Pohl, Frederik - The Gateway Trip

(Thus at one blow ended a half century of speculation on why the seats in the Heechee spacecraft were so user-unfriendly for human users.)

Although hard and shiny, the Heechee integument was not

thick. You could see the movement of the bones through it; you could even see the muscles and tendons working, especially when the Heechee was excited-it was a kind of body language, something like a human's grinding his teeth. Their speech was somewhat hissy. Their gestures were not at all like those of Earthmen. They didn't shake their heads in negation; they flapped their wrists instead.

The Heechee had descended from a race of burrowers like prairie dogs rather than arboreal tree climbers moved to the plains, as people had. Therefore the Heechee possessed several traits that their heredity had laid on them. No Heechee ever suffered from claustrophobia. They liked being in enclosed spaces. (That may have been why they enjoyed tunnels so much. It certainly was why they preferred to sleep in things like gunnysacks filled with wood shavings.)

Their family lives were not exactly like those of humans; nor were their occupations; nor were their equivalents of politics, fashion, and religion. They had two sexes, like people, and sex was sometimes obsessive in their minds-as with people-but for long periods they hardly thought about the subject. (Not very like most people at all.) Strangely, they had never evolved equivalents of such human institutions as a government bureaucracy (they hardly had a government) or a financial economy (they didn't even use money in any important sense). Humans didn't understand how they could operate without these things, but the Heechee thought that in those respects human ways were pretty repulsive, too. Since, by the time human beings got far enough out into space to have some chance of encountering Heechee, most employed human persons were in these "white-collar" occupations, they were startled to find that most Heechee were, in their view, unemployed.

It wasn't just that the human poli-sci and sociology professors wondered how the Heechee managed to get along without kings, presidents, or maximum leaders. Even on Earth, generations of anarchists, libertarians, and small-is-beautiful philosophers had been claiming that human beings didn't need such things, either. The real puzzle was how the Heechee had escaped having them anyway.

It took a number of anthropologists and cultural behaviorists a long time to come up with an explanatory theory. That phenomenon, too, seemed to have an evolutionary basis. It came from the fact that the pre-Heechee nonsapients-the primitive species they labeled "Heecheeids"-had burrowed in the ground like prairie dogs or trapdoor spiders. They did not form tribes. They staked out territories. Therefore Heecheeids did not conduct tribal wars or struggle for succession to a throne; there wasn't any throne to succeed to. No Heecheeid ever had any need or desire that conflicted with any other Heechee-as long as the other guy stayed out of his territory.

Of course, you can't build a high-tech, spacefaring civilization out of solitary, noninterfering individuals. But by the time the primitive Heechee had reached the point of projects so ambitious that they required the cooperation of many their habits were set. They had never formed the custom of patriotism. They didn't have nations to be patriotic to. They did have a code of behavior-"laws"-and institutions to codify and enforce them ("councils," "courts," "police"), but that was about it. Earthly governments spent m5st of their energies defending themselves against the attacks of-or waging their own attacks against-the governments of other nations. When the reciprocal threat was physical, the method of doing so was military. When the threat was economic, the effort was expressed in subsidies, tariffs, and embargoes. The Heechee didn't need such national enterprises, having no nations to compete with each other.

And so the Heechees lived in their crowded Core, contentedly enough, while they waited to be discovered.

Their lives within the Core were not entirely normal by human standards, however.

There was one significant divergence from normality. The Heechee had been living there for some half a million years-since not long after they visited the early Earth and carried away a handful

of australopithecines to see what the stupid little beasts might develop into, given a chance-but it didn't seem that long to them.

Albert Einstein would have immediately understood why that was. In fact, he had predicted something like it. The Heechee were within a black hole. Therefore they obeyed the cosmological rules governing black holes, including the phenomenon of time dilation. Time that sped along in the outer galaxy passed with glacial slowness inside the Core; the ratio was something like 40,000 to 1. That was a very great difference-so great that many of the Heechees who had left their ships on Gateway were still alive inside the Core. Oh, they had grown a bit older, yes. Time hadn't stopped. But for them only a few decades had passed, not half a million years.

And when the Heechee ran away and hid they left sentinels behind them. They had a plan.

There was an unfortunate element of risk to their plan. The Heechee could not be certain that some other intelligent, spacefaring race would evolve and find the artifacts they had left and use them; and if those things didn't happen, the plan was wasted. Still, that was the way to bet it. They counted on it, in fact; and so the Heechee had set robot sentinels in concealed places in the galaxy to find these new races when they showed up.

When the human race began to make noise in the galaxy, the Heechee's watchmen heard it.

The Heechee then employed that twisted crystal and ebon rod that they called the Heechee equivalent of "can opener" to come out and check their "collection traps," to see just what had begun to happen in the galaxy in the last few centuries (or, from their viewpoint, couple of days). As a normal precaution, the Heechee sent a routine scouting party out to investigate .

But that is, really, quite another story.