Фредерик Пол. Врата (engl)
© Frederik Pohl. GateWay (1976, 1977).
© Фредерик Пол. Врата.
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SpellCheck: GrAnD
Premium: Nebula, 1977, Best Novel: "GateWay"
Hugo, 1978, Novel: "GateWay"
Date: 16.07.2002
Chapter 1
My name is Robinette Broadhead, in spite of which I am male. My analyst
(whom I call Sigfrid von Shrink, although that isn't his name; he hasn't
got a name, being a machine) has a lot of electronic fun with this fact:
"Why do you care if some people think it's a girl's name, Rob?"
"I don't."
"Then why do you keep bringing it up?"
He annoys me when he keeps bringing up what I keep bringing up. I look
at the ceiling with its hanging mobiles and pinatas, then I look out the
window. It isn't really a window. It's a moving holopic of surf coming in
on Kaena Point; Sigfrid's programming is pretty eclectic. After a while I
say, "I can't help what my parents called me. I tried spelling it
R-O-B-I-N-E-T, but then everybody pronounces it wrong."
"You could change it to something else, you know."
"If I changed it," I say, and I am sure I am right in this, "you would
just tell me I was going to obsessive lengths to defend my inner
dichotomies."
"What I would tell you," Sigfrid says, in his heavy mechanical attempt
at humor, "is that, please, you shouldn't use technical psychoanalytic
terms. I'd appreciate it if you would just say what you feel."
"What I feel," I say, for the thousandth time, "is happy. I got no
problems. Why wouldn't I feel happy?"
We play these word games a lot, and I don't like them. I think there's
something wrong with his program. He says, "You tell me, Robbie. Why don't
you feel happy?"
I don't say anything to that. He persists. "I think you're worried."
"Shit, Sigfrid," I say, feeling a little disgust, "you always say that.
I'm not worried about anything."
He tries wheedling. "There's nothing wrong with saying how you feel."
I look out the window again, angry because I can feel myself trembling
and I don't know why. "You're a pain in the ass, Sigfrid, you know that?"
He says something or other, but I am not listening. I am wondering why
I waste my time coming here. If there was anybody ever who had every
reason to be happy, I have to be him. I'm rich. I'm pretty good-looking. I
am not too old, and anyway, I have Full Medical so I can be just about any
age I want to be for the next fifty years or so. I live in New York City
under the Big Bubble, where you can't afford to live unless you're really
well fixed, and maybe some kind of celebrity besides. I have a summer
apartment that overlooks the Tappan Sea and the Palisades Dam. And the
girls go crazy over my three Out bangles. You don't see too many
prospectors anywhere on Earth, not even in New York. They're all wild to
have me tell them what it's really like out around the Orion Nebula or the
Lesser Magellanic Cloud. (I've never been to either place, of course. The
one really interesting place I've been to I don't like to talk about.)
"Or," says Sigirid, having waited the appropriate number of
microseconds for a response to whatever it was he said last, "if you
really are happy, why do you come here for help?"
I hate it when he asks me the same questions I ask myself. I don't
answer. I squirm around until I get comfortable again on the plastic foam
mat, because I can tell that it's going to be a long, lousy session. If I
knew why I needed help, why would I need help?
I think you're worried.
Shit, Sigfrid, you always say that. I'm not worried about anything.
Why don't you tell me about it. There's nothing wrong with saying how
you feel.
"You're a pain in the ass, Sigfrid, you know that?"
"Rob, you aren't very responsive today," Sigfrid says through the
little loudspeaker at the head of the mat. Sometimes he uses a very
lifelike dummy, sitting in an armchair, tapping a pencil and smiling
quirkily at me from time to time. But I've told him that that makes me
nervous. "Why don't you just tell me what you're thinking?"
"I'm not thinking about anything, particularly."
"Let your mind roam. Say whatever comes into it, Rob."
"I'm remembering-" I say, and stop.
"Remembering what, Rob?"
"Gateway?"
"That sounds more like a question than a statement."
"Maybe it is. I can't help that. That's what I'm remembering: Gateway."
I have every reason to remember Gateway. That's how I got the money and
the bangles, and other things. I think back to the day I left Gateway.
That was, let's see, Day 31 of Orbit 22, which means, counting back, just
about sixteen years and a couple of months since I left there. I was
thirty minutes out of the hospital and couldn't wait to collect my pay,
catch my ship, and blow.
Sigfrid says politely, "Please say what you're thinking out loud,
Robbie."
"I'm thinking about Shikitei Bakin," I say.
"Yes, you've mentioned him. I remember. What about him?" I don't
answer. Old, legless Shicky Bakin had the room next to mine, but I don't
want to discuss it with Sigfrid. I wriggle around on my circular mat,
thinking about Shicky and trying to cry.
"You seem upset, Rob."
I don't answer to that, either. Shicky was almost the only person I
said good-bye to on Gateway. That was funny. There was a big difference in
our status. I was a prospector, and Shicky was a garbageman. They paid him
enough money to cover his life-support tax because he did odd jobs, and
even on Gateway they have to have somebody to clean up the garbage. But
sooner or later he would be too old and too sick to be any more use at
all. Then, if he was lucky, they would push him out into space and he
would die. If he wasn't lucky, they'd probably send him back to a planet.
He would die there, too, before very long; but first he would have the
experience of living for a few weeks or so as a helpless cripple.
Anyway, he was my neighbor. Every morning he would get up and
painstakingly vacuum every square inch around his cell. It would be dirty,
because there was so much trash floating around Gateway all the time,
despite the attempts to clean it up. When he had it perfectly clean, even
around the roots of the little shrublets he planted and shaped, he would
take a handful of pebbles, bottle caps, bits of torn paper-the same trash
he'd just vacuumed up, half the time-and painstakingly arrange it on the
place he had just cleaned. Funny! I never could see the difference, but
Klara said...Klara said she could.
"Rob, what were you thinking about just then?" Sigfrid asks.
I roll up into a fetal ball and mumble something.
"I couldn't understand what you just said, Robbie."
I don't say anything. I wonder what became of Shicky. I suppose he
died. Suddenly I feel very sad about Shicky dying, such a very long way
from Nagoya, and I wish again that I could cry. But I can't. I squirm and
wriggle. I flail against the foam mat until the restraining straps squeak.
Nothing helps. The pain and shame won't come out. I feel rather pleased
with myself that I am trying so hard to let the feelings out, but I have
to admit I am not being successful, and the dreary interview goes on.
Sigfrid says, "Rob, you're taking a long time to answer. Do you think
you're holding something back?"
I say virtuously, "What kind of a question is that? If I am, how would
I know?" I pause to survey the inside of my brain, looking in all the
corners for padlocks that I can open for Sigfrid. I don't see any. I say
judiciously, "I don't think that's it, exactly. I don't feel as if I were
blocking. It's more as if there were so many things I wanted to say that I
couldn't decide which."
"Take any one, Rob. Say the first thing that comes into your mind."
Now, that's dumb, it seems to me. How do I know which is the first
thing, when they're all boiling around in there together? My father? My
mother? Sylvia? Klara? Poor Shicky, trying to balance himself in flight
without any legs, flapping around like a barn swallow chasing bugs as he
scoops the cobwebby scraps out of Gateway's air?
I reach down into my mind for places where I know it hurts, because it
has hurt there before. The way I felt when I was seven years old, parading
up and down the Rock Park walk in front of the other kids, begging for
someone to pay attention to me? The way it was when we were out of
realspace and knew that we were trapped, with the ghost star coming up out
of nothingness below us like the smile of a Cheshire cat? Oh, I have a
hundred memories like those, and they all hurt. That is, they can. They
are pain. They are clearly labeled PAINFUL in the index to my memory. I
know where to find them, and I know what it feels like to let them
surface.
But they will not hurt unless I let them out.
"I'm waiting, Rob," Sigfrid says.
"I'm thinking," I say. As I lie there it comes to my mind that I'll be
late for my guitar lesson. That reminds me of something, and I look at the
fingers of my left hand, checking to see that the fingernails have not
grown too long, wishing the calluses were harder and thicker. I have not
learned to play the guitar very well, but most people are not that
critical and it gives me pleasure. Only you have to keep practicing and
remembering. Let's see, I think, how do you make that transition from the
D-maj to the C-7th again?
"Rob," Sigfrid says, "this has not been a very productive session.
There are only about ten or fifteen minutes left. Why don't you just say
the first thing that comes into your mind... now."
I reject the first thing and say the second. "The first thing that
comes into my mind is the way my mother was crying when my father was
killed."
"I don't think that was actually the first thing, Rob. Let me make a
guess. Was the first thing something about Klara?"
My chest fills, tingling. My breath catches. All of a sudden there's
Klara rising up before me, sixteen years earlier and not yet an hour
older.... I say, "As a matter of fact, Sigfrid, I think what I want to
talk about is my mother." I allow myself a polite, deprecatory chuckle.
Sigfrid doesn't ever sigh in resignation, but he can be silent in a way
that sounds about the same.
"You see," I go on, carefully outlining all the relevant issues, "she
wanted to get married again after my father died. Not right away. I don't
mean that she was glad about his death, or anything like that. No, she
loved him, all right. But still, I see now, she was a healthy young
woman-well, fairly young. Let's see, I suppose she was about thirty-three.
And if it hadn't been for me I'm sure she would have remarried. I have
feelings of guilt about that. I kept her from doing it. I went to her and
said, 'Ma, you don't need another man. I'll be the man in the family. I'll
take care of you.' Only I couldn't, of course. I was only about five years
old."
"I think you were nine, Robbie."
"Was I? Let me think. Gee, Sigfrid, I guess you're right-" And then I
try to swallow a big drop of spit that has somehow instantly formed in my
throat and I gag and cough.
"Say it, Rob!" Sigfrid says insistently. "What do you want to say?"
"God damn you, Sigfrid!"
"Go ahead, Rob. Say it."
"Say what? Christ, Sigfrid! You're driving me right up the wall! This
shit isn't doing either one of us any good!"
"Say what's bothering you, Rob, please."
