found them; and Bill, true enough, had reached that 
stage in his career when a little help now and then was useful.
 
But I didn’t want to discuss it with her. “Talk about something else or shut 
up,” I ordered.
 
“Sure, hon. Let’s see. How did you like the Crabbers?”
 
I told her the truth. “Not much. Their table manners are pretty lousy.”
 
Hypatia giggled. “Getting a weak stomach, Klara? Do you really think they’re 
much worse than your own remote predecessors? Because I don’t think 
Australo­pithecus robustus worried too much about whether its dinners were 
enjoying the meal, either.”
 
We were getting into a familiar argument. “That was a long time ago, Hypatia.”
 
“So is what you were looking at with the Crabbers, hon. Animals are animals. 
Now, if you really want to take yourself out of that nasty kill-and-eat business 
—”
 
“Not yet,” I told her, as I had told her many times before.
 
What Hypatia wanted to do was to vasten me. That is, take me out of my meat 
body, with all its aches and annoyances, and make me into a pure, machine-stored 
intelligence. As other people I knew had done. Like Hypatia herself, though in 
her case she was no more than a simulated approximation of someone who had once 
been living meat.                                                        
 
It was a scary idea, to be sure, but not altogether unattractive. I wasn’t 
getting as much pleasure as I would have liked out of living, but I certainly 
didn’t want to die. And if I did what Hypatia wanted, I would never have to.
 
But I wasn’t prepared to take that step yet. There were one or two things a meat 
person could do that a machine person couldn’t—well, one big one —and I wasn’t 
prepared to abandon the flesh until I had done what the female flesh was best 
at. For which I needed a man . . . and I wasn’t at all sure that Bill Tartch was 
the particular man I needed.
 
* * * *
 
When I got back for dinner in the PhoenixCorp vessel, everybody was looking 
conspiratorial and expectant. “We’ve got about twenty percent of the optical 
sheets in place,” Terple informed me, thrilled with excitement. “Would you like 
to see?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but commanded: “Hans! Display the 
planet.”
 
The lights went dark, and before us floated a blue-and-white globe the size of 
my head, looking as though it were maybe ten meters away. It was half in 
darkness and half in sunlight, from a sun that was out of sight off to my right. 
There was a half-moon, too, just popping into sight from behind the planet. It 
looked smaller than Luna, and if it had markings of craters and seas, I couldn’t 
see them. On the planet itself I could make out a large ocean and a kind of 
squared-off continent on the illuminated side. Terple did something that made 
the lights in the room go off, and then I could see that there had to be even 
more land on the dark side, because spots of light—artificial lights, cities’ 
lights — blossomed all over parts of the nighttime area.
 
“You see, Klara?” she crowed. “Cities! Civilization!”
 
* * * *
 
CHAPTER IV
 
Their shipmind really was a good cook. Fat pink shrimp that tasted as though 
they’d come out of the sea within the hour, followed by a fritto misto, the 
same, with a decent risotto and figs in cream for dessert. Everything was all 
perfectly prepared. Or maybe it just seemed so, because everybody was visibly 
relaxing now that it had turned out we really did have something to observe.
 
What there wasn’t any of was wine to go with the meal, just some sort of 
tropical juices in the winebulbs. June Terple noticed my expression when I 
tasted it. “We’re not doing anything alcoholic until we’ve completed the obs,” 
she said, half apologetic, half challenging, “Still, I think Hans can get you 
something if you really want it.”
 
I shook my head politely, but I was wondering if Hypatia had happened to say 
anything to Hans about my fondness for a drink now and then. Probably she had; 
shipminds do gossip when they’re as advanced as Hypatia and Hans, and it was 
evident that the crew did know something about me. The conversation was lively 
and far-ranging, but it never, never touched on the subject of the black hole 
itself, or black holes in general.                                
 
We made a nice, leisurely meal of it. The only interruptions were 
inconspicu­ous, as crew members one after another briefly excused themselves to 
double-check how well the spider robots were doing as they clambered all over 
that five-hundred-kilometer dish, seamlessly stitching the optical reflection 
plates into their perfect parabola. None of the organic crew really had to 
bother. Hans was permanently vigilant, about that and everything else, but 
Terple obviously ran a tight ship. A lot of the back-and-forth chat was 
in-jokes, but that wasn’t a problem because Hypatia explained them, whispering 
in my ear.                                   
 
When somebody mentioned homesickness and Oleg Kekuskian said jestingly— 
pointedly jestingly—that some of us weren’t homesick at all, the remark was 
aimed at Humphrey Mason-Manley: “He’s pronging Terple, Klara, and Kekuskian’s 
jealous,” Hypatia told me.
 
Julia —that was Hoo-lia —Ibarruru, the fat and elderly Peruvian-Incan former 
schoolteacher, was wistfully telling Starminder how much she wished she could 
visit the Core before she died, and was indignant when she found out that I’d 
never been to Machu Picchu. “And you’ve been all over the galaxy? And never took 
the time to see one of the greatest wonders of your own planet?”
 
The only subdued one was Mark Rohrbeck. Between the figs and the coffee, he 
excused himself and-didn’t come back for nearly half an hour. “Calling home,” 
Mason-Manley said wisely, and Hypatia, who was the galaxy’s greatest 
eavesdropper when I let her be, filled me in. “He’s trying to talk his wife out 
of the divorce. She isn’t buying it.”
 
When the coffee was about half gone, Terple whispered something to the air. 
Evidently Hans was listening, and in a moment the end of the room went dark. 
Almost at once the planet appeared for us again, noticeably bigger than it had 
been before. She whispered again, and the image expanded until it filled the 
room, and I had the sudden vertiginous sense that I was falling into it.
 
“We’re getting about two- or three-kilometer resolution now,” Terple announced 
proudly.
 
That didn’t give us much beyond mountains, shorelines, and clouds, and the 
planet was still half in sun and half dark. (Well, it had to be, didn’t it? The 
planet was rotating under us, but its relative position to its sun didn’t 
change.) When I studied it, something looked odd about the land mass at the 
bottom of the image. I pointed. “Is that ocean, there, down on the left side? I 
mean the dark part. Because I didn’t see any lights there.”
 
“No, it’s land, all right. It’s probably just that that part is too cold to be 
inhabited. We’re not getting a square look at the planet, you know. We’re about 
twenty degrees south of its equator, so we’re seeing more of its south pole and 
nothing north of, let’s say, what would be Scotland or southern Alaska on Earth. 
Have you seen the globe Hans put together for us? No? Hans, display.”
 
Immediately a sphere appeared in the middle of the room, rotating slowly. It 
would have looked exactly like the kind my grandfather kept in his living room, 
latitude and longitude lines and all, except that the land masses were wholly 
wrong. “This is derived from old Heechee data that Starminder provided for us,” 
Hans’s voice informed me. “However, we’ve given our own names to the 
conti­nents. You see the one that’s made up of two fairly circular masses, 
connected by an isthmus, that looks like a dumbbell? Dr. Terple calls it 
‘Dumbbell.’ It’s divided into Dumbbell East and Dumbbell West. Frying Pan is the 
sort of roundish one with the long, thin peninsula projecting to the southwest. 
The one just coming into view now is Peanut, because — “
 
“I can see why,” I told him. It did look a little like a peanut. Hans was 
perceptive enough to recognize, probably from the tone of my voice, that I found 
this ge­ography— planetography? — lesson a little boring. Terple wasn’t. “Go on, 
Hans,” she said sharply when he hesitated. So he did.
 
Out of guest-politeness I sat still while he named every dot on the map for me, 
but when he came to the end, I did too. “That’s very nice,” I said, unhooking 
myself from my dining place. “Thanks for the dinner, June, but I think I’d 
better let you get your work done. Anyway, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other 
over the next five days.”
 
Every face I saw suddenly wore a bland expression, and Terple coughed. “Well, 
not quite five days,” she said uncomfortably. “I don’t know whether anyone told 
you this, but we’ll have to leave before the star blows.”
 
I stopped cold, one hand stuffing my napkin into its tied-down ring, the other 
holding on to the wall support. “There wasn’t anything about leaving early in 
your prospectus. Why wasn’t I told this?”
 
“It stands to reason, Klara,” she said doggedly. “As soon as the star begins its 
collapse, I’m shutting everything down and getting out of here. It’s too 
dangerous.”
 
I don’t like being surprised by the people who work for me. I gave her a look. 
“How can it be dangerous when we’re six thousand light-years away?”
 
She got obstinate. “Remember I’m responsible for the safety of this installation 
and its crew. I don’t think you have any idea what a supernova is like, Klara. 
It’s huge. Back in 1054 the Chinese astrologers could see it in daylight for 
almost the whole month of July, and they didn’t have our lensing to make it 
brighter.”
 
“So we’ll put on sunglasses.”
 
She said firmly, “We’ll leave. I’m not just talking about visible light. Even 
now, with six thousand years of cooling down after it popped, that thing’s still 
radiating all across the electromagnetic spectrum, from microwave to X-rays. 
We’re not going to want to be where all that radiation comes to a focus when 
it’s fresh.”
 
* * * *
 
As I was brushing my teeth, Hypatia spoke from behind me. “What Terple said 
makes sense, you know. Anything in the focus is going to get fried when the star 
goes supernova.”
 
