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secured we were stark, staring wrecks, our heartbeats pounding, our muscles one solid ache. We took a full sleep shift and a few hours of loafing around the interior of the Food Factory before we went back to securing the rocket so that it could be started. Payter was the most energetic of us; he went prowling as far as he could go down half a dozen corridors. “All come to dead ends,” he reported when he came back. “Looks like the part we can reach is only about a tenth of the object-‘less we cut holes through the walls.”
    “Not now,” I said.
    “Not ever!” said Lurvy strongly. “All we do is get this thing back. Anybody wants to start cutting it up, it will be after we’ve collected our money!” She rubbed her biceps, arms folded across her chest, and added regretfully, “And we might as well get started on securing the rocket.”
    It took us another two days to do that, but finally we had it in place. The welding fluxes they had given us to secure steel to Heechee metal actually worked. As far as we could tell from static inspection, it was solid. We retired into the ship and commanded Vera to give it a ten percent thrust.
    At once we felt a tiny lurch. It was working. We all grinned at each other, and I reached into my private hold-all for the bottle of champagne I had been saving for this occasion- Another lurch.
    Click, click, click, click-one after another our grins snapped off. There should have been only one felt acceleration.
    Lurvy jumped to the cyber board. “Vera! Report delta-V!” The screen lighted up with a diagram of forces: the Food Factory imaged in the middle, force arrows showing in two directions. One was our thruster, doing its job of pushing against the hull. The other was not.
    “Additional thrust now affecting course. . . Lurvy,” Vera reported. “Vector result now same in direction and magnitude as previous delta-V.”
    Our rocket was pushing against the Food Factory. But it wasn’t doing much good. The factory was pushing back.
    Day 1298. So we did what we obviously had to do. We turned everything off and screamed for help.
    We slept, and ate, and wandered around the factory for what seemed like forever, wishing the 25-day delay did not exist. Vera wasn’t much help. “Transmit full telemetry,” she said, and, “Stand by for further directives.” Well, we were doing that already.
    After a day or two I pulled the champagne out anyway, and we all drank up. At .01G the carbonation had more muscle than gravity did, and actually I had to hold my thumb over the bottle and my palm over each glass to squirt and catch the spraying champagne. But after a fashion we toasted. “Not so bad,” said Payter when he had chug-a-lugged his wine. “At least we’ve got a couple million each.”
    “If we ever live to collect it,” snarled Janine.
    “Don’t be such a downer, Janine. We knew when we started out that the mission might bum out.” And so we had; the ship was designed so that we could start back on our basic fuel, then rerig the photon-thrusters to get us home-in another four years or so.
    “And then what, Lurvy? I’ll be an eighteen-year-old virgin! And a failure.”
    “Oh, God. Janine, go explore for a while, won’t you? I’m tired of the sight of you.”
    And so were all of us, of each other. We were more tired of each other, and less tolerant, than we had been all the way out in the cramped quarters of the ship. Now that we had more space to lose each other in, as much as a quarter-kilometer of it at farthest stretch, we were more abrasive on each other than ever. Every twenty hours or so Vera’s small, dull brain would stumble through her contingency programs and come up with some new experiment: test thrusts at one percent of power, at thirty percent of power, even at full power. And we would get together long enough to suit up and carry them out. But they were always the same. No matter how hard we pushed against the Food Factory, the artifact sensed it, and