The important thing to Chou was that no Earthly astronomer had ever seen them that way. The only way anyone on Earth ever could see the beam from a neutron star was by the chance of being somewhere along the rim of the conical shape the beams described as they rotated. And then what they saw was a high-speed flicker, so fast and regular that the first observer to spot one thought it was the signal from an alien intelligence. They called the signal an "LGM" (for Little Green Men) until they figured out what was causing that sort of stellar behavior.
Then they called the things "pulsars."
Chou got a four-hundred-thousand-dollar science bonus for what he had discovered. He wasn't greedy. He took it and returned to Earth, where he found a new career lecturing to women's clubs and college audiences on what it was like to be a Heechee prospector. He was a great success, because he was one of the first of the breed to return to Earth. alive.
Later returnees were less fortunate. For instance, there was-MISSION HALO
In some ways Mission Halo was the saddest and most beautiful of all. The mission had been written off as lost, but that turned out to be wrong. The ship wasn't lost. Only its crew was.
The ship was an unarmored Three. When it came back its arrival was a surprise to everyone. The ship had been gone over three years. It was a certainty that nobody could have survived so long a trip. In fact, no one had. When the hatch crews on Gateway got the ports open, recoiling from the stench inside, they discovered that Jan Mariekiewicz, Rolph Stret, and Lech Szelikowjtz had left a record of their experiences. It was read with compassion by the other prospectors, and with rejoicing by astronomers.
"When we reached two hundred days without turnaround," Stret had written in his diary, "we knew we were out of luck. We drew straws. I won. Maybe I should say I lost, but, anyway, Jan and Lech took their little suicide pills, and I put their bodies in the freezer.
"Turnaround came finally at 271 days. I knew for sure that I wasn't going to make it either, not even with only me alive in the ship. So I've tried rigging everything on automatic. I hope it works. If the ship gets back, please pass on our messages."
As it happened, the messages the crew left never got delivered. There was no one to deliver them to. The messages were all ddressed to other Gateway prospectors who had been part of the same shipment up from Central Europe, and that batch wasn't one of the lucky ones. Every one of them had been lost in their own ships.
But the pictures the ship brought back belonged to the whole world.
