She knew the odds were against her. She wasn't properly frozen for any hope of revival, and anyway the chances were small that anyone would ever find her frozen body and try to revive it. And, as a matter of fact, no one ever did.
The Food Factory wasn't the only Heechee artifact in space which doubled as a trap for the unwary. There were altogether twenty-nine of these large objects-they were called "collection traps"-somewhere in the galaxy.
Patricia Bover's illfated find in the Oort cloud wasn't the only artifact the Heechee had left up and running. It wasn't even the only one to which a Gateway spaceship had a preprogrammed course. There was that other orbiting parking garage for spaceships that the Heechee had left around another star, far away-almost as big as Gateway; humans called it Gateway Two.
And then there was Ethel's Place.
Ethel's Place was discovered by an early one-woman mission. (The woman's name was Ethel Klock.) Then it was rediscovered by a group of Canadians in an armored Three; and re-rediscovered by another One, whose pilot was a man from Cork, Ireland, named Terrance Horran. The Canadians didn't just discover the artifact. They also discovered Ethel Kiock, because she was there when they arrived. When Horran arrived he discovered them all, and later parties kept on discovering those who had come before, because they all stayed right there. As with Pat Bover on the Food Factory, it was a one-way destination for them all. There wasn't any return. The boards on all the ships nulled themselves on arrival.
They had no way of getting off the artifact.
That was a great pity in the minds of all of them, because Ethel's
Place was a wonder. It was an object about the size of a cruise liner,
but without any engines of any kind that they could discover. It
had food machines, and air and water regenerators, and lights; and they were all still operating, even after all the millennia that had passed. The Heechee machines were built to last. Morever, there were a lot of astronomical instruments on Ethel's Place, and they were working, too.
The castaways had plenty of time to investigate their new home. They had nothing else to do. The food machines fed them; their lives were not threatened. They actually made quite a self-sufficient little colony. They might even have made it a permanent one, with generations of settlers coming along, if Klock had not been past the age of childbearing by the time the Canadians got there, or if the later arrivals had included any females.
They realized early that Ethel's Place was a kind of astronomical observatory.
What the observatory had been put there to observe was obvious at once. Ethel's Place was in orbit at a distance of about a thousand AU (which is to say, about five light-days) from a rather spectacular pair of astronomical objects. Binary stars weren't particularly interesting. This pair was unique. One of them was a fafrly standard kind of star, though a rarish one-a hot, pulsating, supergiant specimen of the young and violent class called type F. That by itself would have been worth a little bonus money-if they had had any way of reporting it-but its companion was a lot stranger. The type-F star had a tilted ring of hot gas around it, suggesting that it was still in the process of reaching its final stage of starhood. The companion was all gas, and not very hot gas, at that-an immense, nearly transparent disk of the stuff.
The more they looked at it, the stranger it got. Stars were supposed to be spheres. They weren't supposed to be disks. The diskshaped companion was hard to observe anyway, even with Heechee optics. Visually, it looked like nothing more than a faint scarlet stain on the sky. It was too cool to radiate much. The Heechee instruments couldn't tell them its temperature, because the Heechee had not been thoughtful enough to provide conversion tables into Cel
sius or Kelvin or even Fahrenheit scales. Klock's own best estimate was that it ran to maybe five hundred K-far cooler than the surface of Venus, for instance; cooler even than a log burning in a fireplace on Earth.
The best time to see it, they discovered, was when it was eclipsing the type-F companion star. Because the orbit of Ethel's Place was retrograde with respect to the disk, such eclipses happened more often than they would have if their artifact had somehow been stationary in the sky. They still did not happen very often. Ethel Klock had observed one eclipse alone, shortly after she landed. By the time of the next eclipse she had the Canadians and Horran to share the sight with, but that was more than twenty years later.
The story of Ethel's Place did finally have a happy ending for its captives-well, fairly happy. Ultimately human beings did learn how to make Heechee ships go where they wanted them to go. Shortly thereafter an exploring party in better command of its ship found the five castaways, and they were rescued at last.
