Beyond the Blue Event Horizon Read Online Free PDF Page B

cloud in the first place. You can’t get the observed nearly parabolic orbits out of an Oort cloud; so said R. A. Lyttleton. But then somebody else said, well, who says the distribution can’t be non-Maxwellian? And so it proved. It’s all lumpy. There are clusters of comets, and great volumes of space with almost none.
    And while no doubt the Heechee had set their machine to graze in rich comet pastures, that had been a lot of hundreds of thousands of years ago, and it was now in a kind of cometary desert. If it worked, it had little left to work on. (Maybe it had eaten them all up?)
    I fell asleep wondering what CHON-food would taste like. It couldn’t be a lot worse than what we had been eating for three and a half years, which was mainly recycled us.
    Day 1285. Janine almost got to me today. I was playing chess with Vera, everybody asleep, happy enough, when her hands came around the big earpieces and covered my eyes. “Cut it out, Janine,” I said. When I turned around she was pouting.
    “I just wanted to use Vera,” she said.
    “For what? Another hot love letter to one of your movie stars?”
    “You treat me like a child,” she said. For a wonder, she was fully dressed; her face shone, her hair was damp and pulled down straight to the back of her neck. She looked like your model serious-minded young teen-ager. “What I wanted,” she said, “was to go over thruster alignments with Vera. Since you won’t help me.”
    One of the reasons Janine was along with us was that she was smart-we all were; had to be to be accepted for the mission. And one of the things she was smart at was getting at me. “All right,” I said, “you’re right, what can I say? Vera? Recess the game and give us the program for providing propulsion for the Food Factory.”
    “Certainly,” she said,”. . . Paul.” And the board disappeared, and in its place she built up a holo of the Food Factory. She had updated her specs from the telescopic views we had obtained, and so it was shown complete with its dust cloud and the glob of dirty snowball adhering to one side. “Cancel the cloud, Vera,” I ordered, and the blur disappeared and the Food Factory showed up like an engineering drawing. “Okay, Janine. What’s the first step?”
    “We dock,” she said at once. “We hope the lander facsimile fits, and we dock it. If we can’t dock we link up with braces to some point on the surface; either way, our ship becomes a rigid part of the structure, so we can use our thrust for attitude control.”
    “Next?”
    “We all dismount the number-one thruster and brace it to the aft section of the factory-there.” She pointed out the place on the holo. “We slave it to the board here, and as soon as it is installed we activate.”
    “Guidance?”
    “Vera will give us coordinates-oops, sorry, Paul.” She had been drifting out of orientation with me and Vera, and she caught my shoulder with her hand to pull herself back. She kept her hand there. “Then we repeat the process with the other five. By the time we have all six going we have a delta-V of two meters per second per second, running off the 239pu generator. Then we start spreading the mirror foils-“
    “No.”
    “Oh, sure, we inspect all the moorings to see that they’re holding under thrust first; well, I take that for granted. Then we start with solar power, and when we’ve got it all spread we should be up to maybe two and a quarter meters-“
    “At first, Janine. The closer we get in, the more power we get. All right. Now let’s go through the hardware. You’re bracing our ship to the Heechee-metal hull; how do you go about it?”
    And she told me, and kept on telling me; and by gosh she knew it all. The only thing was her hand on my shoulder became a hand under my arm, and it moved across my chest, and began to roam; and all the time she was giving me the specs for coldwelding and how to get collimation for the thrusters, her face serious and concerned, and her