my door and Sheri's voice: "Rob?"
   "What?"
   "Are you asleep?"
   Obviously  I  wasn't,  but  I  interpreted the question the way she had
intended it. "No. I've been lying here thinking."
   "So was I.... Rob?"
   "Yeah?"
   "Would you like me to come into your hammock?"
   I  made  an effort to wake myself up enough to consider the question on
its merits.
   "I really want to," she said.
   "All  right. Sure. I mean, glad to have you." She slipped into my room,
and I slid over in the hammock, which swung slowly as she crawled into it.
She  was  wearing  a knitted T-shirt and underpants, and she felt warm and
soft  against  me  when  we  rolled  gently  together in the hollow of the
hammock.
   "It doesn't have to be sex, stud," she said. "I'm easy either way."
   "Let's see what develops. Are you scared?"
   Her  breath  was the sweetest-smelling thing about her; I could feel it
on my cheek. "A lot more than I thought I would be."
   "Why?"
   "Rob-"  she  squirmed  herself comfortable and then twisted her neck to
look  at  me  over her shoulder, "you know, you say kind of asshole things
sometimes?"
   "Sorry."
   "Well,  I  mean  it.  I mean, look what we're doing. We're going to get
into a ship that we don't know if it's going to get where it's supposed to
go,  and  we  don't even know where it's supposed to go. We go faster than
light,  nobody knows how. We don't know how long we'll be gone, even if we
knew  where  we were going. So we could be traveling the rest of our lives
and  die  before  we  got there, even if we didn't run into something that
would kill us in two seconds. Right? Right. So how come you ask me why I'm
scared?"
   "Just  making  conversation."  I  curled up along her back and cupped a
breast, not aggressively but because it felt good.
   "And  not  only that. We don't know anything about the people who built
these  things.  How  do  we  know this isn't all a practical joke on their
part? Maybe their way of luring fresh meat into Heechee heaven?"
   "We don't," I agreed. "Roll over this way."
   "And  the  ship  they showed us this morning doesn't hardly look like I
thought  it  was  going  to be, at all," she said, doing as I told her and
putting a hand on the back of my neck.
   There was a sharp whistle from somewhere, I couldn't tell where.
   "What's that?"
   "I  don't  know."  It  came again, sounding both out in the tunnel and,
louder,  inside  my  room. "Oh, it's the phone." What I was hearing was my
own piezophone and the ones on either side of me, all ringing at once. The
whistle stopped and there was a voice:
   "This  is Jim Chou. All you fish who want to see what a ship looks like
when it comes back after a bad trip, come to Docking Station Four. They're
bringing it in now."
   I  could  hear  a  murmuring  from the Forehands' room next door, and I
could feel Sheri's heart pounding. "We'd better go," I said.
   "I know. But I don't think I want to-much."

   The ship had made it back to Gateway, but not quite all the way. One of
the  orbiting  cruisers had detected it and closed in on it. Now a tug was
bringing  it  in  to  the  Corporation's own docks, where usually only the
rockets  from the planets latched in. There was a hatch big enough to hold
even a Five. This was a Three, what there was left of it.
   "Oh,  sweet Jesus," Sheri whispered. "Rob, what do you suppose happened
to them?"
   "To the people? They died." There was not really any doubt of that. The
ship  was a wreck. The lander stem was gone, just the interstellar vehicle
itself, the mushroom cap, was still there, and that was bent out of shape,
split  open,  seared by heat. Split open! Heechee metal, that doesn't even
soften under an electric arc!
   But we hadn't seen the worst of it.
   We  never  did see the worst of it, we only heard about it. One man was
still  inside  the  ship.  All  over  the  inside of the ship. He had been
literally  spattered  around  the  control  room, and his remains had been
baked onto the walls. By what? Heat and acceleration, no doubt. Perhaps he
had  found  himself  skipping into the upper reaches of a sun, or in tight
orbit  around  a  neutron  star.  The  differential  in gravity might have
shredded ship and crew like that. But we never knew.
   The  other  two  persons in the crew were not there at all. Not that it
was  easy to tell; but the census of the organs revealed only one jaw, one
pelvis,  one  spine-though in many short pieces. Perhaps the other two had
been in the lander?
   "Move it, fish!"
   Sheri  caught  my  arm  and  pulled  me  out of the way. Five uniformed
crewmen  from  the  cruisers came through, in American and Brazilian blue,
Russian    beige,    Venusian   work   white   and   Chinese   all-purpose
black-and-brown. The American and the Venusian were female; the faces were
all different, but the expressions were all the same mixture of discipline
and distaste.
   "Let's  go." Sheri tugged me away. She didn't want to watch the crewmen
poke through the remnants, and neither did I. The whole class, Jimmy Chou,
Klara and the other teachers and all, began to straggle back to our rooms.
Not  quite  quick  enough.  We had been looking through the ports into the
lock;  when  the patrol from the cruisers opened it, we got a whiff of the
air  inside.  I  don't know how to describe it. A little bit like overripe
garbage  being  cooked  to swill to pigs. Even in the rank air of Gateway,
that was hard to take.
   Teacher  dropped off at her own level-down pretty low, in the high-rent
district  around  Easy  Level.  When  she  looked  up  after  me as I said
goodnight I observed for the first time that she was crying.
   Sheri and I said goodnight to the Forehands at their door, and I turned
to her, but she was ahead of me.
   "I  think  I'll  sleep  this  one out," she said. "Sorry, Rob, but, you
know, I just don't feel like it anymore."