"Shut your flicking tin mouth!" All that carefully covered pain is
pushing its way out and I can't stand it, can't deal with it.
"I suggest, Rob, that you try-"
I surge against the straps, kicking chunks out of the foam matting,
roaring, "Shut up, you! I don't want to hear. I can't cope with this,
don't you understand me? I can't! Can't cope, can't cope!"
Sigfrid waits patiently for me to stop weeping, which happens rather
suddenly. And then, before he can say anything, I say wearily, "Oh, hell,
Sigfrid, this whole thing isn't getting us anywhere. I think we should
call it off. There must be other people who need your services more than I
do."
"As to that, Rob," he says, "I am quite competent to meet all the
demands on my time."
I am drying my tears on the paper towels he has left beside the mat and
don't answer.
"There is still excess capacity, in fact," he goes on. "But you must be
the judge of whether we continue with these sessions or not."
"Have you got anything to drink in the recovery room?" I ask him.
"Not in the sense you mean, no. There is what I am told is a very
pleasant bar on the top floor of this building."
"Well," I say, "I just wonder what I'm doing here."
And, fifteen minutes later, having confirmed my appointment for the
next week, I am drinking a cup of tea in Sigfrid's recovery cubicle. I
listen to hear if his next patient has started screaming yet, but I can't
hear anything.
So I wash my face, adjust my scarf, and slick down the little cowlick
in my hair. I go up to the bar for a quick one. The headwaiter, who is
human, knows me, and gives me a seat looking south toward the Lower Bay
rim of the bubble. He looks toward a tall, copper-skinned girl with green
eyes sitting by herself, but I shake my head. I drink one short drink,
admire the legs on the copper-skinned girl and, thinking mostly about
where I am going to go for dinner, keep my appointment for my guitar
lesson.
Chapter 2
All my life I wanted to be a prospector, as far back as I can remember.
I couldn't have been more than six when my father and mother took me to a
fair in Cheyenne. Hot dogs and popped soya, colored-paper hydrogen
balloons, a circus with dogs and horses, wheels of fortune, games, rides.
And there was a pressure tent with opaque sides, a dollar to get in, and
inside somebody had arranged a display of imports from the Heechee tunnels
on Venus. Prayer fans and fire pearls, real Heechee-metal mirrors that you
could buy for twenty-five dollars apiece. Pa said they weren't real, but
to me they were real. We couldn't afford twenty-five dollars apiece,
though. And when you came right down to it, I didn't really need a mirror.
Freckled face, buck teeth, hair I brushed straight back and tied. They had
just found Gateway. I heard my father talking about it going home that
night in the airbus, when I guess they thought I was asleep, and the
wistful hunger in his voice kept me awake.
If it hadn't been for my mother and me he might have found a way to go.
But he never got the chance. He was dead a year later. All I inherited
from him was his job, as soon as I was big enough to hold it.
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I don't know if you've ever worked in the food mines, but you've
probably heard about them. There isn't any great joy there. I started,
half-time and half-pay, at twelve. By the time I was sixteen I had my
father's rating: charge driller-good pay, hard work.
But what can you do with the pay? It isn't enough for Full Medical. It
isn't enough even to get you out of the mines, only enough to be a sort of
local success story. You work six hours on and ten hours off. Eight hours'
sleep and you're on again, with your clothes stinking of shale all the
time. You can't smoke, except in sealed rooms. The oil fog settles
everywhere. The girls are as smelly and slick and frazzled as you are.
So we all did the same things, we worked and chased each other's women
and played the lottery. And we drank a lot, the cheap, powerful liquor
that was made not ten miles away. Sometimes it was labeled Scotch and
sometimes vodka or bourbon, but it all came off the same slime-still
columns. I was no different from any of the others... except that, one
time, I won the lottery. And that was my ticket out.
Before that happened I just lived.
My mother was a miner, too. After my father was killed in the shaft
fire she brought me up, with the help of the company creche. We got along
all right until I had my psychotic episode. I was twenty-six at the time.
I had some trouble with my girl, and then for a while I just couldn't get
out of bed in the morning. So they put me away. I was out of circulation
for most of a year, and when they let me out of the shrink tank my mother
had died.
Face it: that was my fault. I don't mean I planned it, I mean she would
have lived if she hadn't had me to worry about. There wasn't enough money
to pay the medical expenses for both of us. I needed psychotherapy. She
needed a new lung. She didn't get it, so she died.
I hated living on in the same apartment after she was dead, but it was
either that or go into bachelor quarters. I didn't like the idea of living
in such close proximity to a lot of men. Of course I could have gotten
married. I didn't-Sylvia, the girl I'd had the trouble with, was long gone
by that time-but it wasn't because I had anything against the idea of
marriage. Maybe you might think I did, considering my psychiatric history,
and also considering that I'd lived with my mother as long as she was
alive. But it isn't true. I liked girls very much. I would have been very
happy to marry one and raise a child.
But not in the mines.
I didn't want to leave a son of mine the way my father had left me.
Charge drilling is bitchy hard work. Now they use steam torches with
Heechee heating coils and the shale just politely splits away, like
carving cubes of wax. But then we drilled and blasted. You'd go down into
the shaft on the high-speed drop at the start of your shift. The shaft
wall was slimy and stinking ten inches from your shoulder, moving at sixty
kilometers an hour relative to you; I've seen miners with a few drinks in
them stagger and stretch out a hand to support themselves and pull back a
stump. Then you pile out of the bucket and slip and stumble on the
duckboards for a kilometer or more till you come to the working face. You
drill your shaft. You set your charges. Then you back out into a
cul-de-sac while they blast, hoping you figured it right and the whole
reeking, oily mass doesn't come down on you. (If you're buried alive you
can live up to a week in the loose shale. People have. When they don't get
rescued until after the third day they're usually never any good for
anything anymore.) Then, if everything has gone all right, you dodge the
handling loaders as they come creeping in on their tracks, on your way to
the next face.
The masks, they say, take out most of the hydrocarbons and the rock
dust. They don't take out the stink. I'm not sure they take out all the
hydrocarbons, either. My mother is not the only miner I knew who needed a
new lung-nor the only one who couldn't pay for one, either.
And then, when your shift is over, where is there to go?
You go to a bar. You go to a dorm-room with a girl. You go to a
rec-room to play cards. You watch TV.
You don't go outdoors very much. There's no reason. There are a couple
of little parks, carefully tended, planted, replanted; Rock Park even has
hedges and a lawn. I bet you never saw a lawn that had to be washed,
scrubbed (with detergent!), and air-dried every week, or it would die. So
we mostly leave the parks to the kids.
Apart from the parks, there is only the surface of Wyoming, and as far
as you can see it looks like the surface of the Moon. Nothing green
anywhere. Nothing alive. no birds, no squirrels, no pets. A few sludgy,
squidgy creeks that for some reason are always bright ochre-red under the
oil. They tell us that we're lucky at that, because our part of Wyoming
was shaft-mined. In Colorado, where they strip-mined, things were even
worse.
I always found that hard to believe, and still do, but I've never gone
to look.
And apart from everything else, there's the smell and sight and sound
of the work. The sunsets orangey-brown through the haze. The constant
smell. All day and all night there's the roar of the extractor furnaces,
heating and grinding the marlstone to get the kerogen out of it, and the
rumble of the long-line conveyors, dragging the spent shale away to pile
it somewhere.
See, you have to heat the rock to extract the oil. When you heat it it
expands, like popcorn. So there's no place to put it. You can't squeeze it
back into the shaft you've taken it out of; there's too much of it. If you
dig out a mountain of shale and extract the oil, the popped shale that's
left is enough to make two mountains. So that's what you do. You build new
mountains.
And the runoff heat from the extractors warms the culture sheds, and
the oil grows its slime as it trickles through the shed, and the
slime-skimmers scoop it off and dry it and press it and we eat it, or some
of it, for breakfast the next morning.
Funny. In the old days oil used to bubble right out of the ground! And
all people thought to do with it was stick it in their automobiles and
burn it up.
All the TV shows have morale-builder commercials telling us how
important our work is, how the whole world depends on us for food. It's
all true. They don't have to keep reminding us. If we didn't do what we do
there would be hunger in Texas and kwashiorkor among the babies in Oregon.
We all know that. We contribute five trillion calories a day to the
world's diet, half the protein ration for about a fifth of the global
population. It all comes out of the yeasts and bacteria we grow off the
Wyoming shale oil, along with parts of Utah and Colorado. The world needs
that food. But so far it has cost us most of Wyoming, half of Appalachia,
a big chunk of the Athabasca tar sands region... and what are we going to
do with all those people when the last drop of hydrocarbon is converted to
yeast?
It's not my problem, but I still think of it.
It stopped being my problem when I won the lottery, the day after
Christmas, the year I turned twenty-six.
The prize was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Enough to live
like a king for a year. Enough to marry and keep a family on, provided we
both worked and didn't live too high.
Or enough for a one-way ticket to Gateway.
I took the lottery ticket down to the travel office and turned it in
for passage. They were glad to see me; they didn't do much of a business
there, especially in that kind of commodity. I had about ten thousand
dollars left over in change, give or take a little. I didn't count it. I
bought drinks for my whole shift as far as it would go. With the fifty
people in my shift, and all the friends and casual drop-ins who leeched on
to the party, it went about twentyfour hours.
Then I staggered through a Wyoming blizzard back to the travel office.
Five months later, I was circling in toward the asteroid, staring out the
portholes at the Brazilian cruiser that was challenging us, on my way to
being a prospector at last.
Chapter 3
Sigfrid never closes off a subject. He never says, "Well, Rob, I guess
we've talked enough about that." But sometimes when I've been lying there
on the mat for a long time, not responding much, making jokes or humming
through my nose, after a while he'll say:
"I think we might go back to a different area, Rob. There was something
you said some time ago that we might follow up. Can you remember that
time, the last time you:"
"The last time I talked to Klara, right?"
"Yes, Rob."
"Sigfrid, I always know what you're going to say."
"Doesn't matter if you do, Rob. What about it? Do you want to talk
about how you felt that time?"
