"Where would they be? They're down in the lander. Dred thinks maybe we should split things up so you and I get the lander to ourselves part of the time while they're up here, then we come up here and they take it."

"Hmm." That sounded pretty nice; actually, I'd been wondering how we were going to work out anything like privacy. "Okay. What do you want me to do now?"

She reached over and gave me an absentminded kiss. "Just stay out of the way. Know what? We look like we're going almost toward straight Galactic North."

I received that information with the weighty consideration of ignorance. Then I said, "Is that good?"

She grinned. "How can you tell?" I lay back and watched her. If she was as frightened as I was, and I had little doubt she was, she certainly was not letting it show.

I began wondering what was toward Galactic North -- and, more important, how long it would take us to get there.

The shortest trip to another star system on record was eighteen days. That was Barnard's Star, and it was a bust, nothing there. The longest, or anyway the longest anybody knows of so far -- who knows how many ships containing dead prospectors are still on their way back from, maybe, M-31 in Andromeda? -- was a hundred and seventy-five days each way. They did come back dead. Hard to tell where they were. The pictures they took didn't show much, and the prospectors themselves, of course, were no longer in condition to say.

When you start out it's pretty scary even for a veteran. You know you're accelerating. You don't know how long the acceleration will last. When you hit turnaround you can tell. First thing, you know formally because that golden coil in every Heechee ship flickers a little bit. (No one knows why.) But you know that you're turning around even without looking, because the little pseudo-grav that had been dragging you toward the back of the ship now starts dragging you toward the front. Bottom becomes top.

Why didn't the Heechee just turn their ships around in midflight, so as to use the same propulsive thrust for both acceleration and deceleration? I wouldn't know. You'd have to be a Heechee to know that.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that all their viewing equipment seems to be in front. Maybe it's because the front part of the ship is always heavily armored, even in the lightweight ships --

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