   |      SAFETY RULES FOR GATEWAY SHIPS
   |
   |      The mechanism for interstellar travel is known
   |  to be contained in the diamond-shaped box which is
   |  located  under  the center keel of 3-man and 5-man
   |  ships, and in the sanitary facilities of the 1-man
   |  ships.
   |      No  one  has  successfully opened one of those
   |  containers. Each attempt has resulted in explosion
   |  of approximately 1-kiloton force. A major research
   |  project   is  attempting  to  penetrate  this  box
   |  without  destroying  it,  and  if you as a limited
   |  partner  have  any  information  or suggestions in
   |  this  connection  you should contact a Corporation
   |  officer at once.
   |      However,  under  no  circumstances  attempt to
   |  open  the  box  yourself. Tampering with it in any
   |  way, or docking a vessel on which the box has been
   |  tampered  with, is strictly forbidden. The penalty
   |  is   forfeiture   of   all  rights  and  immediate
   |  expulsion from Gateway.
   |      The  course-directing  equipment  also poses a
   |  potential  danger.  Under  no circumstances should
   |  you  attempt  to  change the setting once you have
   |  begun  your  flight.  no  vessel in which this has
   |  been done has ever returned.


        Chapter 9

   I  don't  know  why  I  keep  going  back  to  Sigfrid  von  Shrink. My
appointment  with  him  is always on a Wednesday afternoon, and he doesn't
like it if I drink or dope before then. So it blows the whole day. I pay a
lot  for  those days. You don't know what it costs to live the way I live.
My  apartment over Washington Square is eighteen thousand dollars a month.
My  residence  taxes  to  live  under the Big Bubble come to another three
thousand  plus.  (It  doesn't cost that much to stay on Gateway!) I've got
some  pretty  hefty  charge  accounts  for  furs, wine, lingerie, jewelry,
flowers.  Sigfrid  says  I  try to buy love. All right, I do. What's wrong
with  that?  I  can afford it. And that's not mentioning what Full Medical
costs me.
   Sigfrid,  though,  comes  free.  I'm  covered  by  the Full Medical for
psychiatric  therapy,  any  variety  I  like;  I could have group grope or
internal  massage for the same price, namely nothing. I kid him about that
sometimes.  "Even  considering  that  you're just a bag of rusty bolts," I
say, "you're not much good. But your price is right."
   He  asks, "Does that make you feel that you yourself are more valuable,
if you say that I'm not?"
   "Not particularly."
   "Then  why  do  you insist on reminding yourself that I'm a machine? Or
that I don't cost anything? Or that I cannot transcend my programming?"
   "I guess you just piss me off, Sigfrid." I know that won't satisfy him,
so  I  explain  it. "You ruined my morning. This friend, S. Ya. Lavorovna,
stayed  over  last night. She's something." So I tell Sigfrid a little bit
about what S. Ya. is like, including what she is like walking away from me
in stretch pants with that long dirtygold hair hanging down to her waist.
   "She sounds very nice," Sigfrid comments.
   "Bet  your bolts. Only thing is, she wakes up slow in the morning. Just
when  she was getting lively again I had to leave my summer place, up over
Tappan Sea, and come down here."
   "Do you love her, Rob?"
   The answer is no, so I want him to think it's yes. I say, "No."
   "I  think  that's  an  honest  answer,  Rob," he says, approvingly, and
disappointingly. "Is that why you're angry with me?"
   "Oh, I don't know. Just in a bad mood, I guess."
   "Can you think of any reasons why?"
   He  waits  me  out,  so after a while I say, "Well, I took a licking at
roulette last night."
   "More than you can afford?"
   "Christ!  No." But it's annoying, all the same. There are other things,
too.  It's  getting  toward that chilly time of year. My place over Tappan
Sea  isn't  under  the Bubble, so sitting out on the porch with S. Ya. for
brunch  wasn't  such a good idea. I don't want to mention this to Sigfrid.
He  would  say  something wholly rational like, well, why didn't I have my
lunch  served  indoors?  And  I would just have to tell him all over again
that  when  I  was a kid it was my dream to own a summer place over Tappan
Sea  and have brunch on the porch, looking out over it. They'd just dammed
the  Hudson  then,  when  I  was about maybe twelve. I used to dream a lot
about  Making It Big and living in the style of The Rich Folks. Well, he's
heard all that.
   Sigfrid  clears  his  throat. "Thank you, Rob," he says, to let me know
that the hour is over. "Will I see you next week?"
   "Don't  you  always?"  I  say, smiling. "How the time flies. Actually I
wanted to leave a little early today."
   "Did you, Rob?"
   "I  have another date with S. Ya.," I explain. "She's coming back up to
the  summer  place  with  me  tonight.  Frankly, what she's going to do is
better therapy than what you do."
   He says, "Is that all you want out of a relationship, Robbie?"
   "You  mean,  just sex?" The answer in this case is no, but I don't want
him  to  know just what it is I do want out of my relationship with S. Ya.
Lavorovna.  I  say, "She's a little different from most of my girlfriends,
Sigfrid.  She  has  about as much clout as I do, for one thing. Has a damn
good job. I admire her."
   Well, I don't, particularly. Or rather, I don't care much about whether
I admire her or not. S. Ya. has one trait that impresses me even more than
possessing  the  sweetest  rear view that God ever laid on a human female.
Her damn good job is in information handling. She went to the Akademogorsk
University,  she  was  a  fellow  at  the Max Planck Institute for Machine
Intelligence,  and  she  teaches graduate students in the AI department at
NYU.  She  knows  more about Sigfrid than Sigfrid knows about himself, and
that suggests interesting possibilities to me.