"Why not?" I clean the nail of my right middle finger by drawing it
between my two lower front teeth. I inspect it and say, "I realize that
was an important time. Maybe it was the worst moment of my life, about.
Even worse than when Sylvia ditched me, or when I found out my mother
died."
"Are you saying you'd rather talk about one of those things, Rob?"
"Not at all. You say talk about Klara, we'll talk about Klara."
And I settle myself on the foam mat and think for a while. I've been
very interested in transcendental insight, and sometimes when I set a
problem to my mind and just start saying my mantra over and over I come
out of it with the problem solved: Sell the fish-farm stock in Baja and
buy plumbing supplies on the commodities exchange. That was one, and it
really paid out. Or: Take Rachel to Merida for waterskling on the Bay of
Campeche. That got her into my bed the first time, when I'd tried
everything else.
And then Sigfrid says, "You're not responding, Rob."
"I'm thinking about what you said."
"Please don't think about it, Rob. Just talk. Tell me what you're
feeling about Klara right now."
I try to think it out honestly. Sigfrid won't let me get into TI for
it, so I look inside my mind for suppressed feelings.
"Well, not much," I say. Not much on the surface, anyway.
"Do you remember the feeling at the time, Rob?"
"Of course I do."
"Try to feel what you felt then, Rob."
"All right." Obediently I reconstruct the situation in my mind. There I
am, talking to Klara on the radio. Dane is shouting something in the
lander. We're all frightened out of our wits. Down underneath us the blue
mist is opening up, and I see the dim skeletal star for the first time.
The Three-ship-no, it was a Five.. Anyway, it stinks of vomit and
perspiration. My body aches.
I can remember it exactly, although I would be lying if I said I was
letting myself feel it.
I say lightly, half chuckling, "Sigfrid, there's an intensity of pain
and guilt and misery there that I just can't handle." Sometimes I try that
with him, saying a kind of painful truth in the tone you might use to ask
the waiter at a cocktail party to bring you another rum punch. I do that
when I want to divert his attack. I don't think it works. Sigfrid has a
lot of Heechee circuits in him. He's a lot better than the machines at the
Institute were, when I had my episode. He continuously monitors all my
physical parameters: skin conductivity and pulse and beta-wave activity
and so on. He gets readings from the restraining straps that hold me on
the mat, to show how violently I fling myself around. He meters the volume
of my voice and spectrum-scans the print for overtones. And he also
understands what the words mean. Sigfrid is extremely smart, considering
how stupid he is.
It is very hard, sometimes, to fool him. I get to the end of a session
absolutely limp, with the feeling that if I had stayed with him for one
more minute I would have found myself falling right down into that pain
and it would have destroyed me.
Or cured me. Perhaps they are the same thing.
I don't know why I keep coming back to you, Sigfrid.
I remind you, Robby, you've already used up three stomachs and, let me
see, nearly five meters of intestine.
Ulcers, cancer.
Something appears to be eating away at you, Rob.
Chapter 4
So there was Gateway, getting bigger and bigger in the ports of the
ship up from Earth:
An asteroid. Or perhaps the nucleus of a comet. About ten kilometers
through, the longest way. Pear-shaped. On the outside it looks like a
lumpy charred blob with glints of blue. On the inside it's the gateway to
the universe.
Sheri Loffat leaned against my shoulder, with the rest of our bunch of
would-be prospectors clustered behind us, staring. "Jesus, Rob. Look at
the cruisers!"
"They find anything wrong," said somebody behind us, "and they blow us
out of space."
"They won't find anything wrong," said Sheri, but she ended her remark
with a question mark. Those cruisers looked mean, circling jealously
around the asteroid, watching to see that whoever comes in isn't going to
steal the secrets that are worth more than anyone could ever pay.
We hung to the porthole braces to rubberneck at them. Foolishness, that
was. We could have been killed. There wasn't really much likelihood that
our ship's matching orbit with Gateway or the Brazilian cruiser would take
much delta-V, but there only had to be one quick course correction to
spatter us. And there was always the other possibility, that our ship
would rotate a quarterturn or so and we'd suddenly find ourselves staring
into the naked, nearby sun. That meant blindness for always, that close.
But we wanted to see.
The Brazilian cruiser didn't bother to lock on. We saw flashes back and
forth, and knew that they were checking our manifests by laser. That was
normal. I said the cruisers were watching for thieves, but actually they
were more to watch each other than to worry about anybody else. Including
us. The Russians were suspicious of the Chinese, the Chinese were
suspicious of the Russians, the Brazilians were suspicious of the
Venusians. They were all suspicious of the Americans.
So the other four cruisers were surely watching the Brazilians more
closely than they were watching us. But we all knew that if our coded
navicerts had not matched the patterns their five separate consulates at
the departure port on Earth had filed, the next step would not have been
an argument. It would have been a torpedo.
It's funny. I could imagine that torpedo. I could imagine the cold-eyed
warrior who would aim and launch it, and how our ship would blossom into a
flare of orange light and we would all become dissociated atoms in
orbit.... Only the torpedoman on that ship, I'm pretty sure, was at that
time an armorer's mate named Francy Hereira. We got to be pretty good
buddies later on. He wasn't what you'd really call a cold-eyed killer. I
cried in his arms all the day after I got back from that last trip, in my
hospital room, when he was supposed to be searching me for contraband. And
Francy cried with me.
The cruiser moved away and we all surged gently out, then pulled
ourselves back to the window with the grips, as our ship began to close in
on Gateway.
"Looks like a case of smallpox," said somebody in the group.
It did; and some of the pockmarks were open. Those were the berths for
ships that were out on mission. Some of them would stay open forever,
because the ships wouldn't be coming back. But most of the pocks were
covered with bulges that looked like mushroom caps.
Those caps were the ships themselves, what Gateway was all about.
The ships weren't easy to see. Neither was Gateway itself. It had a low
albedo to begin with, and it wasn't very big: as I say, about ten
kilometers on the long axis, half that through its equator of rotation.
But it could have been detected. After that first tunnel rat led them to
it, astronomers began asking each other why it hadn't been spotted a
century earlier. Now that they know where to look, they find it. It
sometimes gets as bright as seventeenth magnitude, as seen from Earth.
That's easy. You would have thought it would have been picked up in a
routine mapping program.
The thing is, there weren't that many routine mapping programs in that
direction, and it seems Gateway wasn't where they were looking when they
looked.
Stellar astronomy usually pointed away from the sun. Solar astronomy
usually stayed in the plane of the ecliptic-and Gateway has a right-angle
orbit. So it fell through the cracks.
The piezophone clucked and said, "Docking in five minutes. Return to
your bunks. Fasten webbing."
We were almost there.
Sheri Loffat reached out and held my hand through the webbing. I
squeezed back. We had never been to bed together, never met until she
turned up in the bunk next to mine on the ship, but the vibrations were
practically sexual. As though we were about to make it in the biggest,
best way there ever could be; but it wasn't sex, it was Gateway.
When men began to poke around the surface of Venus they found the
Heechee diggings.
They didn't find any Heechees. Whoever the Heechees were, whenever they
had been on Venus, they were gone. Not even a body was left in a burial
pit to exhume and cut apart. All there was, was the tunnels, the caverns,
the few piddling little artifacts, the technological wonders that human
beings puzzled over and tried to reconstruct.
Then somebody found a Heechee map of the solar system. Jupiter was
there with its moons, and Mars, and the outer planets, and the Earth-Moon
pair. And Venus, which was marked in black on the shining blue surface of
the Heechee-metal map. And Mercury, and one other thing, the only other
thing marked in black besides Venus: an orbital body that came inside the
perihelion of Mercury and outside the orbit of Venus, tipped ninety
degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic so that it never came very close
to either. A body which had never been identified by terrestrial
astronomers. Conjecture: an asteroid, or a comet-the difference was only
semantic-which the Heechees had cared about specially for some reason.
| (Transcript of Q. & A., Professor Hegramet's
| lecture.)
| Q. What did the Heechee look like?
| Professor Hegramet: Nobody knows. We've never
| found anything resembling a photograph, or a
| drawing, except for two or three maps. Or a book.
| Q. Didn't they have some system of storing
| knowledge, like writing?
| Professor Hegramet: Well, of course they must
| have. But what it is, I don't know. I have a
| suspicion... well, it's only a guess.
| Q. What?
| Professor Hegramet: Well, think about our own
| storage methods and how they would have been
| received in pretechnological times. If we'd given,
| say, Euclid a book, he could have figured out what
| it was, even if he couldn't understand what it was
| saying. But what if we'd given him a tape
| cassette? He wouldn't have known what to do with
| it. I have a suspicion, no, a conviction, that we
| have some Heechee "books" we just don't recognize.
| A bar of Heechee metal. Maybe that Q-spiral in the
| ships, the function of which we don't know at all.
| This isn't a new idea. They've all been tested for
| magnetic codes, for microgrooves, for chemical
| patterns-nothing has shown up. But we may not have
| the instrument we need to detect the messages.
| Q. There's something about the Heechee that I
| just don't understand. Why did they leave all
| these tunnels and places? Where did they go?
| Professor Hegramet: Young lady, it beats the
| piss out of me.
Probably sooner or later a telescopic probe would have followed up that
clue, but it wasn't necessary. Then The Famous Sylvester Macklen-who
wasn't up to that point the famous anything, just another tunnel rat on
Venus-found a Heechee ship and got himself to Gateway, and died there. But
he managed to let people know where he was by cleverly blowing up his
ship. So a NASA probe was diverted from the chromosphere of the sun, and
Gateway was reached and opened up by man.
Inside were the stars.
Inside, to be less poetic and more literal, were nearly a thousand
smallish spacecraft, shaped something like fat mushrooms. They came in
several shapes and sizes. The littlest ones were button-topped, like the
mushrooms they grow in the Wyoming tunnels after they've dug all the shale
out, and you buy in the supermarket. The bigger ones were pointy, like
morels. Inside the caps of the mushrooms were living quarters and a power
source that no one understood. The stems were chemical rocket ships, kind
of like the old Moon Landers of the first space programs.
No one had ever figured out how the caps were driven, or how to direct
them.