I didn’t answer, so she tried another tactic. “Mark Rohrbeck is a good-looking 
man, isn’t he? He’s very confused right now, with the divorce and all, but I 
think he likes you.”
 
I looked at her in the mirror. She was in full simulation, leaning against the 
bathroom doorway with a little smile on her face. “He’s also half my age,” I 
pointed out.
 
“Oh, no, Klara,” she corrected me. “Not even a third, actually. Still, what 
dif­ference does that make? Hans displayed his file tor me. Genetically he’s 
very clean, as organic human beings go. Would you like to see it?”
 
“No.” I finished with the bathroom and turned to leave. Hypatia got gracefully 
out of my way just as though I couldn’t have walked right through her.
 
“Well, then,” she said. “Would you like something to eat? A nightcap?”
 
“What I would like is to go to sleep. Right now.”
 
She sighed. “Such a waste of time. Sooner or later you know you’re going to give 
up the meat, don’t you? Why wait? In machine simulation you can do any­thing you 
can do now, only better, and — “
 
“Enough,” I ordered. “What I’m going to do now is go to bed and dream about my 
lover coming closer every minute. Go away.”
 
The simulation disappeared, and her “Good night, then” came from empty air.
 
Hypatia doesn’t really go away when I tell her to, but she pretends she does. 
Part of the pretense is that she never acts as though she knows what I do in the 
privacy of my room.
 
It wasn’t exactly true that I intended to dream about Bill Tartch. If I were a 
romantic type, I might actually have been counting the seconds until my true 
love arrived. Oh, hell, maybe I was, a little bit, especially when I tucked 
myself into that huge circular bed and automatically reached out for someone to 
touch and nobody was there. I do truly enjoy having a warm man’s body to spoon 
up against when I drift off to sleep. But if I didn’t have that, I also didn’t 
have anybody snoring in my ear, or thrashing about, or talking to me when I 
first woke up and all I wanted was to huddle over a cup of coffee and a piece of 
grapefruit in peace.
 
Those were consoling thoughts — reasonably consoling—but they didn’t do much for 
me this time. As soon as I put my head down, I was wide awake again.
 
Insomnia was one more of those meat-person flaws that disgusted Hypatia so. I 
didn’t have to suffer from it. Hypatia keeps my bathroom medicine chest stocked 
with everything she imagines I might want in the middle of the night, including 
half a dozen different kinds of anti-insomnia pills, but I had a better idea 
than that. I popped the lid off my bedside stand, where I keep the manual 
controls I use when I don’t want Hypatia to do something for me, and I accessed 
the synoptic I wanted to see.
 
I visited my island.
 
Its name is Raiwea — that’s Rah-ee-wczy-uh, with the accent on the third 
syllable, the way the Polynesians say it—and it’s the only place in the universe 
I ever miss when I’m away from it. It’s not very big. It only amounts to a 
couple thousand hectares of dry land, but it’s got palm trees and breadfruit 
trees and a pretty lagoon that’s too shallow for the sharks ever to invade from 
the deep water outside the reef. And now, because I paid to put them there, it’s 
got lots of clusters of pretty little bungalows with pretty, if imitation, 
thatched roofs, as well as plumbing and air conditioning and everything else 
that would make a person comfortable. And it’s got playgrounds and game fields 
that are laid out for baseball or soccer or whatever a bunch of kids might need 
to work off excess animal energy. And it’s got its own food factory nestled 
inside the reef, constantly churning out every variety of healthful food anyone 
wants to eat. And it’s mine. It’s all mine. Every square centimeter. I paid for 
it, and I’ve populated it with orphans and single women with babies from all 
over the world. When I go there, I’m Grandma Klara to about a hundred and fifty 
kids from newborns to teens, and when I’m some­where else I make it a point, 
every day or so, to access the surveillance systems and make sure the schools 
are functioning and the medical services are keeping everybody healthy, because 
I — all right, damn it! —because I love those kids. Every last one of them. And 
I swear they love me back.
 
Hypatia says they’re my substitute for having a baby of my own.
 
Maybe they are. All the same, I do have a couple of my own ova stored in the 
Raiwea clinic’s deep freeze. They’ve been there for a good many years now, but 
the doctors swear they’re still one hundred percent viable and they’ll keep them 
that way. The ova are there just in case I ever decide I really want to do that 
other disgustingly meat-person thing and give birth to my own genetically 
personal child…
 
But I’ve never met the man I wanted to be its father. Bill Tartch? Well, maybe. 
I had thought he might be for a while, anyway, but then I wasn’t really so sure.
 
* * * *
 
When I was up and about the next morning, Hypatia greeted me with a fresh 
display of the Crabber planet. It was too big now to fit in my salon, but she 
had zeroed in on one particular coastline. In the center of the image was a blur 
that might have been manmade — personmade, I mean. “They’re down to 
half-kilometer resolution now,” she informed me. “That’s pretty definitely a 
small city.”
 
I inspected it. It pretty definitely was, but it was very definitely small. 
“Isn’t there anything bigger?”
 
“I’m afraid not, Klara. Hans says the planet seems to be rather remarkably 
un­derpopulated, though it’s not clear why. Will you be going over to the 
PhoenixCorp ship now?”
 
I shook my head. “Let them work in peace. We might as well do some work 
ourselves. What’ve you got for me?”
 
What she had for me was another sampling of some of the ventures I’d put money 
into at one time or another. There were the purely commercial ones such as the 
helium-3 mines on Luna, and the chain of food factories in the Bay of Bengal, 
and the desert-revivification project in the Sahara, and forty or fifty others; 
they weren’t particularly interesting to me, but they were some of the projects 
that, no matter how much I spent, just kept getting me richer and richer every 
day.
 
Then we got to the ones I cared about. I looked in on the foundation Starminder 
had talked about, the one for sending humans into the Core to meet with the 
Heechee who had stayed behind. And the scholarship program for young women like 
myself—like I had been once, long ago—who were stuck in dirty, drudging, 
dead-end jobs. Myself, I got out of it by means of dumb luck and the Gateway 
asteroid, but that wasn’t an option now. Maybe a decent education was.
 
Along about then, Hypatia cleared her throat in the manner that means there’s 
something she wants to talk about. I guessed wrong. I guessed she wanted to 
discuss my island, so I played the game. “Oh, by the way,” I said, “I accessed 
Raiwea last night after I went to bed.”
 
“Really?” she said, just as though she hadn’t known it all along. “How are 
things?”
 
I went through the motions of telling her which kids were about ready to leave, 
and how there were eighteen new ones who had been located by the various 
agencies I did business with, ready to be brought to the island next time I was 
in the neighborhood. As she always did, whether she meant it or not, she clucked 
approvingly. Her simulation was looking faintly amused, though. I took it as a 
challenge. “So you see there’s one thing we animals can do that you can’t,” I 
told her. “We can have babies.”
 
“Or, as in your own case at least so far, not,” she said agreeably. “That wasn’t 
what I was going to tell you, though.”
 
“Oh?”
 
“I just wanted to mention that Mr. Tartch’s ship is going to dock in about an 
hour. He isn’t coming alone.”
 
Sometimes Hypatia is almost too idiosyncratically human, and more than once I’ve 
thought about getting her program changed. The tone of her voice warned me that 
she had something more to tell. I said tentatively, “That’s not surprising. 
Sometimes he needs to bring a crew with him.”
 
“Of course he does, Klara,” she said cheerfully. “There’s only one of them this 
time, though. And she’s very pretty.”
 
* * * *
 
CHAPTER V
 
The very pretty assistant was very pretty, all right, and she looked to be about 
sixteen years old. No, that’s not true. She looked a lot better than sixteen 
years old. I don’t believe I had skin like that even when I was a newborn baby. 
She wore no makeup, and needed none. She had on a decorous one-piece jumpsuit 
that covered her from thigh to neck and left no doubt what was inside. Her name 
was Denys. When I got there —I had taken my time, because I didn’t want Bill to 
think I was eager—all three of PhoenixCorp’s males were hanging around, watching 
her like vultures sniffing carrion. It wasn’t just that she looked the way she 
looked. She was also fresh meat, for a crew that had been getting pretty bored 
with each other.
 
Of course, I had been fresh meat, too, and there had been no signs of that kind 
of testosterone rush when I arrived. But then, I didn’t look like Denys. Bill 
didn’t seem to notice. He had already set up for his opening teaser, and Denys 
was playing his quaint autocameras for him. As they panned around the entrance 
chamber and settled on his face, wearing its most friendly and intelligent 
expres­sion, he began to speak to the masses:
 
“Wilhelm Tartch here again, where PhoenixCorp is getting ready to bring a lost 
race of intelligent beings back to life, and here to help me once again” —one of 
the cameras swung around as Denys cued it toward me —”I have the good luck to 
have my beautiful fiancée, Gelle-Klara Moynlin, with me.”
 
