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Besides, he had perceived that Janine did it regularly. Lurvy watched them
both, remembered how much trouble it had been to get Janine to bathe on the
long flight up from Earth, and did not comment.
As pilot, therefore captain, Lurvy constituted herself head of the expedition.
She assigned Paul to establish and maintain communication with her father on
the Food Factory, with
Wan's help in dealing with the Dead Men. She assigned Janine, with her own
help and Wan's, to housekeeping tasks like washing their clothes in the tepid
tub. She assigned Wan, with anyone who could be spared, to roam the safe parts
of Heechee Heaven, photographing and recording for transmission to Payter and
Earth. Usually Wan's compaanion was Janine. When someone else could be spared,
the two young people were chaperoned, but that was seldom.
Janine did not seem to mind either way. She had not finished with the
preliminary thrill of Wan's companionship and was in no hurry to move to a
further stage-except when they touched. Or when she caught him staring at her.
Or when she saw the knotted bulge in his ragged kilt. Even then, her fantasies
and reveries were almost as good as that next stage, at least for now. She
played with the Dead Men, and munched on berryfruit, brown-skinned and
green-fleshed, and did her chores, and waited to grow up a little more.
There were not many objections to Lurvy's rule, since she had taken care to
assign tasks that the draftees were willing to do anyhow, which left for
herself such drudgery as going through the backed-up cormuands and persuasions
from Payter, and faroff Earth.
The communication was a long way from satisfactory. Lurvy had not appreciated
Shipboard-
Vera until she had to get along without her. She could not command priority
messages first, or have the computer sort them out by theme. There was no
computer she could use, except the overtaxed one in her own head. The messages
came in higgledy-piggledy, and when she replied, or transmitted reports for
downlink relay to Earth, she had no confidence at all that they were getting
where they were supposed to go.
The Dead Men seemed to be basically read-only memories, interactive but
limited. And their circuits had been further scrambled in the makeshift
attempt to use them for communication to the
Food Factory, a task for which they had never been designed. (But what had
they really been designed for? And by whom?) Wan blustered and bluffed, in his
pose as expert, and then miserably confessed that they were not doing what
they were supposed to do any more. Sometimes he would dial
Tiny Jim and get Henrietta, and sometimes a former-English Lit professor named
Willard; and once he got a voice he had never heard before, shaking and
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
whispering on the near side of inaudibility, muttering on the far side of
madness. "Go to the gold," whimpered Henrietta, fretful as ever, and without
pause Tiny Jim's thick tenor would override: "They'll kill you! They don't
like castaways!"
That was frightening. Especially as Wan assured them that Tiny Jim had always
been the most sensible of the Dead Men. It puzzled Lurvy that she was not more
terrified than she was, but there had been so many alarms and terrors that she
had become used to them. Her circuits were scrambled, too.
And the messages! In one five-minute burst of clear transmission Paul had
recorded fourteen hours of them. Commands from downlink: "Report all control
settings shuttle ship. Attempt secure tissue samples Heechee/Old Ones. Freeze
and store berryfruit leaves, fruits, stems.
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederi...0-%20Beyond%20The%20Blue%20Ev
ent%20Horizon.txt (50 of 121) [1/15/03 6:32:56 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%202%20-%20Beyond
%20The%20Blue%20Event%20Horizon.txt
Exercise extreme caution." Half a dozen separate communications from her
father; he was lonesome;
he didn't feel well; he was not receiving proper medical attention because
they had taken the mobile bio-assay unit away; he was being barraged by
peremptory orders from Earth. Information messages from Earth: their first [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]