That was one of the things that made us all nervous: the fact that we
were going to take our chances with something nobody understood. You
literally had no control, once you started out in a Heechee ship. Their
courses were built into their guidance system, in a way that nobody had
figured out; you could pick one course, but once picked that was it-and
you didn't know where it was going to take you when you picked it, any
more than you know what's in your box of Cracker-Joy until you open it.
But they worked. They still worked, after what they say is maybe half a
million years.
The first guy who had the guts to get into one and try to start it up
succeeded. It lifted out of its crater on the surface of the asteroid. It
turned fuzzy and bright, and was gone.
And three months later, it was back, with a starved, staring astronaut
inside, aglow with triumph. He had been to another star! He had orbited a
great gray planet with swirling yellow clouds, had managed to reverse the
controls-and had been brought back to the very same pockmark, by the
built-in guidance controls.
So they sent out another ship, this time one of the big, pointy
morel-shaped ones, with a crew of four and plenty of rations and
instrumentation. They were gone only about fifty days. In that time they
had not just reached another solar system, they had actually used the
lander to go down to the surface of a planet. There wasn't anything living
there... but there had been.
They found the remnants. Not a lot. A few beat-up pieces of trash, on a
corner of a mountaintop that had missed the general destruction that had
hit the planet. Out of the radioactive dust they had picked up a brick, a
ceramic bolt, a half-melted thing that looked as though it had once been a
chromium flute.
Then the star rush began... and we were part of it.
Chapter 5
Sigfrid is a pretty smart machine, but sometimes I can't figure out
what's wrong with him. He's always asking me to tell him my dreams. Then
sometimes I come in all aglow with some dream I'm positive he's going to
love, a big-red-apple-for-the-teacher kind of dream, full of penis symbols
and fetishism and guilt hang-ups, and he disappoints me. He takes off on
some crazy track that has nothing at all to do with it. I tell him the
whole thing, and then he sits and clicks and whirs and buzzes for a
while-he doesn't really, but I fantasize that while I'm waiting-and then
he says:
"Let's go back to something different, Rob. I'm interested in some of
the things you've said about the woman, Gelle-Klara Moynlin."
I say, "Sigfrid, you're off on a wild-goose chase again."
"I don't think so, Rob."
"But that dream! My God, don't you see how important it is? What about
the mother figure in it?"
"What about letting me do my job, Rob?"
"Do I have a choice?" I say, feeling sulky.
"You always have a choice, Rob, but I would like very much to quote to
you something you said a while ago." And he stops, and I hear my own voice
coming out of somewhere in his tapes. I am saying:
"Sigfrid, there's an intensity of pain and guilt and misery there that
I just can't handle."
He waits for me to say something.
After a moment I do. "That's a nice recording," I acknowledge, "but I'd
rather talk about the way my mother fixation comes out in my dream."
"I think it would be more productive to explore this other matter, Rob.
It is possible they're related."
"Really?" I am all warmed up to discuss this theoretical possibility in
a detached and philosophical way, but he beats me to the punch:
"The last conversation you had with Klara, Rob. Please tell me what you
feel about it."
"I've told you." I am not enjoying this at all, it is such a waste of
time, and I make sure he knows it by the tone of my voice and the
tenseness of my body against the restraining straps. "It was even worse
than with my mother."
"I know you'd rather switch to talking about your mother, Rob, but
please don't, right now. Tell me about that time with Klara. What are you
feeling about it at this minute?"
I try to think it out honestly. After all, I can do that much. I don't
actually have to say it. But all I can find to say is, "Not much."
After a little wait he says, "Is that all, 'not much'?"
"That's it. Not much." Not much on the surface, anyway. I do remember
how I was feeling at the time. I open up that memory, very cautiously, to
see what it was like. Going down into that blue mist. Seeing the dim ghost
star for the first time. Talking to Klara on the radio, while Dane is
whispering in my ear.... I close it up again.
"It all hurts, a lot, Sigfrid," I say conversationally. Sometimes I try
to fool him by saying emotionally loaded things in the tone you might use
to order a cup of coffee, but I don't think it works. Sigfrid listens to
volume and overtones, but he also listens to breathing and pauses, as well
as the sense of the words. He is extremely smart, considering how stupid
he is.
Chapter 6
Five permanent-party noncoms, one from each of the cruisers, patted us
down, checked our IDs and turned us over to a Corporation screening clerk.
Sheri giggled when the Russian's pat hit a sensitive spot and whispered,
"What do they think we're smuggling in, Rob?"
I shushed her. The Corporation woman had taken our landing cards from
the Chinese Spec/3 in charge of the detail and was calling out our names.
There were eight of us altogether. "Welcome aboard," she said. "Each one
of you fish will get a proctor assigned to you. He'll help you get
straightened out with a place to live, answer your questions, let you know
where to report for the medical and your classes. Also, he'll give you a
copy of the contract to sign. You've each had eleven hundred and fifty
dollars deducted from your cash on deposit with the ship that brought you
here; that's your life-support tax for the first ten days. The rest you
can draw on any time by writing a P-check. Your proctor will show you how.
Linscott!"
The middle-aged black man from Baja California raised his hand. "Your
proctor is Shota Tarasvili. Broadhead!"
"Here I am."
"Dane Metchnikov," said the Corporation clerk.
I started to look around, but the person who had to be Dane Metchnikov
was already coming toward me. He took my arm very firmly, started to lead
me away and then said, "Hi."
I held back. "I'd like to say good-bye to my friend-"
"You're all in the same area," he grunted. "Come on."
So within two hours of arriving on Gateway I had a room, a proctor, and
a contract. I signed the articles of agreement right away. I didn't even
read them. Metchnikov looked surprised. "Don't you want to know what they
say?"
"Not right this minute." I mean, what was the advantage? If I hadn't
liked what they said, I might have changed my mind, and what other options
did I have, really? Being a prospector is pretty scary. I hate the idea of
being killed. I hate the idea of dying at all, ever; not being alive
anymore, having everything stop, knowing that all those other people would
go on living and having sex and joy without me being there to share it.
But I didn't hate it as much as I hated the idea of going back to the food
mines.
Metchnikov hung himself by his collar to a hook on the wall of my room,
to be out of the way while I put away my belongings. He was a squat, pale
man, not very talkative. He didn't seem to be a very likable person, but
at least he didn't laugh at me because I was a clumsy new fish. Gateway is
about as close to zero-G as you get. I had never experienced low-gravity
before; you don't get much of it in Wyoming, so I kept misjudging. When I
said something, Metchnikov said, "You'll get used to it. Have you got a
toke?"
"Afraid not."
He sighed, looking a little like somebody's Buddha hung up on the wall,
with his legs pulled up.
He looked at his time dial and said, "I'll take you out for a drink
later. It's a custom. Only it's not very interesting until about
twenty-two hundred. The Blue Hell'll be full of people then, and I'll
introduce you around. See what you can find. What are you, straight, gay,
what?"
"I'm pretty straight."
"Whatever. You're on your own about that, though. I'll introduce you to
whoever I know, but then you're on your own. You better get used to that
right away. Have you got your map?"
"Map?"
| MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT
| 1, being of sound mind, hereby assign all
| rights in and to any discoveries, artifacts,
| objects, and things of value of any description I
| may find during or as a result of exploration
| involving any craft furnished me or information
| given me by the Gateway Authority irrevocably to
| said Gateway Authority.
| 2. Gateway Authority may, in its own sole
| direction, elect to sell, lease or otherwise
| dispose of any artifact, object or other thing of
| value arising from my activities under this
| contract. If it does so, it agrees to assign to me
| 50% (fifty percent) of all revenues arising from
| such sale, lease, or disposal, up to the costs of
| the exploration trip itself (including my own
| costs in coming to Gateway and my subsequent costs
| of living while there), and 10% (ten percent) of
| all subsequent revenues once the aforesaid costs
| have been repaid. I accept this assignment as
| payment in full for any obligations arising to me
| from the Gateway Authority of whatever kind, and
| specifically undertake not to lay any claim for
| additional payment for any reason at any time.
| 3. I irrevocably grant to Gateway Authority
| the full power and authority to make decisions of
| all kinds relating to the exploitation, sale, or
| lease of rights in any such discoveries, including
| the right, at Gateway Authority's sole discretion,
| to pool my discoveries or other things of value
| arising under this contract with those of others
| for purpose of exploitation, lease, or sale, in
| which case my share shall be whatever proportion
| of such earnings Gateway Authority may deem
| proper; and I further grant to Gateway Authority
| the right to refrain from exploiting any or all
| such discoveries or things of value in any way, at
| its own sole discretion.
| 4. I release Gateway Authority from any and
| all claims by me or on my behalf arising from any
| injury, accident, or loss of any kind to me in
| connection with my activities under this contract.
| 5. In the event of any disagreement arising
| from this Memorandum of Agreement, I agree that
| the terms shall be interpreted according to the
| laws and precedents of Gateway itself, and that no
| laws or precedents of any other jurisdiction shall
| be considered relevant in any degree.
"Oh, hell, man! It's in that packet of stuff they gave you."
I opened the lockers at random until I found where I had put the
envelope. Inside it were my copy of the articles of agreement, a booklet
entitled Welcome to Gateway, my room assignment, my health questionnaire
that I would have to fill out before 0800 the next morning... and a folded
sheet that, opened up, looked like a wiring diagram with names on it.
"That's it. Can you locate where you are? Remember your room number:
Level Babe, Quadrant East, Tunnel Eight, Room Fifty-one. Write it down."
"It's already written here, Dane, on my room assignment."
"Well, don't lose it." Dane reached behind his neck and unhooked
himself, let himself fall gently to the floor. "So why don't you look
around by yourself for a while. I'll meet you here. Anything else you need
to know right now?"
I thought, while he looked impatient. "Well-mind if I ask you a
question about you, Dane? Have you been out yet?"
"Six trips. All right, I'll see you at twenty-two hundred." Then he
pushed the flexible door open, slipped out into the jungly green of the
corridor and was gone.
I let myself flop-so gently, so slowly-into my one real chair and tried
to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.