I gave him a look, because whatever I was to Wilhelm Tartch, I definitely wasn’t 
planning to marry him. He tipped me a cheeky wink and went right on:
 
“As you all remember, before the Heechee ran away to hide in the Core, they 
surveyed most of the galaxy, looking for other intelligent races. They didn’t 
find any. When they visited Earth they found the australopithecines, but they 
were a long way from being modern humans. They hadn’t even developed language 
yet. And here, on this planet” —that view of the Crabber planet, presupernova, 
ap­peared behind him — “they found another primitive race that they thought 
might someday become both intelligent and civilized. Well, perhaps these 
Crabbers, as the PhoenixCorp people call them, did. But the Heechee weren’t 
around to see it, and neither are we, because they had some bad luck.
 
“There were two stars in their planet’s system, a red dwarf and a bright type-A 
giant. Over the millennia, as these lost people were struggling toward 
civilization, the big star was losing mass, which was being sucked into the 
smaller one —and then, without warning, the small one reached critical mass. It 
exploded —and the people, along with their planet and all their works, were 
instantly obliterated in the supernova blast.”
 
He stopped there, gazing toward Denys until she called, “Got it.” Then he kicked 
himself toward me, arms outstretched for a hug, a big grin on his face. When we 
connected, he buried his face in my neck and whispered, “Oh, Klaretta, we’ve 
been away from each other too long!”
 
Bill Tartch is a good hugger. His arms felt fine around me, and his big, male 
body felt good against mine. “But we’re together now,” I told him ... as I 
looked over his shoulder at Denys — who was regarding us with an affectionate 
and wholly unjealous smile.
 
So that part might not be much of a problem, at that. I decided not to worry 
about it. Anyway, the resolution of the Crabber planet was getting better and 
better, and that was what we were here for, after all.
 
* * * *
 
What the Crabber planet had a lot of was water. As the planet turned on its 
axis, the continental shore had disappeared into the nighttime side of the 
world, and what we were looking at was mostly ocean.
 
Bill Tartch wasn’t pleased. “Is that all we’re going to see?” he demanded of the 
room at large. “I expected at least some kind of a city.”
 
Terple answered. “A small city—probably. Anyway, that’s what it looked like 
before we lost it; I can show you that much if you like. Hans, go back to when 
that object was still in sight.”
 
The maybe-city didn’t look any better the second time I saw it, and it didn’t 
impress Bill. He made a little tongue-click of annoyance. “You, shipmind! Can’t 
you enhance the image for me?”
 
“That is enhanced, Mr. Tartch,” Hans told him pleasantly. “However, we have 
somewhat better resolution now, and I’ve been tracking it in the infrared. 
There’s a lit­tle more detail”—the continental margin appeared for us, hazily 
delineated because of the differences in temperature between water and land, and 
we zoomed in on the ob­ject—”but, as you see, there are hot spots that I have 
not yet been able to identify.”
 
There were. Big ones, and very bright. What was encouraging, considering what we 
were looking for, was that some of them seemed to be fairly geometrical in 
shape, triangles and rectangles. But what were they?
 
“Christmas decorations?” Bill guessed. “You know, I mean not really Christmas, 
but with the houses all lit up for some holiday or other?”
 
“I don’t think so, Mr. Tartch,” Hans said judiciously. “There’s not much optical 
light; what you’re seeing is heat.”
 
“Keeping themselves warm in the winter?”
 
“We don’t know if it’s their winter, Mr. Tartch, and that isn’t probable in any 
case. Those sources read out at up to around three hundred degrees Celsius. 
That’s almost forest-fire temperature.”
 
Bill looked puzzled. “Slash-and-burn agriculture? Or maybe some kind of 
in­dustry?”
 
“We can’t say yet, Mr. Tartch. If it were actual combustion, there should be 
more visible light; but there’s very little. We’ll simply have to wait for 
better data. Meanwhile, however, there’s something else you might like to see.” 
The scene we were viewing skittered across the face of the planet—huge cloud 
banks, a couple of islands, more cloud —and came to rest on a patch of ocean. In 
its center was a tiny blur of something that looked grayish when it looked like 
anything at all; it seemed to flicker in and out of sight, at the very limit of 
visibility.
 
“Clouds?” Bill guessed.
 
“No, Mr. Tartch. I believe it is a group of objects of some kind, and they are 
in motion—vectoring approximately seventy-one degrees, or, as you would say, a 
little north of east. They must be quite large, or we would not pick up anything 
at all. They may be ships, although their rate of motion is too high for 
anything but a hydrofoil or ground-effect craft. If they are still in sight when 
the mirror is more nearly complete, we should be able to resolve them easily 
enough.”
 
“Which will be when?”
 
Hans gave us that phony couple-of-seconds pause before he answered. “There is a 
small new problem about that, Mr. Tartch,” he said apologetically. “Some of the 
installed mirror plates have been subjected to thermal shock, and they are no 
longer in exact fit. Most of the installation machines have had to be delivered 
to adjust them, and so it will be some time before we can go on with completing 
the mirror. A few hours only, I estimate.”
 
Bill looked at me and I looked at him. “Well, shit,” he said. “What else is 
going to go wrong?”
 
* * * *
 
What had gone wrong that time wasn’t June Terple’s fault. She said it was, 
though. She said that she was the person in charge of the whole operation, so 
everything that happened was her responsibility, and she shouldn’t have allowed 
Ibarruru to override Hans’s controls. And Julia Ibarruru was tearfully 
repentant. “Starminder told me the Heechee had identified eleven other planets 
in the Crabber system; I was just checking to see if there were any signs of 
life on any of them, and I’m afraid that for a minute I let the system’s focus 
get too close to the star.”
 
It could have been worse. I told them not to worry about it and invited all 
three of them to my ship for a drink. That made my so-called fiancé’s eyebrows 
rise, because he had certainly been expecting to be the first person I welcomed 
aboard. He was philosophical about it, though. “I’ll see you later,” he said, 
and if none of the women knew what he meant by that, it could only have been 
because they’d never seen a leer before. Then he led Denys off to interview some 
of PhoenixCorp’s other people.
 
Which was pretty much what I was planning for myself. Hypatia had set out tea 
things on one table, and dry sherry on another, but before we sat down to 
either, I had to give all three of the women the usual guided tour. The sudden 
return to normal gravity was a burden for them, but they limped admiringly 
through the guest bedroom, exclaimed at the kitchen — never used by me, but 
installed just in case I ever wanted to do any of that stuff myself — and were 
blown away by my personal bathroom. Whirlbath, bidet, big onyx tub, mirror walls 
—Bill Tartch always said it looked like a whore’s dream of heaven, and he hadn’t 
been the first guest to make that observation. I don’t suppose the PhoenixCorp 
women had ever seen anything like it. I let them look. I even let them peek into 
the cabinets of perfumes and toiletries. “Oh, musk oil!” Terple cried. “But it’s 
real! That’s so expensive.”
 
“I don’t wear it anymore. Take it, if you like,” I said and, for the grand 
finale, opened the door to my bedroom.
 
When at last we got to the tea, sherry, and conversation, Ibarruru’s first 
remark was, “Mr. Tartch seemed like a very interesting man.” She didn’t spell 
out the connection, but I knew it was that huge bed that was in her mind. So we 
chatted about Mr. Tartch and his glamorous p-vision career, and how Terple had 
grown up with the stories of the Gateway prospectors on every day’s news, and 
how Ibarruru had dreamed of an opportunity like this —“Astronomy’s really almost 
a lost art on Earth, you know,” she told me. “Now we have all the Heechee data, 
so there’s no point anymore in wasting time with telescopes and probes.”
 
“So what does an astronomer do when there’s no astronomy to be done?” I asked, 
being polite.
 
She said ruefully, “I teach an undergraduate course in astronomy at a com­munity 
college in Maryland. For people who will never do any astronomy, because if 
there’s anything somebody really wants to see, why, they just get in a ship and 
go out and look at it.”
 
“As I did, Ms. Moynlin,” said Starminder, with the Heechee equivalent of a 
smile.
 
That was what I was waiting for. If there was a place in the universe I still 
wanted to see, it was her home in the Core. “You must miss the Core,” I told 
her. “All those nearby stars, so bright—what we have here must look pretty 
skimpy to you.”
 
“Oh, no,” she said, being polite, “this is quite nice. For a change. What I 
really miss is my family.”
 
It had never occurred to me that she had a family, but, yes, she had left a mate 
and two young offspring behind when she came out. It was a difficult decision, 
but she couldn’t resist the adventure. Miss them? Of course she missed them! 
Miss her? She looked surprised at that. “Why, no, Ms Moynlin, they won’t be 
missing me. They’re asleep for the night. I’ll be back long before they wake up. 
Time dilation, you see. I’m only going to stay out here for a year or two.”
 
Ibarruru said nervously, “That’s the part that worries me about going to the 
Core, Starminder. I’m not young anymore, and I know that if I went for even a 
few days, nearly everyone I know would be gone when I got back. No, not just 
‘nearly’ everyone,” she corrected herself. “What is it, forty thousand to one? 
So a week there would be nearly a thousand years back home.” Then she turned to 
the Heechee female. “But even if we can’t go ourselves, you can tell us about 
it, Starminder. Would you like to tell Ms. Moynlin what it’s like in the Core?”
 
* * * *
 
It was what I wanted to hear, too. I’d heard it often enough before, but I 
listened as long as Starminder was willing to talk. Which was a lot, because she 
was def­initely homesick.
 
