Stret's jury-rigging had worked. The ship had stopped at its destination. The instruments had thoroughly mapped everything in sight. Then the ship's return had been triggered automatically, while Stret's corpse lay bloating under the controls.
The record showed that their ship had been outside the Milky Way galaxy entirely.
It brought back the first pictures ever seen of our galaxy from outside. It showed a couple of fairly nearby stars and one great, distant globular cluster-the stars and clusters of the spherical halo that surrounds our galaxy-but most of all it showed our Milky Way galaxy itself, from core to farthest spiral wisp, with its great, familiar octopus arms: the Perseus arm, the Cygnus arm, the Sagittarius-Carina arm (with our own little Orion arm, the small spur that held the Earth, nearby), as well as the large, distant arm that Earthly astronomers had never seen before. They called it simply "Far Arm" at first, but then it was renamed the StretMariekiewicz-Szelikowitz arm to honor the dead discoverers. And in the center of it all was the great bellying octopus-body mass of core stars, laced with gas and dust clouds, showing the beginnings of the new growing spiral structures that might in another hundred million years become new arms themselves.
They also showed the effects of a structure more interesting still, but not in enough detail to be recognized just then-not until some other events had taught human beings what to look for in the core. All the same, they were beautiful pictures.
Since no one returned from Mission Halo alive, there wasn't even a science bonus due, but the Gateway Corporation voted a special exception to the rules. Five million dollars was voted for the heirs of Mariekiewicz, Szelikowitz, and Stret.
It was a generous gesture but, as it turned out, a very inexpensive one. The award went unclaimed. Like so many Gateway prospectors, the three who had manned the ship had no families that
anyone could find, and so the Gateway Corporation's bursar quietly, and philosophically, returned the cash to the Corporation's general funds.
The first, best, and brightest hope of any exploration crew was to find a really nice planet with really nice treasures on it. Ultimately some of them did, of course, but it took a while. For a good many orbits after the systematic exploration program began the crews went out and came back with nothing but pictures and hard-luck stories-when they came back at all.
But some of the things they had seen were wonderful. Volya Shadchuk took a One into the heart of a planetary nebula, green-tinged with the radiation from oxygen atoms, and collected fifty thousand dollars. Bill Merrian saw a recurring nova system, red giant's gases being sucked onto a white dwarf; luckily not enough matter had accreted while he was there to blow off in a noval explosion, but he got the fifty thousand and ten percent more for "danger bonus." And then there were the Grantlands.
There were five of the Grantlands-two brothers, their wives, and the eldest son of one of the couples. They reached a globular cluster-ten thousand old stars, mostly red, mostly sliding toward the sunset at the lower right side of the Hertzspung-Russell diagram as they aged. The cluster was in the galactic halo and, of course, the trip was a long one. None of them survived. The trip took 314 days, and all of them were alive at the time of arrival (but existing on scant rations). They took their pictures. The last of them, the young second wife of one of the brothers, died thirty-three days into the return trip; but the pictures they had taken survived.
The three Schoen sisters were no luckier. They didn't come back at all, either. Again, their ship did, but thoroughly racked and scorched, and of course their bodies inside were barely recognizable.
But they, too, had taken a few pictures before they died. They had been in a reflection nebula-after analysis it was determined that
it was the Great Nebula in Orion, actually visible to the naked eye from Earth. (American Indians called it "the smoking star.") The Schoen sisters must have known they were in trouble as soon as they came out of drive, because they weren't really in space anymore. Oh, it was close to a vacuum-as people on Earth measure a vacuum-but there were as many as three hundred atoms to the cubic centimeter, hundreds of times as many as there should hav~ been in interstellar space.
Still, they looked around, and they started their cameras-just barely. They didn't have much time.
There are four bright young stars in the Orion Nebula, the so-called Trapezium; it is in such nebulae that gas clouds fall together and are born as stars. Astronomers conjectured that the Heechee knew this, and the reason the ship had been set to go there was that Heechee astronomers had been interested in studying the conditions that lead to star formation.
But the Heechee had set that program half a million years before.
