"Just making conversation." I curled up along her back and cupped a breast, not aggressively but because it felt good.

"And not only that. We don't know anything about the people who built these things. How do we know this isn't all a practical joke on their part? Maybe their way of luring fresh meat into Heechee heaven?"

"We don't," I agreed. "Roll over this way."

"And the ship they showed us this morning doesn't hardly look like I thought it was going to be, at all," she said, doing as I told her and putting a hand on the back of my neck.

There was a sharp whistle from somewhere, I couldn't tell where.

"What's that?"

"I don't know." It came again, sounding both out in the tunnel and, louder, inside my room. "Oh, it's the phone." What I was hearing was my own piezophone and the ones on either side of me, all ringing at once. The whistle stopped and there was a voice:

"This is Jim Chou. All you fish who want to see what a ship looks like when it comes back after a bad trip, come to Docking Station Four. They're bringing it in now."

I could hear a murmuring from the Forehands' room next door, and I could feel Sheri's heart pounding. "We'd better go," I said.

"I know. But I don't think I want to -- much."

The ship had made it back to Gateway, but not quite all the way. One of the orbiting cruisers had detected it and closed in on it. Now a tug was bringing it in to the Corporation's own docks, where usually only the rockets from the planets latched in. There was a hatch big enough to hold even a Five. This was a Three, what there was left of it.

"Oh, sweet Jesus," Sheri whispered. "Rob, what do you suppose happened to them?"

"To the people? They died." There was not really any doubt of that. The ship was a wreck. The lander stem was gone, just the interstellar vehicle itself, the mushroom cap, was still there, and that was bent out of shape, split open, seared by heat. Split open! Heechee metal, that doesn't even soften under an electric arc!

But we hadn't seen the worst of it.

We never did see the worst of it, we only heard about it. One man was still inside the ship. All over the inside of the ship. He had been literally spattered around the control room, and his remains had been baked onto the walls. By what? Heat and acceleration, no doubt. Perhaps he had found himself skipping into the upper reaches of a sun, or in tight orbit around a neutron star. The differential in gravity might have shredded ship and crew like that. But we never knew.

The other two persons in the crew were not there at all. Not that it was easy to tell; but the census of the organs revealed only one jaw, one pelvis, one spine -- though in many short pieces. Perhaps the other two had been in the lander?