Frederik Pohl The Boy Who Would Live Forever

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wildly, throwing them against their restraints, and the twisted crystal rod firing off its showers of sparks
that didn't burn, didn't last, didn't seem to do anything at all except mark the fact that they weregoing
Outside. It was like nothing Achiever had ever experienced before. A faint sound from Breeze, almost a
whimper, told him that she was hit as hard as himself. Her face was dark with not with fright, no, but at
least with a severe case of worry. And when the fat sparks sputtered and died away, and the jolting
stopped, and they all three were staring at the lookplate, Breeze was the first to speak. "How very ...
many stars there are," she said.
Indeed there were countless stars out there, so many that they seemed to coalesce into one vast milky
mist of starshine. Even their passenger was held to the plate. "I did not expect to see this spectacle again
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in my life," he said softly, more to himself than to the pilots.
Achiever turned away from the lookplate to gaze at him. The passenger, whose name was Burnish, was
old, older than almost anyone Achiever had ever met, his scalp fuzz no longer gray but turned a muddy
white. But he was a long way from frail. He returned Achiever's stare, then flapped his hands. "Perhaps
you would like to see for yourself," he offered. "One moment and I will show you."
He gestured Achiever away from his pilot's perch and took his place. Carefully he set the control wheels
to a new position. On the lookplate acolorful overlay sprang into existence, first a line of tiny orange
course-marking bubbles, with the fishheads and arrowheads that marked navigational features. Burnish
pointed with one bony hand.
"We will proceed on this course that I have set until we are farther from the Core," he said. "Then, you
will see, the stars will be much more sparse and it will be easy to observe them optically. Do you have
any other questions?"
He was looking at Breeze, but it was Achiever who answered. "One question, yes," he said. "We are
Outside now. Isn't there more you should tell us?"
The old one looked him over carefully, his mouth widening with thought. Then he reached a decision.
"Of course," he said. "It is your right to know. The reason we have come into the Outside galaxy is that
we are conducting a search which is of great importance to all our race indeed to all intelligent living
things everywhere. What we are searching for is the present location of the Foe."
III
When they grew hungry, they ate. When they grew tired, they slept both pilots at the same time,
although in their separate nests, and neither mentioned Achiever's preference for having someone always
at the controls. And Burnish did not reappear.
Which left them plenty of time to consider the meaning of what he had said, and to contemplate its
consequences.
If the thought of pursuing those creatures called the Assassins, or sometimes simply the Foe, terrified
Achiever, it was no discredit to him. He was as brave as any other Heechee in the Core which is to
say, not very, except in such exceedingly rare times when bravery was absolutely necessary.
This seemed to be one of those times. If it was true that they were going to track down the Foe, that
faceless, formless embodiment of evil that had haunted every Heechee's nightmares, then Achiever was
going to have to use up quite a lot of bravery. He would also have to have more information about the
nature of this horror they were trying to track down. Since he couldn't ask Burnish, he sought other
sources, pulling down from the shelves of the ship's library one after another of the crystalline fans that
were the Heechee equivalent of books. As he fed them, one by one, into the reading machines, the first
thing he was looking for was the record of those intelligent galactic races that had been found by
Heechee explorers to have gone suddenly and violently extinct, thus leading to thediscovery of the source
of those extinctions and thus, very soon afterward, to the Heechee's Withdrawal to the Core.
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But after Achiever had scanned every document on the subject he still had not found answers for all the
questions in his mind, so he turned to the Stored Mind in the pod that hung between his wide-set, skinny
thighs. As he tapped the pod's medallion, "Ancestral Mind," he said to the air, but knowing the mind
would hear, "is there no additional information on this race?"
The Stored Mind took a moment to answer, and then she still sounded annoyed at being disturbed.
"One moment, Achiever," she said. And then: "The file you were just accessing dealt with the race of
amphibious lizard-like creatures who had managed to send person-carrying rockets into their nearby
space before their whole population was wiped out overnight. Is it additional material on them that you
seek?"
"Exactly," Achiever said.
"There isn't any," said the Stored Mind, and went silent. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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