Of course, the Heechee needed a way in and out of their great black hole, and, of course, they had one. Human beings had the same thing, too, in some of those abandoned Heechee ships they had found, but it didn't do them much good because they didn't know they had it.
That was a general problem with Heechee technology. When human beings found pieces of it they also found a lot of confusion. The Heechee had not been kind enough to leave operating manuals for the humans to pore over. They hadn't even put labels on the machines-at least, not in any way that human beings could read. The best way for human beings to find out what all those gizmos and gadgets were for was what used to be called reverse engineering, which basically meant taking them apart to see how they worked.
The trouble with that was that when engineers tried it, the damned things often blew up. So they tended to treat the machinery with caution, and if they didn't know what it was for, and couldn't figure out any way of trying it out, they tended to leave it alone. Take that crystally, twisty rod sort of thing that was part of the furnishings of some, but not all, Heechee ships. They knew it had a purpose. They didn't know what it was.
If anyone on Earth had known where the Heechee lived, they might have guessed that one a lot sooner... but no one did, and so the human race had in its hands an instrument for penetrating black holes long before anyone knew what it could do.
It was a while before any human being knew exactly what a Heechee looked like, for that matter. Still, they are easy enough to describe.
A male Heechee is about five feet tall, on average. His head is the Aryan ideal Nordic squared-off block, only a little more so, though his skin color isn't Nordic at all. If he is male it is probably a sort of oak-bark brown; if female, she is generally somewhat paler. The Heechee skin looks as though it were carved out of shiny plas
tic. A dense, fine growth of hair covers his scalp, or would if he didn't keep it cropped very short. He smells ammoniacal to human beings-the Heechee themselves don't notice it. There is no iris to his eyes. There isn't really even a pupil, just a vaguely X-shaped dark blotch in the middle of a pinkish eyeball. His tongue is forked. And his general build
Well, what you would think of a Heechee's bodily build would depend on whether you were looking at him from the front or from the side.