Would it really matter if I spent a week in the Core? Or a month, or a year, for 
that matter? I’d miss my kids on the island, of course, but they’d be taken care 
of, and so would everything else that mattered to me. And there wasn’t any other 
human being in the universe that I cared enough about to miss for more than a 
day.
 
I was surprised when Hypatia spoke up out of thin air. “Ms. Moynlin” —formal 
because of the company—”there’s a call for you.” And she displayed Bill Tartch’s 
face.
 
I could see by the background that he was in his own ship, and he looked all 
bright and fresh and grinning at me. “Permission to come aboard, hon?” he asked.
 
That produced a quick reaction among my guests.
 
“Oh,” said Ibarruru, collecting herself. “Well, it’s time we got back to work 
anyway, isn’t it, June?” She was sounding arch. Terple wasn’t; she simply got 
up, and Starminder followed her example.
 
“You needn’t leave,” I said.
 
“But of course we must,” said Terple. “Julia’s right. Thank you for the tea and, 
uh, things.”
 
And they were gone, leaving me to be alone with my lover.
 
* * * *
 
CHAPTER VI
 
“He’s been primping for the last hour,” Hypatia reported in my ear. “Showered, 
shaved, dressed up. And he put on that musk cologne that he thinks you like.”
 
“I do like it,” I said. “On him. Let me see you when I’m talking to you.”
 
She appeared obediently, reclining on the couch Ibarruru had just left. “I’d say 
the man’s looking to get laid,” she observed. “Again.”
 
I didn’t choose to pick up on the “again.” That word was evidence of one of 
Hypatia’s more annoying traits, of which she has not quite enough to make me 
have her reprogrammed. When I chose Hypatia of Alexandria as a personality for 
my shipmind, it seemed to be a good idea at the time. But my own Hypatia took it 
seriously. That’s what happens when you get yourself a really powerful shipmind; 
she throws herself into the part. The first thing Hypatia did was look up her 
template and model herself as close to the original as she thought I would stand 
— including such details as the fact that the original Hypatia really hated men.
 
“So, do you want me out of the way so you can oblige him?” she asked sociably.
 
“No,” I said. ‘You stay.”
 
“That’s my girl. You ask me, sexual intercourse is greatly overrated anyway.”
 
“That’s because you never had any,” I told her. “By which I mean neither you, my 
pet program, nor the semimythical human woman I modeled you after, who died a 
virgin and is said to have shoved her used menstrual cloths in the face of one 
persistent suitor to turn him off.”
 
“Malicious myth,” she said comfortably. “Spread by the Christians after they 
murdered her. Anyway, here he comes.”
 
I would have been willing to bet that the first words out of Bill Tartch’s mouth 
would be Alone at last! accompanied by a big grin and a lunge for me. I would 
have half won. He didn’t say anything at all, just spread his arms and lurched 
toward me, grin and all.
 
Then he saw Hypatia, sprawled on the couch. “Oh,” he said, stumbling as he came 
to a stop —there evidently wasn’t any gravity in his rental ship, either. “I 
thought we’d be alone.”
 
“Not right now, sweetie,” I said. “But it’s nice to see you.”
 
“Me, too.” He thought for a moment, and I could see him changing gears: All 
right, the lady doesn’t want what I want right now, so what else can we do? 
That’s one of those good-and-bad things about Bill Tartch. He does what I want, 
and none of this sweeping-her-off-her-feet stuff. Viewing it as good, it means 
he’s con­siderate and sweet. Viewing it the other way—the way Hypatia chooses to 
view it—he’s a spineless wretch, sucking up to somebody who can do him good.
 
While I was considering which way to view it, Bill snapped his fingers. “I 
know,” he said, brightening. “I’ve been wanting to do a real interview with you 
anyway. That all right? Hypatia, you can record it for me, can’t you?”
 
Hypatia didn’t answer, just looked sulkily at me.
 
“Do what he says,” I ordered. But Bill was having second thoughts.
 
“Maybe not,” he said, cheerfully resigned to the fact that she wouldn’t take 
orders from him. “She’d probably screw it up on purpose for me anyway, so I 
guess we’d better get Denys in here.”
 
* * * *
 
It didn’t take Denys much more than a minute to arrive, with those quaint little 
cameras and all. I did my best to be gracious and comradely. “Oh, yes, clip them 
on anywhere,” I said —in my ship’s gravity, the cameras wouldn’t just float. “On 
the backs of the chairs? Sure. If they mess the fabric a little, Hypatia will 
fix it right up.” I didn’t look at Hypatia, just gestured to her to get herself 
out of sight. She did without protest.
 
Bill had planted himself next to me and was holding my hand. I didn’t pull it 
away. It took Denys a little while to get all the cameras in place, Bill gazing 
tolerantly at the way she was doing it and not offering to help. When she 
an­nounced she was ready, the interview began.
 
It was a typical Wilhelm Tartch interview, meaning that he did most of the 
talking. He rehearsed our entire history for the cameras in one uninterrupted 
monologue; my part was to smile attentively as it was going on. Then he got to 
Phoenix.
 
“We’re here to see the results of this giant explosion that took place more than 
a thousand years ago—What’s the matter, Klara?”
 
He was watching my face, and I knew what he was seeing. “Turn off your cameras, 
Bill. You need to get your facts straight. It happened a lot longer than a 
thousand years ago.”
 
He shook his head at me tolerantly. “That’s close enough for the audience,” he 
explained. “I’m not giving an astronomy lesson here. The star blew up in 1054, 
right?”
 
“It was in 1054 that the Chinese astronomers saw it. That’s the year when the 
light from the supernova got as far as our neighborhood, but it took about five 
thousand years to get there. Didn’t you do your homework?”
 
“We must’ve missed that little bit, hon,” he said, giving me his best ruefully 
apologetic smile. “All right, Denys. Take it from the last little bit. We’ll put 
in some shots of the supernova to cover the transition. Ready? Then go. This 
giant explosion took place many thousands of years ago, destroying a 
civilization that might in some ways almost have become the equal of our own. 
What were they like, these people the Phoenix investigators call ‘Crabbers’? No 
one has ever known. When the old Heechee visited their planet long ago, they 
were still animallike primitives —Denys, we’ll put in some of those old Heechee 
files here — but the Heechee thought they had the potential to develop cognitive 
intelligence and even civilization. Did they ever fulfill this promise? Did they 
come to dom­inate their world as the human race did our Earth? Did they develop 
science and art and culture of their own? We know from the tantalizing hints 
we’ve seen so far that this may be so. Now, through the generosity of 
Gelle-Klara Moynlin, who is here with me, we are at last going to see for 
ourselves what these tragically doomed people achieved before their star 
exploded without warning, cutting them off—Oh, come on, Klara. What is it this 
time?”
 
“We don’t know if they had any warning or not, do we? That’s one of the things 
we’re trying to find out.”
 
Denys cleared her throat. She said diffidently, “Bill, maybe you should let me 
do a little more background research before you finish this interview.”
 
My lover gave her a petulant little grimace. “Oh, all right. I suppose there’s 
nothing else to do.”
 
I heard the invisible little cough that meant Hypatia had something to say to 
me, so I said to the air, “Hypatia?”
 
She picked up her cue. “The PhoenixCorp shipmind tells me they’re back at work 
on the dish, and they’re getting somewhat better magnification now. There are 
some new views you may want to see. Shall I display here?”
 
Bill seemed slightly mollified. He looked at me. “What do you think, Klara?”
 
It was the wrong question to ask me. I didn’t want to tell him what I was 
thinking.
 
For that matter, I didn’t want to be thinking it at all. All right, he and this 
little Denys lollipop hadn’t done any of their backgrounding on the way out to 
Phoenix. So what, exactly, had they been doing with their time?
 
I said, “No, I think I’d rather see it on the PhoenixCorp ship. You two go 
ahead. I’ll follow in a minute.” And as soon as they were out of sight. I turned 
around, and Hypatia was sitting in the chair Denys had just left, looking smug.
 
“Can I do something for you, Klara?” she asked solicitously.
 
She could, but I wasn’t ready to ask her for it. I asked her for something else 
instead. “Can you show me the interior of Bill’s ship?”
 
“Of course, Klara.” And there it was, displayed for me, Hypatia guiding my point 
of view all through it.
 
It wasn’t much. The net obviously wasn’t spending any more than it had to on 
Bill’s creature comfort. It was so old that it had all that Heechee drive stuff 
out in the open; when I designed my own ship, I made sure all that ugliness was 
tucked away out of sight, like the heating system in a condo. The important fact 
was that it had two sleeping compartments, one clearly Denys’s, the other 
defi­nitely Bill’s. Both had unmade beds. Evidently the rental’s shipmind wasn’t 
up to much housekeeping, and neither was Denys. There was no indication that 
they might have been visiting back and forth.
 
I gave up. “You’ve been dying to tell me about them ever since they got here,” I 
said to Hypatia. “So tell me.”
 
She gave me that wondering look. “Tell you what exactly, Klara?”
 
“Tell me what was going on on Bill’s ship, for Christ’s sake! I know you know.”
 
She looked slightly miffed, the way she always did when Christ’s name was 
mentioned, but she said, “It is true that I accessed Mr. Tartch’s shipmind as a 
routine precaution. It’s a pretty cheap-jack job, about what you’d expect in a 
rental. It had privacy locks all over it, but nothing that I couldn’t—”
 
I snarled at her, “Tell me! Did they?”
 