I don't know if I can make you feel it, how the universe looked to me
from Gateway: like being young with Full Medical. Like a menu in the best
restaurant in the world, when somebody else is going to pick up the check.
Like a girl you've just met who likes you. Like an unopened gift.
The things that hit you first on Gateway are the tininess of the
tunnels, feeling tinier even than they are because they're lined with
windowboxy things of plants; the vertigo from the low gravity, and the
stink. You get Gateway a little bit at a time. There's no way of seeing it
all in one glance; it is nothing but a maze of tunnels in the rock. I'm
not even sure they've all been explored yet. Certainly there are miles of
them that nobody ever goes into, or not very often.
That's the way the Heechees were. They grabbed the asteroid, plated it
over with wall metal, drove tunnels into it, filled them with whatever
sort of possessions they had-most were empty by the time we got there,
just as everything that ever belonged to the Heechees is, all over the
universe. And then they left it, for whatever reason they left.
The closest thing to a central point in Gateway is Heecheetown. That's
a spindle-shaped cave near the geometric center of the asteroid. They say
that when the Heechees built Gateway they lived there. We lived there too,
at first, or close to it, all of us new peopie off Earth. (And elsewhere.
A ship from Venus had come in just before ours.) That's where the company
housing is. Later on, if we got rich on a prospecting trip, we could move
out farther toward the surface, where there was a little more gravity and
less noise. And above all, less smell. A couple thousand people had
breathed the air I was breathing, one time or another, voided the water I
drank and exuded their smells into the atmosphere. The people didn't stay
around very long, most of them. But the smells were still there.
I didn't care about the smell. I didn't care about any of it. Gateway
was my big, fat lottery ticket to Full Medical, a nine-room house, a
couple of kids, and a lot of joy. I had won one lottery already. It made
me cocky about my chances of winning another.
It was all exciting, although at the same time it was dingy enough,
too. There wasn't much luxury around. For your $238,575 what you get is
transportation to Gateway, ten days' worth of food, lodging, and air, a
cram course in ship handling, and an invitation to sign up on the next
ship out. Or any ship you like. They don't make you take any particular
ship, or for that matter any ship at all.
The Corporation doesn't make any profit on any of that. All the prices
are fixed at about cost. That doesn't mean they were cheap, and it
certainly doesn't mean that what you got was good. The food was just about
what I had been digging, and eating, all my life. The lodging was about
the size of a large steamer trunk, one chair, a bunch of lockers, a
fold-down table, and a hammock that you could stretch across it, corner to
corner, when you wanted to sleep.
My next-door neighbors were a family from Venus. I caught a glimpse
through the part-opened door. Imagine! Four of them sleeping in one of
those cubicles! It looked like two to a hammock, with two hammocks
crisscrossed across the room. On the other side was Sheri's room. I
scratched at her door, but she didn't answer. The door wasn't locked.
Nobody locks his door much on Gateway, because there's nothing much worth
stealing among other reasons. Sheri wasn't there. The clothes she had been
wearing on the ship were thrown all over.
I guessed that she had gone out exploring, and wished I had been a
little earlier. I would have liked someone to explore with. I leaned
against the ivy growing out of one wall of the tunnel and pulled out my
map.
It did give me some idea of what to look for. There were things marked
"Central Park" and "Lake Superior." What were they? I wondered about
"Gateway Museum," which sounded interesting, and "Terminal Hospital,"
which sounded pretty bad-I found out later that "terminal" meant as in end
of the line, on your return trip from wherever you went to. The
Corporation must have known that it had another sound to it, too; but the
Corporation never went to much trouble to spare a prospector's feelings.
What I really wanted was to see a ship!
As soon as that thought percolated out of my mind I realized that I
wanted it a lot. I puzzled over how to get to the outer skin, where the
ship docks were located of course. Holding onto a railing with one hand, I
tried to keep the map open with the other. It didn't take me long to
locate myself. I was at a five-way intersection which seemed to be the one
marked "East Star Babe G" on the map. One of the five tunnels out of it
led to a dropshaft, but I couldn't tell which.
I tried one at random, wound up in a dead end, and on the way back
scratched on a door for directions. It opened. "Excuse me-" I said... and
stopped.
The man who opened the door seemed as tall as I, but was not. His eyes
were on a level with my own. But he stopped at the waist. He had no legs.
He said something, but I didn't understand it; it wasn't in English. It
wouldn't have mattered. My attention was taken up with him. He wore gauzy
bright fabric strapped from wrists to waist, and he fluttered the wings
gently to stay in the air. It wasn't hard, in Gateway's low-G. But it was
surprising to see. I said, "I'm sorry. I just wanted to know how to get to
Level Tanya." I was trying not to stare, but I wasn't succeeding.
He smiled, white teeth in an unlined, old face. He had jet eyes under a
crest of short white hair. He pushed past me out into the corridor and
said in excellent English, "Certainly. Take the first turning on your
right. Go to the next star, and take the second turning on your left.
It'll be marked." He indicated with his chin the direction toward the
star.
| WELCOME TO GATEWAY!
|
| Congratulations!
|
| You are one of a very few people each year who
| may become a limited partner in Gateway
| Enterprises, Inc. Your first obligation is to sign
| the enclosed Memorandum of Agreement. You need not
| do this at once. You are encouraged to study the
| agreement and to seek legal advice, if available.
|
| However, until you sign you will not be
| eligible to occupy Corporation housing, dine at
| the Corporation commissary or participate in the
| Corporation instruction courses.
|
| Accommodations are available at the Gateway
| Hotel and Restaurant for those who are here as
| visitors, or who do not at present wish to sign
| the Memorandum of Agreement.
| KEEPING GATEWAY GOING
|
| In order to meet the costs of maintaining
| Gateway, all persons are required to pay a daily
| per-capita assessment for air, temperature
| control, administration, and other services.
| If you are a guest, this cost is included in
| your hotel bill.
| Rates for other persons are posted. The tax
| may be prepaid up to one year in advance if
| desired. Failure to pay the daily per-capita tax
| will result in immediate expulsion from Gateway.
| Note: Availability of a ship to receive
| expelled persons cannot be guaranteed.
I thanked him and left him floating behind me. I wanted to turn back,
but it didn't seem good manners. It was strange. It hadn't occurred to me
that there would be any cripples on Gateway.
That's how naive I was then.
Having seen him, I knew Gateway in a way I had not known it from the
statistics. The statistics are clear enough, and we all studied them, all
of us who came up as prospectors, and all of that vastly larger number who
only wished they could. About eighty percent of flights from Gateway come
up empty. About fifteen percent don't come back at all. So one person in
twenty, on the average, comes back from a prospecting trip with something
that Gateway-that mankind in general-can make a profit on. Most of even
those are lucky if they collect enough to pay their costs for getting here
in the first place.
And if you get hurt while you're out... well, that's tough. Terminal
Hospital is about as well equipped as any anywhere. But you have to get
there for it to do you any good. You can be months in transit. If you get
hurt at the other end of your trip-and that's where it usually
happens-there's not much that can be done for you until you get back to
Gateway. By then it can be too late to make you whole, and likely enough
too late to keep you alive.
There's no charge for a return trip to where you came from, by the way.
The rockets always come up fuller than they return. They call it wastage.
The return trip is free... but to what?
I let go the down-cable on Level Tanya, turned into a tunnel, and ran
into a man with cap and armband. Corporation Police. He didn't speak
English, but he pointed and the size of him was convincing; I grabbed the
up-cable, ascended one level, crossed to another dropshaft, and tried
again.
The only difference was that this time the guard spoke English. "You
can't come through here," he said.
"I just want to see the ships."
"Sure. You can't. You've got to have a blue badge," he said, tapping
his own. "That's Corporation specialist, flight crew or maintenance."
"I am flight crew."
He grinned. "You're a new fish off the Earth transport, aren't you?
Friend, you'll be flight crew when you sign on for a flight and not
before. Go on back up."
I said reasonably, "You understand how I feel, don't you? I just want
to get a look."
"You can't, till you've finished your course, except they'll bring you
down here for part of it. After that, you'll see more than you want."
I argued a little more, but he had too many arguments on his side. But
as I reached for the up-cable the tunnel seemed to lurch and a blast of
sound hit my ears. For a minute I thought the asteroid was blowing up. I
stared at the guard, who shrugged, in a not unfriendly way. "I only said
you couldn't see them," he said. "I didn't say you couldn't hear them."
I bit back the "wow" or "Holy God!" that I really wanted to say, and
said, "Where do you suppose that one's going?"
"Come back in six months. Maybe we'll know by then."
Well, there was nothing in that to feel elated about. All the same, I
felt elated. After all those years in the food mines, here I was, not only
on Gateway, but right there when some of those intrepid prospectors set
out on a trip that would bring them fame and incredible fortune! Never
mind the odds. This was really living on the top line.
So I wasn't paying much attention to what I was doing, and as a result
I got lost again on the way back. I reached Level Babe ten minutes late.
Dane Metchnikov was striding down the tunnel away from my room. He
didn't appear to recognize me. I think he might have passed me if I hadn't
put out my arm.
"Huh," he grunted. "You're late."
"I was down on Level Tanya, trying to get a look at the ships."
"Huh. You can't go down there unless you have a blue badge or a bangle."
Well, I had found that out already, hadn't I? So I tagged along after
him, without wasting energy on attempts at further conversation.
Metchnikov was a pale man, except for the marvelously ornatecurled
whisker that followed the line of his jaw. It seemed to be waxed, so that
each separate curl stood out with a life of its own. "Waxed" was wrong. It
had something in it besides hair, but whatever it was wasn't stiff. The
whole thing moved as he moved, and when he talked or smiled the muscles
moored to the jawbone made the beard ripple and flow. He finally did
smile, after we got to the Blue Hell. He bought the first drink,
explaining carefully that that was the custom, but that the custom only
called for one. I bought the second. The smile came when, out of turn, I
also bought the third.
| WHAT IS GATEWAY?
|
| Gateway is an artifact created by the
| so-called Heechee. It appears to have been formed
| around an asteroid, or the core of an atypical
| comet. The time of this event is not known, but it
| almost surely precedes the rise of human
| civilization.
| Inside Gateway the environment resembles
| Earth,except that there is relatively little
| gravity. (There is actually none, but centrifugal
| force derived from Gateway's rotation gives a
| similar effect.) If you have come from Earth you
| will notice some difficulty in breathing for the
| first few days because of the low atmospheric
| pressure. However, the partial pressure of oxygen
| is identical with the 2000-meter elevation at
| Earth and is fully adequate for all persons in
| normal health.
