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…other seven can be turned to quite arbitrary settings and you'll still go when you squeeze the action teat.
What you usually do -- or what the course programmers the Corporation keeps on the payroll to do this sort of thing for you usually do -- is pick four numbers at random. Then you cycle the fifth digit until you get a kind of warning pink glow. Sometimes it's faint, sometimes it's bright. If you stop there and press the flat oval part under the teat, the other numbers begin to creep around, just a couple of millimeters one way or another, and the pink glow gets brighter. When they stop it's shocking pink and shockingly bright. Metchnikov says that's an automatic fine-tuning device. The machine allows for human error -- sorry, I mean for Heechee error -- so when you get close to a real, valid target setting it makes the final adjustments for you automatically. Probably he's right.
(Of course, learning every step of this cost a lot of time and money, and most of it cost some lives. It's dangerous being a prospector. But for the first few out, it was more like suicidal.)
Sometimes you can cycle all the way through your fifth digit and get nothing at all. So what you do is, you swear. Then you reset one of the other four and go again. It only takes a few seconds to cycle, but check pilots have run up a hundred hours of new settings before they got good color.
Of course, by the time I went out, the check pilots and the course programmers had worked out a couple hundred possible settings that had been logged as good color but not as yet used--as well as all the settings that had been used, and aren't worth going back to. Or that the crews didn't come back from.
But all that I didn't know at the time, and when I sat down in that modified Heechee seat it was all new, new, new. And I don't know if I can make you understand what it felt like.
I mean, there I was, in a seat where Heechee had sat half a million years ago. The thing in front of me was a target selector. The ship could go anywhere. Anywhere! If I selected the right target I could find myself around Sirius, Procyon, maybe even the Magellanic Clouds!
Teacher got tired of hanging head-down and wriggled through, squeezing in behind me. "Your turn, Broadhead," she said, resting a hand on my shoulder and what felt like her breasts on my back.
I was reluctant to touch. I asked, "Isn't there any way of telling where you're going to wind up?"
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Classifieds.
HOW DO you know you're not a Unitarian? Gateway Fellowship now forming. 87-539.
BILITIS WANTED for Sappho and Lesbia, joint trips till we make it, then happily ever after in Northern Ireland. Permanent trimarriage only. 87-033 or 87-034.
STORE YOUR effects. Save rent, avoid Corporation seizure while out. Fee includes disposal instructions if nonreturn. 88-125.