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propulsive thrust for both acceleration and deceleration? I wouldn't know. You'd have to be a
Heechee to know that.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that all their viewing equipment seems to be in
front. Maybe it's because the front part of the ship is always heavily armored, even in the
lightweight ships
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-- against, I guess, the impact of stray molecules of gas or dust. But some of the bigger
ships, a few Threes and almost all the Fives, are armored all over. They don't turn around either.
So, anyway, when the coil flickers and you feel the turnaround, you know you've done one-
quarter of your actual travel time. Not necessarily a quarter of your total out-time, of course.
How long you stay at your destination is another matter entirely. You make up your own mind about
that. But you've gone half of the automatically controlled trip out.
So you multiply the number of days elapsed so far by four, and if that number is less than
the number of days your life-support capability is good for, then you know that at least you don't
have to starve to death. The difference between the two numbers is how long you can hang around at
destination.
Your basic ration, food, water, air replenishment, is for two hundred fifty days. You can
stretch it to three hundred without much trouble (you just come back skinny, and maybe with a few
deficiency diseases). So if you get up to sixty or sixty-five days on the outbound leg without
turnaround, then you know you may be having a problem, and you begin eating lighter. If you get up
to eighty or ninety, then your problem solves itself, because you don't have any options anymore,
you're going to die before you get back. You could try changing the course settings. But that's
just another way of dying, as far as can be told from what the survivors say.
Presumably the Heechee could change course when they wanted to, but how they did it is one
of those great unanswered questions about the Heechee, like why did they tidy everything up before
they left? Or what did they look like? Or where did they go?
There used to be a jokey kind of book they sold at the fairs when I was a kid. It was
called Everything We Know About the Heechee. It had a hundred and twenty-eight pages, and they
were all blank.
If Sam and Dred and Mohamad were gay, and I had no reason to doubt it, they didn't show
much of it in the first few days. They followed their own interests. Reading. Listening to music
tapes with earphones. Playing chess and, when they could talk Klara and me into it, Chinese poker.
We didn't play for money, we played for shift time. (After a couple of days Klara said it was more
like winning to lose, because if you lost you had more to occupy your time.) They were quite
benignly tolerant of Klara and me, the oppressed heterosexual minority in the dominantly
homosexual culture that occupied our ship, and gave us the lander an exact fifty percent of the
time even though we comprised only forty percent of the population.
We got along. It was good that we did. We were living in each other's shadow and stink
every minute.
The inside of a Heechee ship, even a Five, is not much bigger than an apartment kitchen.
The lander gives you a little extra space -- add on the equivalent of a fair-sized closet -- but
on the outleg at least that's usually filled with supplies and equipment. And from that total
available cubage, say forty-two or forty-three cubic meters, subtract what else goes into it
besides me and thee and the other prospectors.
When you're in tau space, you have a steady low thrust of acceleration. It isn't really
acceleration, it is only a reluctance of the atoms of your body to exceed c, and it can as well be
described as friction as gravity. But it feels like a little gravity. You feel as though you
weighed about two kilos.
This means you need something to rest in when you are resting, and so each person in your
crew has a personal folding sling that opens out and wraps around you to sleep in, or folds to
become a sort of a chair. Add to that each person's own personal space: cupboards for tapes and
disks and clothing (you don't wear much of that); for toilet articles; for pictures of the near
and dear (if any); for whatever you have elected to bring, up to your total allowance of weight
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