She made an expression of distaste. “Oh, yes, hon, they certainly did. All the 
way out here. Like dogs in rut.”
 
I looked around the room at the wineglasses and cups and the cushions that had 
been disturbed by someone sitting on them. “I’m going to the ship. Clean up this 
mess while I’m gone,” I ordered, and checked my face in the mirror.
 
It looked just as it always looked, as though nothing were different.
 
Well, nothing was, really, was it? What did it matter if Bill chose to bed this 
Denys, or any number of Denyses, when I wasn’t around? It wasn’t as though I had 
been planning to marry the guy.
 
* * * *
 
CHAPTER VII
 
None of the crew was in the entrance lock when I came to the PhoenixCorp ship, 
but I could hear them. They were all gathered in the dining hall, laughing and 
chattering excitedly. When I got there, I saw that the room was darkened. They 
were all poking at virtuals of one scene or another as Hans displayed them, and 
no one noticed me as I came in.
 
I hooked myself inconspicuously to a belt near the door and looked around. I saw 
Bill and his sperm receptacle of the moment hooked chastely apart, Denys 
chirping at Mason-Manley, Bill talking into his recorders. Mason-Manley was 
squeezing Denys’s shoulder excitedly, presumably because he was caught up in the 
euphoria of the moment, but he seemed to be enjoying touching her, too. If Bill 
noticed, he didn’t appear to mind. But then, Bill was not a jealous type; that 
was one of the things I liked about him.
 
Until recently I hadn’t thought that I was, either.
 
Well, I told myself, I wasn’t. It wasn’t a question of jealousy. It was a 
question of— oh, call it good manners; if Bill chose to bed a bimbo now and 
then, that was his business, but it did not excuse his hauling the little tart 
all the way from Earth to shove her in my face.
 
A meter or so away from me, Mark Rohrbeck was watching the pictures, looking a 
lot less gloomy than usual. When he saw me at last, he waved and pointed. “Look, 
Ms. Moynlin!” he cried. “Blimps!”
 
So I finally got around to looking at the display. In the sector he was 
indicating, we were looking down on one of the Crabber planet’s oceans. There 
were a lot of clouds, but some areas had only scattered puffs. And there among 
them were eight fat little silver sausages, in a V formation, that surely were 
far too hard-edged and uniform in shape to be clouds.
 
“These are the objects we viewed before, Ms. Moynlin,” Hans’s voice informed me. 
“Now we can discriminate the individual elements, and they are certainly 
artifacts.”
 
“Sure, but why do you say they’re blimps? How do you know they aren’t ships of 
some kind?” I asked, and then said at once, “No, cancel that,” as I figured it 
out for myself. If they had been surface vessels, they would have produced some 
sort of wake in the water. They were aircraft, all right, so I changed the 
question to, “Where are they going, do you think?”
 
“Wait a minute,” June Terple said. “Hans, display the projection for Ms. 
Moyn­lin.”
 
That sheet of ocean disappeared, and in its place was a globe of the Crabber 
planet, its seas in blue, land masses in gray. Eight stylized little blimp 
figures, greatly out of proportion, were over the ocean. From them a silvery 
line extended to the northeast, with another line, this one golden, going back 
past the day-night terminator toward the southwest. Terple said, “It looks like 
the blimps came from around that group of islands at the end of the gold 
course-line, and they’re heading toward the Dumbbell continents up on the right. 
Unfortunately, those are pretty far north. We can’t get a good picture of them 
from here, but Hans has enhanced some of the data on the island the blimps came 
from. Hans?”
 
The globe disappeared. Now we were looking down on one of those greenish 
infrared scenes: shoreline, bay—and something burning around the bay. Once again 
the outlines of the burning areas were geometrically unnatural. “As we 
spec­ulated, it is almost certainly a community, Ms. Moynlin,” Hans informed me. 
“However, it seems to have suffered some catastrophe, similar to what we 
observed on the continent that is now out of sight.”
 
“What kind of catastrophe?” I demanded.
 
Hans was all apologetic. “We simply don’t have the data yet, Ms. Moynlin. A 
great fire, one might conjecture. I’m sure it will make sense when we have 
better resolution — in a few hours, perhaps. I’ll keep you posted.”
 
“Please do,” I said. And then, without planning it, I, found myself saying, “I 
think I’ll go back to my ship and lie down for a while.”
 
“But you just got here,” Mark Rohrbeck said, surprised and, I thought with some 
pleasure, maybe a little disappointed. Bill Tartch looked suddenly happy and 
began to unhook himself from his perch. I gave a little shake of the head to 
both of them.
 
“I’m sorry. I just want to rest,” I said. “It’s been an exhausting few days.”
 
* * * *
 
That wasn’t particularly true, of course —not any part of it. I wasn’t really 
tired, and I didn’t want to rest. I just wanted to be by myself, or at any rate 
with no company but Hypatia, which comes to pretty much the same thing.
 
As I came into my ship, she greeted me in motherly mode. “Too many people, hon?” 
she asked. “Shall I make you a drink?”
 
I shook my head to the drink, but she was right about the other part of it. 
“Funny thing,” I said, sprawling on the couch. “The more people I meet, the 
fewer I am comfortable around.”
 
“Meat people are generally boring,” she agreed. “How about a cup of tea?”
 
I shrugged, and immediately heard the activity begin in the kitchen. Hypatia had 
her faults, but she was a pretty good mom when I needed her to be. I lay back on 
the couch and gazed at the ceiling. “You know what?” I said. “I’m be­ginning to 
think I ought to settle down on the island.”
 
“You could do that, yes,” she said diplomatically. Then, because she was 
Hy­patia, she added, “Let’s see, the last time you were there, you stayed 
exactly eleven days, wasn’t it? About six months ago?”
 
She had made me feel defensive —again. I said. “I had things to do.”
 
“Of course you did. Then the time before that wasn’t quite that long, was it? 
Just six days —and that was over a year ago.”
 
“You’ve made your point, Hypatia. Talk about something else.”
 
“Sure thing, boss.” So she did. Mostly what she chose to talk about was what my 
various holdings had been doing in the few hours since I’d checked them last. I 
wasn’t listening. After a few minutes of it, I swallowed the tea she’d made for 
me and stood up. “I’m going to soak in the tub for a while.”
 
“I’ll run it for you, hon. Hon? They’ve got some new pictures from the Crabber 
planet if you want to see them while you soak.”
 
“Why not?” And by the time I’d shucked my clothes the big onyx tub was full, the 
temperature perfect as always, and one corner of the bathroom was concealed by 
one of Hypatia’s simulations.                       
 
The new display was almost filled by what looked like hundreds, maybe thousands, 
of tiny buildings. We were looking down at them from something like a 
forty-five-degree angle, and I couldn’t make out many details. Their sun must 
have been nearly overhead, because there weren’t many shadows to bring out 
details.
 
“This is the biggest city they’ve found yet,” Hypatia informed me. “It’s inland 
on the western part of the squarish continent in the southern hemisphere, where 
two big rivers come together. If you look close, you’ll see there’s a suggestion 
of things moving in the streets, but we can’t make out just what yet. However—”
 
I stopped her. “Skip the commentary,” I ordered. “Just keep showing me the 
pictures. If I have any questions, I’ll ask.”
 
“If that’s what you want, hon.” She sounded aggrieved. Hypatia doesn’t like to 
be told to shut up, but she did.
 
The pictures kept coming, one city after another, now a bay with what looked 
like surface ships of some kind moored in it, now some more blimps sailing 
peacefully along, now what might have been a wide-gauge railroad with a train 
steaming over a bridge. I couldn’t really see the tracks, only the bridge and a 
hazy line that stretched before and after it across the countryside. What I 
could see best was the locomotive, and most of all the long white trail of steam 
from its stack.
 
I watched for a while, then waved the display off. I closed my eyes and lay back 
to let the sweet-smelling foamy waters make me feel whole and content again. As 
I had done many thousands of times, sometimes with success.
 
This was one of the successes. The hot tub did its work. I felt myself drifting 
off to a relaxed and welcome sleep. ...
 
And then, suddenly, a vagrant thought crossed my mind, and I wasn’t relaxed 
anymore.
 
I got out of the tub and climbed into the shower stall, turning it on full; I 
let cold water hammer at me for a while, then changed it to hot. When I got out, 
I pulled on a robe.
 
As I was drying my hair, the door opened and Hypatia appeared, looking at me 
with concern. “I’m afraid what I told you about Tartch upset you, hon,” she 
said, oozing with compassion. “You don’t really care what he does, though, do 
you?”
 
I said, “Of course not,” wondering if it were true.
 
“That’s my girl,” she said approvingly. “There are some new scenes, too.”
 
They appeared; she didn’t wait to see if I wanted them on. I watched the 
changing scenes for a while, then decided I didn’t. I turned to Hypatia. “Turn 
it off,” I said. “I want to ask you something.”
 
She didn’t move, but the scene disappeared. “What’s that, Klara?”
 
“While I was dozing in the tub, I thought for a moment I might fall asleep, and 
slip down into the water and drown. Then I thought you surely wouldn’t let that 
happen, because you’d be watching, wouldn’t you?”
 
