So the cargo-handling carrythings had little to do while the ship was coming in, only to stack the personal possessions of returning personnel. There wasn’t much of that; there were only eight families to be rotated.
A mellow note sounded; the ship was in normal space.
The dockmaster stood over his screens and boards, checked the readings, and called, “Lights!” It wasn’t an order. It was a courtesy for the audience, just to let them know what was happening; the actual extinguishing of the lights, like almost everything else that happened, was controlled by the sensors and the docking programs.
The lights in Bay 2 went out. So, in the same moment, did all the lights on the rest of the Wheel visible through the shell.
And then Sneezy could see the sky.
There was not much to see. There weren’t any stars. The only stars bright enough to be seen from the Watch Wheel were those from their own galaxy, and their eyes didn’t happen to be pointed that way. There were other galaxies by the hundreds of millions in their line of sight, but only a few dozen of them were naked-eye objects, and those only pale, tiny smudges of firefly light.
Then, as the Wheel slowly ~pun through its endless round, the westernmost of the smudges dipped out of sight, and the onlookers murmured.
A pale colorless ificker of light, hard to see, painful to the eyes when seen . . . and then, abruptly, like a slide projected without warning on a screen, there was the ship.
The supply ship was immense, itself a spindle 800 meters long. The shape meant that this time it was an original-Heechee ship, not one of the new human-built ones. Sneezy felt a special glow. He didn’t have anything against the human ships, which were usually either torpedo-shaped or simple cylinders. As everybody knew, the shape made no difference at all in interstellar travel. They could just as easily have been spheres or cubes or chrysanthemums; the shape was only a matter of the whims of the designers. Most of the supply ships that visited the Watch Wheel were human-made and human-crewed-and generally loaded with human recruits, too, so that that minor fraction of the Wheel’s complement that was Heechee was still further outnumbered.
A Heechee ship might mean more Heechee to redress the balance! So thought Sneezy.
But not this time.
The great spindle settled inside the embrace of the Wheel. Its approach course was a corkscrew turn, beginning to twirl to match the Wheel’s own slow spin, so that by the time its teat was touching the hatch of Bay 2 they were synchronized. Rings meshed. Seals locked. From the aft quarters of the ship, cables spun out to the capstans at Bays I and 3, securing themselves and tightening to make the ship an integral part of the structure of the Wheel. The mass shifters in the utility conduits shuddered and chugged, adjusting the balance of the Wheel to match the new increments. Harold stumbled, off balance, as the floor twitched beneath them. Sneezy caught him, and Harold shoved him away. “You take care of yourself, Dopey,” he instructed.
But then the ship was securely locked in, and its wonders began to pour out.
The carrythings were the first to spring into action, hurrying into the cargo hatches and emerging with crates and bales and articles of furnishings and machines. Most could not be identified by sight, but the cargo bay was suddenly brightened with lovely smells as the handlers offloaded crates of fresh fruit, peaches and oranges and berries. “Wow! Gosh! Look at those bananas!” cried Harold as a handler came off the ramp with all four limbs upraised, each one holding a stalk of unripe fruit. “I wish I had one right now!”
“You aren’t supposed to eat them until they turn yellow,” Sneezy pointed out with pride in his knowledge of strange human foods. He got a withering glare from Harold.
“I know that. I mean I wish I had one ripe one now. Or some of those what-do-you-call-them berries.”
Sneezy bent to whisper to his pod for help, then straightened up. “They are strawberries,” he stated. “I wish I had some, too.”
“Strawberries,” Harold whispered. It had been a long time since he had seen a strawberry. The Wheel grew or manufactured most of its own food, but no one had yet got around to a berry patch. It was easy enough to make food with strawberry flavor-or any other flavor imaginable for that matter; CHON-food was endlessly variable. But the crispness, the texture, the smell-no, there was always a difference between CHON-food and the real stuff, and the difference was that the real stuff was wonderful. The boys slid carefully closer to the stacked crates of fruit, inhaling deeply. There was space between the crates and the wall of the bay, out of the way of the carrythings, and the boys fit into that space as no adult could. “I think those are raspberries,” said Harold, peering across stacks of lettuce and carrots and scarlet-ripe tomatoes. “And look, cherries!”
“I would like to have some strawberries best,” said Sneezy wistfully, and a carrything, gently setting down a box marked “Instruments—Fragile,” paused as though listening. It was. It heard. Two of its long handling arms extended themselves to the crates of strawberries, opened one of the crates, extricated a little basket of fruit, resealed the end of the crate, and reached over the other crates to hand the basket to Sneezy. “Why, thank you!” said Sneezy, surprised but polite.
“You are welcome, Sternutator,” said the carrything in Heechee. Sneezy jumped.
“Oh! Do I know you?”
“I was your tai-chi teacher,” the carrything announced. “Give some to Harold.” Then it turned and raced off for the next load.
Harold looked resentful for a moment, then dismissed the emotion as unworthy-who would be jealous of the attentions of a low-grade machine intelligence? The two boys divided the fruit, nipping each berry between fingertips by its short green stem and nibbling it away. The strawberries were perfect. Fully ripe, sugar-sweet, taste fuffilling all the promise of look and smell.
“The people will be out in a minute,” Harold announced, chewing blissfully-and was surprised to see Sneezy suddenly stop eating. The Heechee boy’s eyes were staring at the ship.
Following the direction of Sneezy’s eyes, Harold saw the first of the passengers at last emerging. ~. There were fifteen or twenty of them, adults and children.
That was always interesting, of course. It was the biggest reason the boys were there, to see what new companions or rivals the ship might be bringing them. But the expression on Sneezy’s face was not just curiosity. It was either anger or fear-astonishment, at least, Harold decided, annoyed as he always was because Heechee expressions were hard for a human to read. The newcomers looked human enough to Harold, though there was something about the way they walked, hard to see at this distance, that was odd.
Harold looked again, and saw something else.
The Wheel had turned a bit farther.
Now, just past the bulk of the ship, out in the emptiness of intergalactic space, was the cluster of patches of dirty-yellow light the Wheel was there to watch.
The light was not really yellow to begin with, of course. Spectroscopy showed that far more than ninety percent of the radiation from the kugelblitz was in the violet end of the optical spectrum and beyond; but those frequencies were bad for human or Heechee eyes. The transparent shell had been doped to exclude them. Only the yellow came through.
Harold grinned in satisfaction. “What’s the matter, Dopey?” he said patronizingly. “You suddenly scared about the kugelblitz?”
Sneezy blinked those great, pink, odd-looking Heechee eyes at him. “Scared of the kugelblitz? No. What are you talking about?”
“You look so funny,” Harold explained.
“I’m not funny. I’m mad. Look at that!” Sneezy waved a skinny arm at the dock. “That’s a Heechee ship! And the people are all wearing Ancestor pods! But every one of those people is human.”