Over the noise in the Blue Hell talk wasn't easy, but I told him about
hearing a launch. "Right," he said, lifting his glass. "Hope they have a
good trip." He wore six blue-glowing Heechee metal bracelets, hardly
thicker than wire. They tinkled faintly as he swallowed half the drink.
"Are they what I think they are?" I asked. "One for every trip out?"
He drank the other half of the drink. "That's right. Now I'm going to
dance," he said. My eyes followed his back as he lunged toward a woman in
a luminous pink sari. He wasn't much of a talker, that was sure.
On the other hand, at that noise level you couldn't talk much anyhow.
You couldn't really dance much, either. The Blue Hell was up in the center
of Gateway, part of the spindle-shaped cave. Rotational G was so low that
we didn't weigh more than two or three pounds; if anyone had tried to
waltz or polka he would have gone flying. So they did those no-touching
junior-high-school sort of dances that appear to be designed so
fourteen-year-old boys won't have to look up at too sharp an angle to the
fourteen-year-old girls they're dancing with. You pretty much kept your
feet in place, and your head and arms and shoulders and hips went where
they wanted to. Me, I like to touch. But you can't have everything. I like
to dance, anyway.
I saw Sheri, way across the room, with an older woman I took to be her
proctor, and danced one with her. "How do you like it so far?" I shouted
over the tapes. She nodded and shouted something back, I couldn't say
what. I danced with an immense black woman who wore two blue bracelets,
then with Sheri again, then with a girl Dane Metchnikov dropped on me,
apparently because he wanted to be rid of her, then with a tall,
strong-faced woman with the blackest, thickest eyebrows I had ever seen
under a female hairdo. (She wore it pulled back in two pigtails that
floated around behind her as she moved.) She wore a couple of bracelets,
too. And between dances I drank.
They had tables that were meant for parties of eight or ten, but there
weren't any parties of eight or ten. People sat where they wanted to, and
took each other's seats without worrying about whether the owner was
coming back. For a while there were half a dozen crewmen in Brazilian Navy
dress whites sitting with me, talking to each other in Portuguese. A man
with one golden earring joined me for a while, but I couldn't understand
what he was saying, either. (I did, pretty well, understand what he
meant.)
There was that trouble all the time I was in Gateway. There always is.
Gateway sounds like an international conference when the translation
equipment has broken down. There's a sort of lingua franca you hear a lot,
pieces of a dozen different languages thrown together, like, "Ecoutez,
gospodin, tu es verreckt." I danced twice with one of the Brazilians, a
skinny, dark little girl with a hawk nose but sweet brown eyes, and tried
to say a few simple words. Maybe she understood me. One of the men she was
with, though, spoke fine English, introduced himself and the others all
around. I didn't catch any of the names but his, Francesco Hereira. He
bought me a drink, and let me buy one for the crowd, and then I realized
I'd seen him before: He was one of the detail that searched us on the way
in.
While we were commenting on that, Dane leaned over me and grunted in my
ear, "I'm going to gamble. So long, unless you really want to come."
It wasn't the warmest invitation I'd ever had, but the noise in the
Blue Hell was getting heavy. I tagged after him and discovered a
full-scale casino just next to the Blue Hell, with blackjack tables,
poker, a slow-motion roulette with a big, dense ball, craps with dice that
took forever to stop, even a roped-off section for baccarat. Metchnikov
headed for the blackjack tables and drummed his fingers on the back of a
player's chair, waiting for an opening. Around then he noticed I had come
with him.
"Oh." He looked around the room. "What do you like to play?"
"I've played it all," I said, slurring the words a little. Bragging a
little, too. "Maybe a little baccarat."
He looked at me first with respect, then amusement. "Fifty's the
minimum bet."
I had five or six thousand dollars left in my account. I shrugged.
"That's fifty thousand," he said.
I choked. He said absently, moving over behind a player whose chip
stack was running out, "You can get down for ten dollars at roulette.
Hundred minimum for most of the others. Oh, there's a ten-dollar slot
machine around somewhere, I think." He dived for the open chair and that
was the last I saw of him.
I watched for a moment and realized that the black-eyebrowed girl was
at the same table, busy studying her cards. She didn't look up.
I could see I wasn't going to be able to afford much gambling here. At
that point I realized I couldn't really afford all the drinks I'd been
buying, either, and then my interior sensory system began to make me
realize just how many of those drinks I had had. The last thing I realized
was that I had to get back to my room, pretty fast.
| SYLVESTER MACKLEN: FATHER OF GATEWAY
|
| Gateway was discovered by Sylvester Macklen, a
| tunnel explorer on Venus, who found an operable
| Heechee spacecraft in a dig. He succeeded in
| getting it to the surface and bringing it to
| Gateway, where it now rests In Dock 5-33.
| Tragically, Macklen was not able to return and,
| although he succeeded in signaling his presence by
| exploding the fuel tank of the lander of his ship,
| he was dead before Investigators reached Gateway.
| Macklen was a courageous and resourceful man,
| and the plaque at Dock 5-33 commemorates his
| unique service to humanity. Services are held at
| appropriate times by representatives of the
| various faiths.
Chapter 7
I am on the mat, and I am not very comfortable. Physically, I mean. I
have had an operation not long ago and probably the stitches aren't yet
absorbed.
Sigfrid says, "We were talking about your job, Rob."
That's dull enough. But safe enough. I say, "I hated my job. Who
wouldn't hate the food mines?"
"But you kept it, Rob. You never even tried to get on anywhere else.
You could have switched to sea-farming, maybe. And you dropped out of
school."
"You're saying I stuck myself in a rut?"
"I'm not saying anything, Rob. I'm asking you what you feel."
"Well. I guess in a sense I did do that. I thought about making some
kind of a change. I thought about it a lot," I say, remembering how it was
in those bright early days with Sylvia. I remember sitting with her in the
cockpit of a parked sailplane on a January night-we had no other place to
go-and talking about the future. What we would do. How we would beat the
odds. There's nothing there for Sigfrid, as far as I can see. I've told
Sigfrid all about Sylvia, who married a stockholder in the long run. But
we'd broken up long before that. "I suppose," I say, pulling myself up
short and trying to get my money's worth out of this session, "that I had
a kind of death wish."
"I prefer that you don't use psychiatric terms, Rob."
"Well, you understand what I mean. I knew time was going by. The longer
I stayed in the mines the harder it would be to get out. But nothing else
looked any better. And there were compensations. My girlfriend, Sylvia. My
mother, while she was alive. Friends. Even some fun things. Sailplaning.
It is great over the hills, and when you're up high enough Wyoming doesn't
look so bad and you can hardly smell the oil."
"You mentioned your girlfriend, Sylvia. Did you get along with her?"
I hesitated, rubbing at my belly. I have almost half a meter of new
intestine in there now. They cost fearfully, those things, and sometimes
you get the feeling the previous owner wants them back. You wonder who he
was. Or she. How he died. Or did he die? Could he still be alive, so poor
that he sells off parts of himself, the way I've heard of pretty girls
doing with a well-shaped breast or ear?
"Did you make friends with girls easily, Rob?"
"I do now, all right."
"Not now, Rob. I think you said you didn't make friends easily as a
child."
"Does anyone?"
"If I understand that question, Robbie, you are asking if anyone
remembers childhood as a perfectly happy and easy experience, and of
course the answer is 'no.' But some people seem to carry the effects of it
over into their lives more than others."
"Yeah. I guess, thinking back, that I was a little afraid of my peer
group-sorry about that, Sigfrid! I mean the other kids. They all seemed to
know each other. They had things to say to each other all the time.
Secrets. Shared experiences. Interests. I was a loner."
"You were an only child, Robbie?"
"You know I was. Yeah. Maybe that was it. Both my parents worked. And
they didn't like me playing near the mines. Dangerous. Well, it really was
dangerous for kids. You can get hurt around those machines, or even if
there's a slide in the tailings or an outgassing. I stayed at home a lot,
watching shows, playing cassettes. Eating. I was a fat kid, Sigfrid. I
loved all the starchy, sugary stuff with all the calories. They spoiled
me, buying me more food than I needed."
I still like to be spoiled. Now I get a higher class of diet, not as
fattening, about a thousand times as expensive. I've had real caviar.
Often. It gets flown in from the aquarium at Galveston. I have real
champagne, and butter.... "I remember lying in bed," I say, "I guess I was
very small, maybe about three. I had a teddytalker. I took it to bed with
me, and it told me little stories, and I stuck pencils into it and tried
to pull its ears off. I loved that thing, Sigfrid."
Maybe maturity is wanting what you want, instead of what somebody else
tells you you should want.
Maybe, Sigfrid, dear old tin god, but what it feels like is mature is
dead.
I stop, and Sigfrid picks up immediately. "Why are you crying, Robbie?"
"I don't know!" I bawl, tears running down my face, and I look at my
watch, the skipping green numerals rippling through the tears. "Oh," I
say, very conversationally, and sit up, the tears still rolling down my
face but the fountain turned off, "I've really got to go now, Sigfrid.
I've got a date. Her name's Tania. Beautiful girl. The Houston Symphony.
She loves Mendelssohn and roses, and I want to see if I can pick up some
of those dark-blue hybrids that will go with her eyes."
"Rob, we've got nearly ten minutes left."
"I'll make it up another time." I know he can't do that, so I add
quickly, "May I use your bathroom? I need to."
"Are you going to excrete your feelings, Rob?"
"Oh, don't be smart. I know what you're saying. I know this looks like
a typical displacement mechanism-"
"Rob."