“I’m always aware of any problems that confront you, Klara.”
 
“And then it occurred to me that you might be tempted to let me go ahead and 
drown, just so you could get me into that machine storage you’re always trying 
to sell me. So I got out of the tub and into the shower.”
 
I pulled my hair back and fastened it with a barrette, watching her. She didn’t 
speak, just stood there with her usual benign and thoughtful expression. “So, 
would you?” I demanded.
 
She looked surprised. “You mean would I deliberately let you drown? Oh, I don’t 
think I could do that, Klara. As a general rule I’m not programmed to go against 
your wishes, not even if it were for your own good. That would be for your good, 
you know. Machine storage would mean eternal life for you, Klara, or as close as 
makes no difference. And no more of the sordid little concerns of the meat that 
cause you so much distress.”
 
I turned my back on her and went into my bedroom to dress. She followed, in her 
excellent simulation of walking. What I wanted to know was how general her 
general rule was, and what she would have deemed a permissible exception. But as 
I opened my mouth to ask her, she spoke up.
 
“Oh, Klara,” she said. “They’ve found something of interest. Let me show you.” 
She didn’t wait for a response; at once the end of the room lit up.
 
We were looking again at that first little fleet of blimps. They were nearly at 
the coast, but they weren’t in their tidy V formation anymore. They were 
scattered over the sky, and two of them were falling to the sea, blazing with 
great gouts of flame. Small things I couldn’t quite make out were buzzing around 
and between them.
 
“My God,” I said. “Something’s shooting them down!”
 
Hypatia nodded. “So it would appear, Klara. It looks as though the Crabbers’ 
blimps are filled with hydrogen, to burn the way they do. That suggests a rather 
low level of technological achievement, but give them credit. They aren’t 
primi­tives, anyway. They’re definitely civilized enough to be having themselves 
a pretty violent little war.”
 
* * * *
 
CHAPTER VIII
 
There wasn’t any doubt about it. The Crabbers were industriously killing each 
other in a kind of aerial combat that was right out of the old stories of World 
War I. I couldn’t see much of the planes that were shooting the blimps down, but 
they were really there, and what was going on was a real old-fashioned dogfight.
 
I don’t know what I had hoped to see when we brought the long-dead Crabbers back 
to some kind of life. But that definitely wasn’t it. When the scenes changed — 
Hans had been assiduous in zooming down to wherever on the planet’s surface 
things were going on —it didn’t improve. It got worse. I saw a harbor crammed 
with surface vessels, where a great river joined the sea; but some of the ships 
were on fire, and others appeared to be sinking. “Submarines did that, I think,” 
Hypatia judged. “Or it could possibly be from bombing planes or mines, but my 
money’s on submarines.” Those strange patterns of heat in the cities weren’t a 
mystery any longer—the cities had been burned to the ground by incendiaries, 
leaving only glowing coals. Then, when we were looking down, on a plain where 
flashes of white and reddish light sparkled all over the area, we couldn’t see 
what was making them, but Hypatia had a guess for that, too. “Why,” she said, 
sounding interested, “I do believe we’re looking at a large-scale tank battle.”
 
And so on, and on.
 
So Hans’s promise had been kept. As soon as the magnification got a little 
better, it all did begin to make sense, just as the shipmind had promised. (I 
mean, if war makes any sense in the first place, that’s the sense the pictures 
made.) The robots on the dish were still slaving away at adding the final mirror 
segments, and the pictures kept getting better and better.
 
Well, I don’t know if I mean “better,” exactly. The pictures were certainly 
clearer and more detailed, in some cases I would have to say even more 
excruciatingly detailed. But what they all showed was rack and ruin and death 
and destruction.
 
And their war was so pointless! They didn’t have to bother killing each other. 
Their star would do it for them soon enough. All unknowing, every one of those 
Crabbers was racing toward a frightful death as their sun burst over them.
 
An hour earlier I had been pitying them for the fate that awaited them. But now 
I couldn’t say I thought their fate was all that unjust.
 
Hypatia was looking at me in that motherly way she sometimes assumes. “I’m 
afraid all this is disturbing for you, Klara,” she murmured. “Would it cheer you 
up to invite Mr. Tartch aboard? He’s calling. He says he wants to talk to you 
about the new pictures.”
 
“Sure he does,” I said, pretty sure that Bill really wanted to talk about why he 
didn’t deserve being treated so standoffishly by me. “No. Tell him I’m asleep 
and don’t want to be disturbed. And leave me alone for a while.”
 
* * * *
 
As soon as she had left and the door had closed behind her, I actually did throw 
myself onto my big, round bed. I didn’t sleep, though. I just lay there, staring 
at myself in the mirror on the ceiling and doing my best not to think about 
anything.
 
Unfortunately, that’s not something I’m good at. I could get myself to not think 
about those damn nasty Crabbers, but then I found my mind quickly turned itself 
to thinking whether it was better to let Bill Tartch hang or tell him to come in 
and then have a knock-down, drag-out, breaking-up fight with him to get it all 
over with. And when I made myself stop thinking about Bill Tartch, I found 
myself wondering why I’d squandered a fairly hefty chunk of my surplus cash on 
poking into the lives of a race that didn’t know any better than to take a 
reasonably nice little planet and turn it into a charnel house.
 
I thought of calling Hypatia back in for another dull session of playing with my 
investments. I thought wistfully of taking another look at my island. And then I 
thought, screw it. I got myself into this thing. I might as well go ahead and 
see it through. . . .
 
But a more pleasant thought had been stirring in the background of my mind, so 
first there was something else I wanted from Hypatia.
 
I put on the rest of my clothes and went out to where she was reclining 
grace­fully on the couch, just as though she’d been lounging there all along. 
I’m sure she had been watching those charnel-house scenes as attentively as 
anyone on the Phoenix ship—the difference being, of course, that Hypatia didn’t 
have to bother with turning the optical display on for her own needs. But I 
needed it, so she asked politely, “Shall I display the data for you again, 
Klara?”
 
“In a minute,” I said. “First, tell me all about Mark Rohrbeck.”
 
I expected one of those tolerantly knowing looks from her. I got it, too. But 
she obediently began to recite all his stats. Mark’s parents had died when he 
was young, and he had been brought up by his grandfather, who had once made his 
living as a fisherman on Lake Superior. “Mostly the old man fished for sea 
lampreys — know what they are, Klara? They’re ugly things. They have big sucking 
disks instead of jaws. They attach themselves to other fish and suck their guts 
out until they die. I don’t think you’d want to eat a sea lamprey yourself, but 
they were about all that was left in the lake. Mr. Rohrbeck sold them for export 
to Europe —people there thought they were a delicacy. They said they tasted like 
escargot. Then, of course, the food factories came along and put him out of 
business — “
 
“Get back to Mark Rohrbeck,” I ordered. “I want to hear about the man himself. 
Briefly.”
 
“Oh. Sorry. Well, he got a scholarship at the University of Minnesota, did well, 
went on to grad school at MIT, made a pretty fair reputation in computer 
science, married, had two kids, but then his wife decided there was a dentist 
she liked better than Rohrbeck, so she dumped him. And as I’ve mentioned 
before,” she said appreciatively, “he does have really great genes. Does that 
cover it?”
 
I mulled that over for a moment, then said, “Just about. Don’t go drawing any 
conclusions from this, do you hear?”
 
“Certainly, Klara,” she said, but she still had that look.
 
I sighed. “All right. Now turn that damn thing back on.”
 
“Of course, Klara,” she said, unsurprised, and did. “I’m afraid it hasn’t been 
getting any better.”
 
* * * *
 
It hadn’t. It was just more of the same. I watched doggedly for a while, and 
then I said, “All right, Hypatia. I’ve seen enough.”
 
She made it disappear, looking at me curiously. “There’ll be better images when 
they finish with the mirror. By then we should be able to see actual individual 
Crabbers.”
 
“Lovely,” I said, not meaning it, and then I burst out. “My God, what’s the 
matter with those people? There’s plenty of room on the planet for all of them. 
Why didn’t they just stay home and live in peace?”
 
It wasn’t meant to be a real question, but Hypatia answered it for me anyway. 
“What do you expect? They’re meat people,” she said succinctly.
 
I wasn’t letting her get away with that. “Come on, Hypatia! Human beings are 
meat people, too, and we don’t go tearing halfway around the world just to kill 
each other!”
 
“Oh, do you not? What a short memory you have, Klara dear. Think of those 
twentieth-century world wars. Think of the Crusades, tens of thousands of 
Euro­peans dragging themselves all the way around the Mediterranean Sea to kill 
as many Moslems as they could. Think of the Spanish conquistadors, murdering 
their way across the Americas. Of course,” she added’, “those people were all 
Christians.”
 
I blinked at her. “You think what we’re looking at is a religious war?”
 
She shrugged gracefully. “Who knows? Meat people don’t need reasons to kill each 
other, dear.”
 
* * * *
 
CHAPTER IX
 
Hypatia had been right about what gravitational lensing plus that big mirror 
could do.
 
By the time the mirror was complete, we could make out plenty of detail. We were 
even able to see individual centaur-like Crabbers —the same build, four legs and 
upright torso, that they’d inherited from the primitives I’d seen, but no longer 
very primitive at all.
 