        Chapter 10

   Along  about  my  fifth  day  on  Gateway  I got up early and splurged,
breakfast out in the Heecheetown Arms, surrounded by tourists, bloody-eyed
gamblers  from the casino across the spindle, and liberty sailors from the
cruisers.  It  felt  luxurious,  and  cost luxurious, too. It was worth it
because  of  the tourists. I could feel their eyes on me. I knew they were
talking  about  me,  particularly  a  smooth-faced  but  old African type,
Dahomeyan  or  Ghanaian,  I  think,  with his very young, very plump, very
jeweled   wife.  Or  whatever.  As  far  as  they  could  tell,  I  was  a
swashbuckling hero. True, I didn't have any bangles on my arm, but some of
the veterans didn't wear them, either.
   I  basked.  I  considered  ordering real eggs and bacon, but that was a
little  more  than  even my euphoria would let me go for, so I settled for
orange  juice (it turned out to be real, to my surprise) and a brioche and
several cups of black Danish coffee. All I was really missing was a pretty
girl  across  the armboard of the chair. There were two nice-looking women
who  seemed  to  be  the liberty crew from the Chinese cruiser, neither of
them unwilling to exchange a few radio messages by the glance of the eyes,
but I decided to keep them as open prospects for some future date and paid
my check (that was painful enough) and left for class.

   |      Classifieds.
   |
   |      GOURMET    COOKERY    to    order.   Szechuan,
   |  California,  Cantonese.  Specialty  party munches.
   |  The Wongs, ph 83-242.
   |
   |      LECTURE   &   PV   careers   are  waiting  for
   |  multi-bracelet  retirees!  Sign  up now for course
   |  public    speaking,   holoview   preparation,   PR
   |  management.    Inspect    authenticated    letters
   |  graduates earning $3000/wk up. 86-521.
   |
   |      WELCOME  TO Gateway! Make contacts quickly our
   |  unique  service.  200  names, preferences on file.
   |  Introductions $5O. 88-963.