"-all right, I mean, it looks like I'm copping out. But I honestly do
have to go. To the bathroom, I mean. And to the florist's, too. Tani is
pretty special. She's a fine person. I'm not talking about sex, but that's
great, too. She can g-She can-"
"Rob? What are you trying to say?"
I take a breath and manage to say: "She's great at oral sex, Sigfrid."
"Rob?"
I recognize that tone. Sigfrid's repertory of vocal modes is quite
large, but parts of it I have learned to identify. He thinks he is on the
track of something.
"What?"
"Rob, what do you call it when a woman gives you oral sex?"
"Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, what kind of dumb game is this one?"
"What do you call it, Rob?"
"Ah! You know as well as I do."
"Please tell me what you call it, Rob."
"They say, like, 'She eats me.'"
"What other expression, Rob?"
"Lots of them! 'Giving head,' that's one. I guess I've heard a thousand
terms for it."
"What other, Rob?"
I have been building up to rage and pain and it suddenly boils over.
"Don't play these fucking games with me, Sigfrid!" My gut aches, and I am
afraid I am going to mess my pants; it is lIke being a baby again. "Jesus,
Sigfrid! When I was a little kid I used to talk to my teddy. Now I'm
forty-five and I'm still talking to a stupid machine as if it was alive!"
"But there is another term, isn't there, Rob?"
"There are thousands of them! Which one do you want?"
"I want the expression you were going to use and didn't, Rob. Please
try to say it. That term means something special to you, so that you can't
say the words without trouble."
I crumple over onto the mat, and now I'm really crying.
"Please say it, Rob. What's the term?"
"Damn you, Sigfrid! Going down! That's it. Going down, going down,
going down!"
Chapter 8
"Good morning," said somebody, speaking right into the middle of a
dream about getting stuck in a sort of quicksand in the middle of the
Orion Nebula. "I have brought you some tea."
I opened an eye. I looked over the edge of the hammock into a nearby
pair of coalsack-black eyes set into a sand-colored face. I was fully
dressed and hung over; something smelled very bad, and I realized it was
me.
"My name," said the person with the tea, "is Shikitei Baldu. Please
drink this tea. It will help rehydrate your tissues."
I looked a little further and saw that he ended at the waist; he was
the legless man with the strap-on wings whom I had seen in the tunnel the
day before. "Uh," I said, and tried a little harder and got as far as,
"Good morning." The Orion Nebula was fading back into the dream, and so
was the sensation of having to push through rapidly solidifying gas
clouds. The bad smell remained. The room smelled excessively foul, even by
Gateway standards, and I realized I had thrown up on the floor. I was only
millimeters from doing it again. Bakin, slowly stroking the air with his
wings, dexterously dropped a stoppered flask next to me on the hammock at
the end of one stroke. Then he propelled himself to the top of my chest of
drawers, sat there, and said:
| WHO OWNS GATEWAY?
|
| Gateway is unique In the history of humanity,
| and it was quickly realized that it was too
| valuable a resource to be given to any one group
| of persons, or any one government. Therefore
| Gateway Enterprises, Inc., was formed.
| Gateway Enterprises (usually referred to as
| "the Corporation") is a multinational corporation
| whose general partners are the governments of the
| United States of America, the Soviet Union, the
| United States of Brazil, the Venusian
| Confederation, and New People's Asia, and whose
| limited partners are all those persons who, like
| yourself, have signed the attached Memorandum of
| Agreement.
"I believe you have a medical examination this morning at oh eight
hundred hours."
"Do I?" I managed to get the cap off the tea and took a sip. It was
very hot, sugarless, and almost tasteless, but it did seem to tip the
scales inside my gut in the direction opposite to throwing up again.
"Yes. I think so. It's customary. And in addition, your P-phone has
rung several times."
I went back to, "Uh?"
"I presume it was your proctor caffing you to remind you. It is now
seven-fifteen, Mr:"
"Broadhead," I said thickly, and then more carefully: "My name is Rob
Broadhead."
"Yes. I took the liberty of making sure you were awake. Please enjoy
your tea, Mr. Broadhead. Enjoy your stay on Gateway."
He nodded, fell forward off the chest, swooped toward the door, handed
himself through it, and was gone. With my head thudding at every change of
attitude I got myself out of the hammock, trying to avoid the nastier
spots on the floor, and somehow succeeded in getting reasonably clean. I
thought of depilating, but I had about twelve days on a beard and decided
to let it go for a while; it no longer looked unshaven, exactly, and I
just didn't have the strength.
When I wobbled into the medical examining room I was only about five
minutes late. The others in my group were all ahead of me, so I had to
wait and go last. They extracted three kinds of blood from me, fingertip,
inside of the elbow, and lobe of the ear, I was sure they would all run
ninety proof. But it didn't matter. The medical was only a formality. If
you could survive the trip up to Gateway by spacecraft in the first place;
you could survive a trip in a Heechee ship. Unless something went wrong.
In which case you probably couldn't survive anyway, no matter how healthy
you were.
I had time for a quick cup of coffee off a cart that someone was
tending next to a dropshaft (private enterprise on Gateway? I hadn't known
that existed), and then I got to the first session of the class right on
the tick. We met in a big room on Level Dog, long and narrow and
low-ceilinged. The seats were arranged two on each side with a center
aisle, sort of like a schoolroom in a converted bus. Sheri came in late,
looking fresh and cheerful, and slipped in beside me; our whole group was
there, all seven of us who had come up from Earth together, the family of
four from Venus and a couple others I knew to be new fish like me. "You
don't look too bad," Sheri whispered as the instructor pondered over some
papers on his desk.
| SHOWER PROCEDURE
|
| This shower will automatically deliver two
| 45-second sprays. Soap between sprays.
| You are entitled to 1 use of the shower in
| each 3-day period.
| Additional showers may be charged against your
| credit balance at the rate of 45 seconds-$5
"Does the hangover show?"
"Actually not. But I assume it's there. I heard you coming in last
night. In fact," she added thoughtfully, "the whole tunnel heard you."
I winced. I could still smell myself, but most of it was apparently
inside me. None of the others seemed to be edging away, not even Sheri.
The instructor stood up and studied us thoughtfully for a while. "Oh,
well," he said, and looked back at his papers. Then he shook his head. "I
won't take attendance," he said. "I teach the course in how to run a
Heechee ship." I noticed he had a batch of bracelets; I couldn't count
them, but there were at least half a dozen. I wondered briefly about these
people I kept seeing who had been out a lot of times and still weren't
rich. "This is only one of the three courses you get. After this you get
survival in unfamiliar environments, and then how to recognize what's
valuable. But this one is in ship-handling, and the way we're going to
start learning it is by doing it. All of you come with me."
So we all got up and gaggled after him, out of the room, down a tunnel,
onto the down-cable of a dropshaft and past the guards-maybe the same ones
who had chased me away the night before. This time they just nodded to the
instructor and watched us go past. We wound up in a long, wide,
low-ceilinged passage with about a dozen squared-off and stained metal
cylinders sticking up out of the floor. They looked like charred tree
stumps, and it was a moment before I realized what they were.
I gulped.
"They're ships," I whispered to Sheri, louder than I intended. A couple
of people looked at me curiously. One of them, I noticed, was a girl I had
danced with the night before, the one with the dense black eyebrows. She
nodded to me and smiled; I saw the bangles on her arm, and wondered what
she was doing there-and how she had done at the gambling tables.
The instructor gathered us around him, and said, "As someone just said,
these are Heechee ships. The lander part. This is the piece you go down to
a planet in, if you're lucky enough to find a planet. They don't look very
big, but five people can fit into each of those garbage cans you see. Not
comfortably, exactly. But they can. Generally speaking, of course, you'll
always leave one person in the main ship, so there'll be at most four in
the lander."
He led us past the nearest of them, and we all satisfied the impulse to
touch, scratch, or pat it. Then he began to lecture:
"There were nine hundred and twenty-four of these ships docked at
Gateway when it was first explored. About two hundred, so far, have proved
nonoperational. Mostly we don't know why; they just don't work. Three
hundred and four have actually been sent out on at least one trip.
Thirty-three of those are here now, and available for prospecting trips.
The others haven't been tried yet." He hiked himself up on the stumpy
cylinder and sat there while he went on:
"One thing you have to decide is whether you want to take one of the
thirty-three tested ones or one of the ones that has never been flown. By
human beings, I mean. There you just pay your money and take your choice.
It's a gamble either way. A high proportion of the trips that didn't come
back were in first flights, so there's obviously some risk there. Well,
that figures, doesn't it? After all, nobody has done any maintenance on
them for God knows how long, since the Heechee put them there.
"On the other hand, there's a risk in the ones that have been out and
back safely, too. There's no such thing as perpetual motion. We think some
of the no-returns have been because the ships ran out of fuel. Trouble is,
we don't know what the fuel is, or how much there is, or how to tell when
a ship is about to run out."
He patted the stump. "This, and all the others you see here, were
designed for five Heechees in the crews. As far as we can tell. But we
send them out with three human beings. It seems the Heechee were more
tolerant of each other's company in confined spaces than people are. There
are bigger and smaller ships, but the no-return rate on them has been very
bad the last couple of orbits. It's probably just a string of bad luck,
but... Anyway, I personally would stick with a Three. You people, you do
what you want.
"So you come to your second choice, which is who you go with. Keep your
eyes open. Look for companions-What?"
Sheri had been semaphoring her hand until she got his attention. "You
said 'very bad,'" she said. "How bad is that?"
The instructor said patiently, "In the last fiscal orbit about three
out of ten Fives came back. Those are the biggest ships. In several cases
the crews were dead when we got them open, even so."
"Yeah," said Sheri, "that's very bad."
"No, that's not bad at all, compared to the one-man ships. Two orbits
ago we went a whole orbit and only two Ones came back at all. That's bad."
"Why is that?" asked the father of the tunnel-rat family. Their name
was Forehand. The instructor looked at him for a moment.
"If you ever find out," he said, "be sure and tell somebody. Now. As
far as selecting a crew is concerned, you're better off if you can get
somebody who's already been out. Maybe you can, maybe you can't.