Well, what I mean is that sometimes we could see them, anyway. Not always. The 
conditions had to be right. We couldn’t see them when it was night on their part 
of the planet, of course, except in those ghosty-looking IR views, and we 
couldn’t see them at all when they were blanketed with clouds we couldn’t peer 
through. But we could see enough. More than enough, as far as I was concerned.
 
The PhoenixCorp crew was going crazy trying to keep up with the incoming data. 
Bill seemed to have decided to be patient with my unpredictable moods, so he 
paid me only absentminded attention. He kept busy working. He and Denys were 
ecstatically interrupting everyone in their jobs so that he could record their 
spot reactions, while the crew did their best to get on with their jobs anyway. 
June Terple stopped sleeping entirely, torn between watching the new images as 
they arrived and nagging her shipmind to make sure we would have warning in time 
to get the hell out of there before the star blew.
 
Only Mark Rohrbeck seemed to have time on his hands. Which was just the way I 
wanted it.
 
I found him in the otherwise empty sleep chamber, where Hans had obligingly set 
up a duplicate show of the incoming scenes for him. Mark’s main area of concern 
was the shipmind and the functions it controlled, but all those things were 
working smoothly without his attention. He was spending his time gazing morosely 
in the general direction of the pictures.
 
I hooked myself up nearby. “Nasty, isn’t it?” I said sociably, to cheer him up.
 
He didn’t want to be cheered. “You mean the Crabbers?” Although his eyes had 
been on the display, his mind evidently hadn’t. He thought it over for a moment, 
then gave his verdict. “Oh, I guess it’s nasty enough, all right. It isn’t 
exactly what we were all hoping for, that’s for sure. But it all happened a long 
time ago, though, didn’t it?”
 
“And you’ve got more immediate problems on your mind,” I offered helpfully.
 
He gave me a gloomy imitation of a smile. “I see the shipminds have been 
gossiping again. Well, it isn’t losing Doris that bothers me so much,” he said 
after a moment. “I mean, that hurt, too. I thought I loved her, but—Well, it 
didn’t work out, did it? Now she’s got this other guy, so what the hell? But” 
—he swal­lowed unhappily—”the thing is, she’s keeping the kids.”     
 
He was not only a nice man, he was beginning to touch my heart. I said, sounding 
sympathetic and suddenly feeling that way, too, “And you miss them?”
 
“Hell! I’ve been missing them most of the time since they were born,” he said 
self-accusingly. “I guess that’s what went wrong. I’ve been away working so 
much, I suppose I can’t blame Doris for getting her lovemaking from somebody 
else.”
 
That triggered something in me that I hadn’t known was there. “No!” I said, 
surprising myself by my tone. “That’s wrong. Blame her.”
 
I startled Rohrbeck, too. He looked at me as though I had suddenly sprouted 
horns, but he didn’t get a chance to speak. June Terple came flying by the room 
and saw us. She stuck her nose in, grabbing a hold-on to yell at Mark in 
passing. “Rohrbeck! Get your ass in gear! I want you to make sure Hans is 
shifting focus as fast as possible. We could be losing all kinds of data!” And 
then she was gone again, to wherever she was gone to.
 
Mark gave me a peculiar look, but then he shrugged and waved his hands to show 
that when the boss gave orders, even orders to do what he had already done, he 
couldn’t just stay and talk anymore, and then he was gone as well.
 
I didn’t blame him for the peculiar look. I hadn’t realized I was so sensitive 
in the matter of two-timing partners. But apparently I was.
 
* * * *
 
Even though I was the boss, I had no business keeping the PhoenixCorp people 
from doing their jobs. Anyway, there was more bustle and confusion going on 
there than I liked. I went back to my ship to stay out of everybody’s way, 
watching the pictures as they arrived with only Hypatia for company.
 
She started the projections up as soon as I arrived, without being asked, and I 
sat down to observe.
 
If you didn’t think of the Crabbers as people, what they were doing was 
certainly interesting. The Crabbers themselves were, for that matter. I could 
see traces of those primitive predators in the civilized —civilized!—versions 
before me. Now, of course, they had machines and wore, clothes and, if you 
didn’t mind the extra limbs, looked rather impressive in their gaudy tunics and 
spiked leggings, and the shawl things they wore on their heads that were 
ornamented with, I guessed, maybe insignia of rank. Or junk jewelry, maybe, but 
most of them were definitely in one or another kind of uniform. Most of the 
civilized ones, anyway. In the interior of the south continent, where it looked 
like rain forest and savanna, were lots of what looked like noncivilized ones. 
Those particular Crabbers didn’t have machines, or much in the way of clothing 
either. They lived off the land, and they seemed to spend a lot of time gaping 
up worriedly at the sky, where fleets of blimps and double-winged aircraft 
buzzed by now and then.
 
The civilized ones seemed to be losing some of their civilization. When Hans 
showed us close-ups of one of the bombed-out cities, I could see streams of 
peo­ple—mostly civilians, I guessed —making their way out of the ruins, carrying 
bun­dles, leading kids or holding them. A lot of them were limping, just 
dragging themselves along. Some were being pulled in wagons or sledlike things.
 
“They look like they’re all sick,” I said, and Hypatia nodded.
 
“Undoubtedly some of them are, dear,” she informed me. “It’s a war, after all. 
You shouldn’t be thinking just in terms of bombs and guns, you know. Did you 
never hear of biological warfare?”
 
I stared at her. “You mean they’re spreading disease? As a weapon?”
 
“I believe that is likely, and not at all without precedent,” she informed me, 
preparing to lecture. She started by reminding me of the way the first American 
colonists in New England gave smallpox-laden blankets to the Indians to get them 
out of the way—”The colonists were Christians, of course, and very religious” — 
and went on from there. I wasn’t listening. I was watching the pictures from the 
Crabber planet.
 
They didn’t get better. For one moment, in one brief scene, I saw something that 
touched me. It was an archipelago in the Crabber planet’s tropical zone. One bit 
looked a little like my island, reef and lagoon and sprawling vegetation over 
everything. Aboriginal Crabbers were there, too. But they weren’t alone. There 
was also a company of the ones in uniform, herding the locals into a village 
square, for what purpose I could not guess—to draft them? to shoot them 
dead?—but certainly not a good one. And, when I looked more closely, I saw all 
the plants were dying. More bioweapons, this time directed at crops? Defoliants? 
I didn’t know, but it looked as though someone had done something to that 
vegetation.
 
I had had enough. Without intending it, I came to a decision.
 
I interrupted my shipmind in the middle of her telling me about America’s old 
Camp Detrick. “Hypatia? How much spare capacity do you have?”
 
It didn’t faze her. She abandoned the history of human plague-spreading and 
responded promptly. “Quite a lot, Klara.”
 
“Enough to store all the data from the installation? And maybe take Hans aboard, 
too?”
 
She looked surprised. I think she actually was. “That’s a lot of data, Klara, 
but, yes, I can handle it. If necessary. What’ve you got in mind?”
 
“Oh,” I said, “I was just thinking. Let me see those refugees again.”
 
* * * *
 
CHAPTER X
 
I kept one eye on the time, but I had plenty for what I wanted to do. I even 
gave myself a little diversion first. I went to my island.
 
I don’t mean in person, of course. I simply checked out everything on Raiwea 
through my monitors and listened to the reports from the department heads. That 
was almost as satisfying. Just looking at the kids, growing up healthy and happy 
and free the way they are — it always makes me feel good. Or, in this case, at 
least a little better.
 
Then I left my remote-accessed Raiwea and went into the reality of the Phoenix 
ship.
 
Hans was busily shifting focus every time a few new frames came in, so now the 
pictures were coming in faster than anybody could take them in. That couldn’t be 
helped. There was a whole world to look at, and anyway it didn’t matter if we 
saw it all in real time. All the data were being stored for later analysis and 
inter­pretation—by somebody else, though. Not by me. I had seen all I wanted.
 
So, evidently, had most of the Phoenix crew. Starminder and Julia Ibarruru were 
in the eating chamber, but they were talking to each other about the Core and 
paying no attention to the confusing images pouring in. Bill Tartch had his 
cameras turned on the display, but he was watching the pictures only with sulky 
half-attention, while Denys hung, sound asleep, beside him. “What’s the use of 
this, Klara?” he demanded as soon as he saw me. “I can’t get any decent footage 
from this crap, and most of the crew’s gone off to sleep.”
 
I was looking at Denys. The little tart even snored prettily. “They needed it,” 
I told him. “How about Terple?”
 
He shrugged. “Kekuskian was here a minute ago, looking for her. I don’t know 
whether he found her or not. Listen, how about a little more of your interview, 
so I won’t be wasting my time entirely?”
 
“Maybe later,” I said, not meaning it, and went in pursuit of June Terple.
 
I heard her voice raised in anger long before I saw her. Kekuskian had found 
her, all right, and the two of them were having a real cat-and-dog fight. She 
was yelling at him. “I don’t give a snake’s fart what you think you have to 
have, Oleg! We’re going! We have to get the whole installation the hell out of 
here while we’re still in one piece.”
 
“You can’t do that!” he screeched back at her. “What’s the point of my coming 
out here at all if I can’t observe the supernova?”
 
