It was a little late. By then Ethel Klock was in her seventyeighth year, and even Horran was nearly fifty. They didn't even get
their science bonuses, either. The Gateway Corporation had long since stopped issuing them, because the Gateway Corporation no longer existed.
They would have been out of luck anyway, they found, because even if they'd gotten back early they would not have collected much in the way of financial rewards. That binary star system was unfortunately not a new discovery. Indeed, it turned out to be a system that had been very familiar to astronomers on Earth, because of those very puzzling characteristics. The name of the star was Epsilon Aurigae, and its mysteries were no secret. They had been unlocked by human astronomers with conventional instruments when the binary's cool orbiting disk had passed between Earth and its type-F primary in the eclipse of the year A.D. 2000.
It was more than fifty years between the time the first Gateway prospector landed on one of those "collection traps" and the time the last of them was discovered. As many as eight separate missions might converge on one of them. When they did, they couldn'treturn. Most had food factories, either built in or supplied with shipments of food by automatic spacecraft from an independent factory nearby, so the castaways didn't starve, nor did they lack for water or air. A few did not have these amenities-not in working condition anymore, at least. In those cases all that was found were the abandoned Heechee ships and a few desiccated corpses.
Heecheeologists grew to believe that these "collection traps" served some purpose-maybe several purposes, though they could not be really sure what any of them were. None were accessible to planet dwellers; there were no tunnels on inhabited planets, nor were there any treasures where they could be reached without the use of spacecraft.
It seemed to be a sort of intelligence test posed by these vanished aliens. It was almost as though the Heechee, when they went to wherever they had gone, had deliberately left clues to themselves. But even the clues were hard to find. No intelligent race could find
one until it had first mastered at least primitive interplanetary travel on its own.
And the greatest prizes were even more thoroughly concealed.
As a matter of record, it wasn't exactly a Gateway prospector who made the first round-trip expedition to the Food Factory. Pat Bover's was only one way. The expedition that made it possible for the Heechee carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen (or "CHON") food to do something to help out hunger on Earth arrived there in an Earthly chemical rocket, spiraling out into the outer reaches of the solar system.
And they did more than that, because it was through the Food Factory that the second big discovery came along. It was called Heechee Heaven. It was the largest Heechee-made artifact ever discovered, more than half a mile long, twice the size of an ocean liner. It was shaped like a spindle (a familiar Heechee design), and it was not uninhabited. It held the descendants of the breeding group of australopithecines the Heechee had captured on Earth's surface, half
a million years before; it held one living human, the son of a pair of prospectors who had reached Heechee Heaven in their Gateway ship-and been trapped there. And it contained the stored minds (poorly stored, but the machines that did the job had never been designed for human beings; humans had not yet evolved when those machines were built) of more then twenty Gateway prospectors who had come there on one-way trips.
All that was wonderful
It was more than wonderful, though. For the first time, Heechee technology was not only on hand but accessible. At last some of it could be understood ... and copied ... and even improved! Those treasures were not just satisfying scratches for the scientists' itch of curiosity, or wealth for a few lucky discoverers. They meant a better life for everyone.
And Heechee Heaven was not simply a space station. It was a ship. A vast one. A ship big enough to transport human colonists in quantities sizable enough to begin to make a dent in human misery-3,800 emigrants at a time, anywhere they chose to go-and keep on doing it, once a month, indefinitely.
And the colonization of the galaxy by the human race was possible at last.
The biggest "science" bonus the Gateway Corporation ever offeitd its prospectors wasn't really scientific. It was emotional. It proved that even the Gateway Corporation had some human feelings. The bonus was waiting there for any explorer who discovered a living, breathing Heechee, and it wasn't tiny. It came to fifty million dollars.
