signs on at all had tunnels dug into it, lined with Heechee metal. Where the surface conditions were unpleasant (as on Venus), the tunnels were extensive and complex. But even so fair a world as Peggy's Planet had a few of them. The anthropologically trained scientists called Heecheeologists, trying passionately to figure out what these vanished people were like, supposed that they came from a burrowing race, like gophers, rather than an arboreal one, like people. The Heecheeologists turned out to be right ... but it was a long time before any of them were sure of it.
All the tunnels looked pretty much alike. They were lined with
a dense, hard, metallic substance that glowed in the dark: it was called Heechee metal. In the first tunnels humans encountered, on Venus and on the Gateway asteroid itself, the glow was a pale blue. Blue was by far the commonest of Heechee-metal colors, but inside the Heechee ships there were some parts that were made of a golden Heechee metal, and later on the explorers found Heechee metal that glowed red or green.
No one really knew why Heechee metal came in different colors. The Heecheeologists were not much help. All they could tell about the occasional variation in the color of Heechee metal was that it seemed clear that the tunnels of bluish metal were generally the ones poorest in Heechee artifacts: Gold, red, and green almost always had more treasures to be found by the explorers.
Of course, until men and women began to learn how to explore the galaxy in the Heechee ships, they were limited to the blue-glowing tunnels of Gateway and Venus. And in them the treasures to be found were sparse, though sometimes of great value. In the tunnels found on the most productive planets, the metal walls started out blue, and then became another color just where the largest collections of useful tools were located. No one knew why ... but then, no one knew much about the Heechee at all, just then.
MISSION HEATER
Wu Fengtse had chosen to ship out in a One. That had its advantages, and its faults. The biggest advantage was that if there was nothing to land on, and the only reward would be some kind of science bonus for observations, he could keep it all himself.
It didn't happen that way, though. When he came out of FTL drive, he found himself in orbit around a more or less Earth-type planet.
So Wu had to face the problem of every single prospector: If he took his lander down to the surface of the planet, no one would be
left in the ship. If anything happened to him on the surface, no one would be there to rescue him. He was completely on his own.
His other problem was that "Earth-type" was only a very approximate description of the world he had to explore. "Earth-type" meant that the planet was about the right size, and that it had an atmosphere and a temperature range that permitted water vapor in the air, liquid water in its shallow seas, and frozen water on its colder parts. It wasn't heaven, though. Its colder parts included nearly all of the planet. Its best zone was around the equator, and that was not much unlike Labrador.
If there ever had been anything on any other part of its surface, it was now covered with thousands of feet of ice. There was no point in landing on a glacier; Wu had no way of digging down to whatever lay under it. After a lot of searching Wu found a bare outcropping of rock and landed there. By then he wasn't very optimistic anymore. The environment did not look promising-but his instruments gave him better news than he had expected.
There was a tunnel.
Wu had practiced tunnel entry. He even had the necessar~y equipment. Sweating the big power drills into place and erecting the bubble shelter that would protect it from the outside air took all of his strength, and enough time to use up the bulk of his supplies. But he got in.
It was a blue-lined tunnel.
That was discouraging, but as he moved along it he caught glimpses of other colors. When he got to a red segment he found a huge machine-later on, experts decided from his description that it had been a tunnel digger-but he didn't have the strength to lift it, or the equipment (or the courage, for that matter) to try to hack pieces off it. In the green part of the tunnel were bolts of what Wu first took to be cloth but turned out to be the crystalline sheeting the "prayer fans" were made of. In the gold was-the gold.
There were stacks and stacks of little hexagonal Heechee-metal boxes, all sealed. All heavy.
Wu couldn't carry them all, and his energy was running out. He managed to get two of them back to the lander and then took off, with every intention of coming back in a Five.
Unfortunately, when he was safely back on Gateway it turned out that no Five would accept the program that had brought him there. Neither would any of the Threes or Ones that were lying in their docks, waiting for crews.
It seemed that only the One he had found the planet in would take him back.