“The point,” she said fiercely, “is to stay alive, and that’s what we’re going 
to do. I’m in charge here, Kekuskian! I give the orders, and I’m giving them 
now. Hans! Lay in a course for the neutron star!”
 
That’s when I got into the spat. “Cancel that, Hans,” I ordered. “From here on 
in, you’ll be taking your orders from me. Is that understood?”
 
“It is understood, Ms. Moynlin,” his voice said, as calm and unsurprised as 
ever. Terple wasn’t calm at all. I made allowances for the woman; she hadn’t had 
much sleep, and she was under a lot of strain. But for a minute there I thought 
she was going to hit me.                                       
 
“Now what the hell do you think you’re doing, Moynlin?” she demanded 
dan­gerously.                                                  
 
“I’m taking command,” I explained. “We’re going to stay for a while. I want to 
see that star blow up, too.”
 
“Yes!” Kekuskian shouted.
 
Terple didn’t even look at him. She was giving her whole attention to me, and 
she wasn’t in a friendly mood. “Are you crazy? Do you want to get killed?”
 
It crossed my mind to wonder if that would be so bad, but what I said, quite 
reasonably, was, “I don’t mean we have to stay right here and let the star fry 
us. Not the people, anyway. We’ll evacuate the crew and watch the blowup on the 
remote. There’s plenty of room for everybody in the two ships. I can take three 
or four with me, and Bill can take the others in his rental.”
 
She was outraged and incredulous. “Klara! The radiation will be enormous! It 
could destroy the whole installation!”
 
“Fine,” I said. “I understand that. So I’ll buy you a new one.”
 
She stared at me in shock. “Buy a new one! Klara, do you have any idea of what 
it would cost—”
 
Then she stopped herself short and gave me a long look. “Well,” she said, not a 
bit mollified, but more or less resigned to accepting the facts of life, “I 
guess you do know, at that. If that’s what you want to do, well, you’re the 
boss.”
 
And, as usual, I was.
 
* * * *
 
So when I gave orders, no one objected. I got everybody back in the dining 
chamber and explained that we were abandoning ship. I told Terple she could come 
on my ship, along with Starminder and Ibarruru. “It’s only a few days to Earth; 
the three of you can all fit in my guest bedroom. Mason-Manley and Kekuskian can 
go with Bill and Denys. It’ll be a little crowded in his rental, but they’ll 
manage.”
 
“What about Hans and me?” Rohrbeck asked, sounding puzzled.
 
I said offhandedly, “Oh, you can come with me. We’ll find a place for you.”
 
He didn’t look as thrilled as he might have at the idea of sailing off through 
space with a beautiful, unattached woman, such as me. He didn’t even look 
in­terested. “I don’t just mean me personally, Klara,” he said testily. “I mean 
me and my shipmind. I put a lot of work into designing Hans! I don’t want him 
ruined!”
 
I wasn’t thrilled by his reaction, either, but I do like a man who likes his 
work. “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I asked Hypatia about that. She says she 
has plenty of extra capacity. We’ll just copy him and take him along.”
 
* * * *
 
CHAPTER XI
 
I had never seen a supernova in real time before —well, how many people have? — 
but that, at least, was not a disappointment. The show was everything it 
promised to be. We were hovering in our two ships, a few million kilometers off 
the prime focus. Hans was taking his orders from Kekuskian now, and He had 
ditched the Crabber planet for good to concentrate on the star.
 
Hypatia whispered in my ear that, on his rental, Bill Tartch was pissing and 
moaning about the decision. He had wanted to catch every horrible, tragic bit, 
if possible right down to the expressions on the faces of the Crabbers when they 
saw their sun go all woogly right over their heads. I didn’t. I had seen enough 
of the Crabbers to last me.
 
In my main room we had a double display. Hypatia had rigged my ship’s ex­ternal 
optics so we could see the great mirror and the tiny Phoenix ship, together like 
toys in one corner of the room, but the big thing was the Crabber star itself as 
seen from the PhoenixCorp ship. It wasn’t dangerous — Hypatia said. Hans had 
dimmed it down, and anyway we were seeing only visible light, none of the 
wide-spectrum stuff that would be pouring out of it in a minute. Even so, it was 
huge, two meters across and so bright we had to squint to watch it.
 
I don’t know much about stellar surfaces, but this particular star looked sick 
to me. Prominences stuck out all over its perimeter, and ugly sunspots spotted 
its face. And then, abruptly, it began to happen. The star seemed to shrink, as 
though Hans had zoomed back away from it. But that wasn’t what was going on. The 
star really was collapsing on itself, and it was doing it fast. “That’s the 
implosion,” Hypatia whispered to me. While we watched, it went from two meters 
to a meter and a half, to a meter, to smaller still —
 
And then it began to expand again, almost as fast as it had shrunk, and became 
far more bright. Hypatia whispered, “And that’s the rebound. I’ve told Hans to 
cut back on the intensity. It’s going to get worse.”
 
It did.
 
It blossomed bigger and brighter—and angrier—until it filled the room and, just 
as I was feeling as though I were being swallowed up by that stellar hell, the 
picture began to break up. I heard Terple moan, “Look at the mirror!” And then I 
understood what was happening to our image. The little toy PhoenixCorp ship and 
mirror were being hammered by the outpouring of raw radiation from the 
supernova. No filters. No cutouts. The PhoenixCorp vessels were blazing bright 
themselves, reflecting the flood of blinding light that was pouring on them from 
the gravitational lensing. As I watched, the mirror began to warp. The flimsy 
sheets of mirror metal peeled off, exploding into bright plumes of plasma, like 
blossoming fireworks on the Fourth of July. For a moment we saw the wire mesh 
underneath the optical plates. Then it was gone, too, and all that was left was 
the skeleton of reinforcing struts, hot and glowing.
 
I thought we’d seen everything we were going to see of the star. I was wrong. A 
moment later the image of the supernova reappeared before us. It wasn’t 
any­where near as colossally huge or frighteningly bright as it had been before, 
but it was still something scary to look at. “What—?” I began to ask, but 
Hypatia had anticipated me.
 
“We’re looking at the star from the little camera in the center of the dish now, 
Klara,” she explained. “We’re not getting shipside magnification from the mirror 
anymore. That’s gone. I’m a little worried about the camera, too. The 
gravitational lensing alone is pretty powerful, and the camera might not last 
much” —she paused as the image disappeared for good, simply winked out and was 
gone — “longer,” she finished, and, of course, it hadn’t.
 
* * * *
 
I took a deep breath and looked around my sitting room. Terple had tears in her 
eyes. Ibarruru and Starminder sat together, silent and stunned, and Mark 
Rohrbeck was whispering to his shipmind. “That’s it,” I said briskly. “The 
show’s over.”
 
Rohrbeck spoke up first, sounding almost cheerful. “Hans has all the data,” he 
reported. “He’s all right.”
 
Terple had her hand up. “Klara? About the ship? It took a lot of heat, but the 
dish burned pretty fast and the hull’s probably intact, so if we can get a 
repair crew out there — “
 
“Right away,” I promised. “Well, almost right away. First we go home.”
 
I was looking at Rohrbeck. He had looked almost cheerful for a moment, but the 
cheer was rapidly fading. When he saw my eyes on him, he gave me a little shrug. 
“Where’s that?” he asked glumly.          
 
I wanted to pat his shoulder, but it was a little early for that. I just said 
sym­pathetically, ‘You’re missing your kids, aren’t you? Well, I’ve got a place 
with plenty of them. And, as the only grown-up male on my island, you’ll be the 
only dad they’ve got.”
 
* * * *
 
CHAPTER XII
 
That blast from the supernova didn’t destroy the PhoenixCorp ship after all. The 
mirror was a total write-off, of course, but the ship itself was only cooked a 
little. June Terple stooged around for a bit while it cooled down, then went 
back with what was left of her crew. Which wasn’t much.
 
Mason-Manley talked his way back into her good graces once Denys wasn’t around 
anymore; Kekuskian promised to come out for the actual blowup, eighty years from 
now, provided he was still alive; and, of course, she still had the 
in­destructible Hans, now back in his own custom-designed datastore. The rest of 
her people were replacements. Starminder went back to her family in the Core, 
and I paid Ibarruru’s fare to go along with her as a kind of honorary citizen 
ambassador.
 
Naturally, Terple invited me to join them for their stint at the neutron star — 
couldn’t really avoid it, since the new money was coming from the same place as 
the old, namely mostly me. I said maybe, to be polite, but I really meant no. 
One look at the death of a world was enough for me. Bill Tarteh’s special show 
on the Crabbers went on the net within days. He had great success with it, 
easily great enough so that he didn’t really mind the fact that he no longer had 
me.
 
Hypatia kept copies of all the files for me, and those last little bits of data 
stayed with me on my island for a long time. I played pieces of them now and 
then, for any of the kids that showed an interest, and for their moms, too, when 
they did. But mostly I played them for me.                                
 
Mark Rohrbeck stayed with me on Raiwea for a while, too, though not too long. 
That’s the way my island works. When my kids are ready for the world outside, I 
let them go. It was the same with Rohrbeck. For him it took just a little over 
three months. Then he was ready, and he kissed me good-bye, and I let him go.
 
* * * *