Prospectors who strike it rich generally quit; the ones that are still
hungry may not want to break up their teams. So a lot of you fish are
going to have to go out with other virgins. Umm." He looked around
thoughtfully. "Well, let's get our feet wet. Sort yourselves out into
groups of three-don't worry about who's in your group, this isn't where
you pick your partners-and climb into one of those open landers. Don't
touch anything. They're supposed to be in deactive mode, but I have to
tell you they don't always stay deactive. Just go in, climb down to the
control cabin and wait for an instructor to join you."
That was the first I'd heard that there were other instructors. I
looked around, trying to work out which were teachers and which were fish,
while he said, "Are there any questions?"
Sheri again. "Yeah. What's your name?"
"Did I forget that again? I'm Jimmy Chou. Pleased to meet you all. Now
let's go."
Now I know a lot more than my instructor did, including what happened
to him half an orbit later-poor old Jimmy Chou, he went out before I did,
and came back while I was on my second trip, very dead. Flare burns, they
say his eyes were boiled out of his bead. But at that time he knew it all,
and it was all very strange and wonderful to me.
So we crawled into the funny elliptical hatch that let you slip between
the thrusters and down into the landing capsule, and then down a
peg-ladder one step further into the main vehicle itself.
We looked around, three Ali Babas staring at the treasure cave. We
heard a scratching above us, and a head poked in. It had shaggy eyebrows
and pretty eyes, and it belonged to the girl I had been dancing with the
night before. "Having fun?" she inquired. We were clinging together as far
from anything that looked movable as we could get, and I doubt we really
looked at ease. "Never mind," she said, "just look around. Get familiar
with it. You'll see a lot of it. That vertical line of wheels with the
little spokes sticking out of them? That's the target selector. That's the
most important thing not to touch for now-maybe ever. That golden spiral
thing over next to you there, the blond girl? Anybody want to guess what
that's for?"
You-there-blond-girl, who was one of the Forehand daughters, shrank
away from it and shook her head. I shook mine, but Sheri hazarded, "Could
it be a hatrack?"
Teacher squinted at it thoughtfully. "Hmm. No, I don't think so, but I
keep hoping one of you fish will know the answer. None of us here do. It
gets hot sometimes in flight; nobody knows why. The toilet's in there.
You're going to have a lot of fun with that. But it does work, after you
learn how. You can sling your hammocks and sleep there-or anywhere you
want to, actually. That corner, and that recess are pretty dead space. If
you're in a crew that wants some privacy, you can screen them off. A
little bit, anyway."
Sheri said, "Don't any of you people like to tell your names?" Teacher
grinned. "I'm Gelle-Klara Moynlin. You want to know the rest about me?
I've been out twice and didn't score, and I'm killing time until the right
trip comes along. So I work as assistant instructor."
"How do you know which is the right trip?" asked the Forehand girl.
"Bright fellow, you. Good question. That's another of those questions
that I like to hear you ask, because it shows you're thinking, but if
there's an answer I don't know what it is. Let's see. You already know
this ship is a Three. It's done six round trips already, but it's a
reasonable bet that it's got enough reserve fuel for a couple more. I'd
rather take it than a One. That's for long-shot gamblers."
"Mr. Chou said that," said the Forehand girl, "but my father says he's
been all through the records since Orbit One, and the Ones aren't that
bad."
| WHAT DOES THE CORPORATION DO?
|
| The purpose of the Corporation is to exploit
| the spacecraft left by the Heechee, and to trade
| in, develop, or otherwise utilize all artifacts,
| goods, raw materials, or other things of value
| discovered by means of these vessels.
| The Corporation encourages commercial
| development of Heechee technology, and grants
| leases on a royalty basis for this purpose.
| Its revenues are used to pay appropriate
| shares to limited partners, Such as you, who have
| been instrumental in discovering new things of
| value; to pay the costs of maintaining Gateway
| itself over and above the per-capita tax
| contribution; to pay to each of the general
| partners an annual sum sufficient to cover the
| cost of maintaining surveillance by means of the
| space cruisers you will have observed in orbit
| nearby; to create and maintain an adequate reserve
| for contingencies; and to use the balance of its
| income to subsidize research and development on
| the objects of value themselves.
| In the fiscal year ending February 30 last,
| the total revenues of the Corporation exceeded 3.
| 7 x 10^12 dollars U. S.
"Your father can have mine," said Gelle-Klara Moynlin. "It's not just
statistics. Ones are lonesome. Anyway, one person can't really handle
everything if you hit lucky, you need shipmates, one in orbit-most of us
keep one man in the ship, feels safer that way; at least somebody might
get help if things go rancid. So two of you go down in the lander to look
around. Of course, if you do hit lucky you have to split it three ways. If
you hit anything big, there's plenty to go around. And if you don't hit,
one-third of nothing is no less than all of it."
"Wouldn't it be even better in a Five, then?" I asked.
Klara looked at me and half-winked; I hadn't thought she remembered
dancing the night before. "Maybe, maybe not. The thing about Fives is that
they have almost unlimited target acceptance."
"Please talk English," Sheri coaxed.
"Fives will accept a lot of destinations that Threes and Ones won't. I
think it's because some of those destinations are dangerous. The worst
ship I ever saw come back was a Five. All scarred and seared and bent;
nobody knows how it made it back at all. Nobody knows where it had been,
either, but I heard somebody say it might've actually been in the
photosphere of a star. The crew couldn't tell us. They were dead.
"Of course," she went on meditatively, "an armored Three has almost as
much target acceptance as a Five, but you take your chances any way you
swing. Now let's get with it, shall we? You-" she pointed at Sheri, "sit
down over there."
The Forehand girl and I crawled around the mix of human and Heechee
furnishings to make room. There wasn't much. If you cleared everything out
of a Three you'd have a room about four meters by three by three, but of
course if you cleared everything out it wouldn't go.
Sheri sat down in front of the column of spoked wheels, wriggling her
bottom to try to get a fit. "What kind of behinds did the Heechee have?"
she complained.
Teacher said, "Another good question, same no-good answer. If you find
out, tell us. The Corporation puts that webbing in the seat. It isn't
original equipment. Okay. Now, that thing you're looking at is the target
selector. Put your hand on one of the wheels. Any one. Just don't touch
any other. Now move it." She peered down anxiously as Sheri touched the
bottom wheel, then thrust with her fingers, then laid the heel of her hand
on it, braced herself against the V-shaped arms of the seat, and shoved.
Finally it moved, and the lights along the row of wheels began to flicker.
"Wow," said Sheri, "they must've been pretty strong!"
We took turns trying with that one wheel-Klara wouldn't let us touch
any other that day-and when it came my turn I was surprised to find that
it took about as much muscle as I could bring to bear to make it move. It
didn't feel rusted stuck; it felt as though it were meant to be hard to
turn. And, when you think how much trouble you can get into if you turn a
setting by accident in the middle of a flight, it probably was.
Of course, now I know more about that, too, than my teacher did then.
Not that I'm so smart, but it has taken, and is still taking, a lot of
people a hell of a long time to figure out what goes on just in setting up
a target on the course director.
What it is is a vertical row of number generators. The lights that show
up display numbers; that's not easy to see, because they don't look like
numbers. They aren't positional, or decimal. (Apparently the Heechee
expressed numbers as sums of primes and exponents, but all that's way over
my head.) Only the check pilots and the course programmers working for the
Corporation really have to be able to read the numbers, and they don't do
it directly, only with a computing translator. The first five digits
appear to express the position of the target in space, reading from bottom
to top. (Dane Metchnikov says the prime ordering isn't from bottom to top
but from front to back, which says something or other about the Heechee.
They were three-D oriented, like primitive man, instead of two-D oriented,
like us.) You would think that three numbers would be enough to describe
any position anywhere in the universe, wouldn't you? I mean, if you make a
threedimensional representation of the Galaxy you can express any point in
it by means of a number for each of the three dimensions. But it took the
Heechee five. Does that mean there were five dimensions that were
perceptible to the Heechee? Metchnikov says not....
Anyway. Once you get a lock on the first five numbers, the other seven
can be turned to quite arbitrary settings and you'll still go when you
squeeze the action teat.
| GATEWAY'S SHIPS
|
| The vessels available on Gateway are capable
| of interstellar flight at speeds greater than the
| velocity of light. The means of propulsion is not
| understood (see pilot manual). There is also a
| fairly conventional rocket propulsion system,
| using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for
| attitude control, and for propulsion of the
| landing craft which is docked into each
| interstellar vessel.
| There are three major classifications,
| designated as Class 1, Class 3, and Class 5,
| according to the number of persons they can carry.
| Some of the vessels are of particularly heavy
| construction and are designated "armored." Most of
| the armored class are Fives.
| Each vessel is programmed to navigate itself
| automatically to a number of destinations. Return
| is automatic, and is quite reliable in practice.
| Your course in ship-handling will adequately
| prepare you for all the necessary tasks in
| piloting your vessel safely; however, see pilot
| manual for safety regulations.
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?"
| 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.
"Probably," she said, "providing you're a Heechee with pilot training."
"Not even like one color means you're going farther from here than some
other color?"
"Not that anybody here has figured out. Of course, they keep trying.
There's a whole team that spends its time programming returned mission
reports against the settings they went out with. So far they've come up
empty. Now let's get on with it, Broadhead. Put your whole hand on that
first wheel, the one the others have used. Shove it. It'll take more
muscle than you think."
It did. In fact, I was almost afraid to push it hard enough to make it
work. She leaned over and put her hand on mine, and I realized that that
nice musk-oil smell that had been in my nostrils for the last little while
was hers. It wasn't just musk, either; her pheromones were snuggling
nicely into my chemoreceptors. It made a very nice change from the rest of
the Gateway stink.
But all the same, I didn't get even a show of color, although I tried
for five minutes before she waved me away and gave Sheri another shot in
my place.
When I got back to my room somebody had cleaned it up. I wondered
gratefully who that had been, but I was too tired to wonder very long.
Until you get used to it, low gravity can be exhausting; you find yourself
overusing all your muscles because you have to relearn a whole pattern of
economies.
I slung my hammock and was just dozing off when I heard a scratching at
the lattice of