   On  the  way  down  I caught up with the Forehands. The man, whose name
seemed  to  be  Sess,  dropped  off the down-cable and waited to wish me a
polite good morning. "We didn't see you at breakfast," his wife mentioned,
so  I  told  them  where  I  had  been. The younger daughter, Lois, looked
faintly  envious.  Her mother caught the expression and patted her. "Don't
worry,  hon.  We'll eat there before we go back to Venus." To me: "We have
to watch our pennies right now. But when we hit, we've got some pretty big
plans for spending the profits."
   "Don't we all," I said, but something was turning over in my head. "Are
you really going to go back to Venus?"
   "Certainly,"  they all said, in one way or another, and acted surprised
at  the  question.  Which surprised me. I hadn't realized that tunnel rats
could  manage to think of that molten stinkpot as home. Sess Forehand must
have read my expression, too. They were a reserved family, but they didn't
miss much. He grinned and said:
   "It's our home, after all. So is Gateway, in a way."
   That was astonishing. "Actually, we're related to the first man to find
Gateway, Sylvester Macklen. You've heard of him?"
   "How could I not?"
   "He  was  a  sort  of  a  cousin.  I guess you know the whole story?" I
started  to  say  I  did,  but he obviously was proud of his cousin, and I
couldn't  blame  him,  and  so I heard a slightly different version of the
familiar  legend:  "He  was  in one of the South Pole tunnels, and found a
ship.  God  knows  how he got it to the surface, but he did, and he got in
and   evidently   squeezed   the   go-teat,  and  it  went  where  it  was
programmed-here."
   "Doesn't  the  Corporation pay a royalty?" I asked. "I mean, if they're
going  to  pay  for discoveries, what discovery would be more worth paying
for?"
   "Not to us, anyway," said Louise Forehand, somewhat somberly; money was
a hard subject with the Forehands. "Of course, Sylvester didn't set out to
find Gateway. As you know from what we've been hearing in class, the ships
have  automatic  return. Wherever you go, you just squeeze the go-teat and
you  come  straight back here. Only that didn't help Sylvester, because he
was  here. It was the return leg of a round trip with about a zillion-year
stopover."
   "He  was  smart and strong." Sess took up the story. "You have to be to
explore.  So  he  didn't  panic.  But by the time anybody came out here to
investigate  he  was  out  of  life  support. He could have lived a little
longer. He could have used the lox and H-two from the lander tanks for air
and water. I used to wonder why he didn't."

   |      LAUNCH AVAILABILITIES
   |
   |      30-107.
   |      FIVE.  Three vacancies, Englishspeaking. Terry
   |  Yakamora (ph 83-675) or Jay Parduk (83-004).
   |
   |      30-108.
   |      THREE.   Armored.   One  vacancy,  English  or
   |  French.   BONUS   TRIP.  Dorlean  Sugrue  (P-phone
   |  88-108).
   |
   |      30-109.
   |      ONE.  Check  trip.  Good  safety  record.  See
   |  Launch Captain.
   |
   |      30-110.
   |      ONE. Armored. BONUS TRIP. See Launch Captain.
   |
   |      30-111.
   |      THREE. Open enlistment. See Launch Captain.
   |
   |      30-112.
   |      THREE.  Probable  short trip. Open enlistment.
   |  Minimum guarantee. See Launch Captain.
   |
   |      30-113.
   |      ONE.   Four   vacancies   via   Gateway   Two.
   |  Transportation  in  reliable  Five. Tikki Trumbull
   |  (ph 87-869).

   "Because  he  would  have starved anyway," Louise cut in, defending her
relative.
   "I  think  so. Anyway, they found his body, with his notes in his hand.
He had cut his throat."
   They  were  nice people, but I had heard all this, and they were making
me late for class.
   Of  course,  class wasn't all that exciting just at that point. We were
up  to  Hammock  Slinging  (Basic) and Toilet Flushing (Advanced). You may
wonder why they didn't spend more time actually teaching us how to fly the
ships.  That's  simple.  The things flew themselves, as the Forehands, and
everybody  else,  had  been  telling me. Even the landers were no sweat to
operate,  although  they did require a hand on the controls. Once you were
in  the lander all you had to do was compare a three-D sort of holographic
representation of the immediate area of space with where you wanted to go,
and  maneuver  a  point  of  light  in the tank to the point you wanted to
reach.  The  lander  went  there.  It  calculated its own trajectories and
corrected  its  own  deviations. It took a little muscular coordination to
get the hang of twisting that point of light to where you wanted it to go,
but it was a forgiving system.
   Between  the  sessions of flushing practice and hammock drill we talked
about  what  we  were  going to do when we graduated. The launch schedules
were kept up to date and displayed on the PV monitor in our class whenever
anyone pushed the button. Some of them had names attached to them, and one
or  two  of the names I recognized. Tikki Trumbull was a girl I had danced
with and sat next to in the mess hall once or twice. She was an out-pilot,
and as she needed crew I thought of joining her. But the wiseheads told me
that out-missions were a waste of time.
   I  should tell you what an out-pilot is. He's the guy who ferries fresh
crews  to  Gateway  Two.  There  are about a dozen Fives that do that as a
regular  run.  They take four people out (which would be what Tikki wanted
people  for),  and  then  the  pilot  comes  back alone, or with returning
prospectors-if any-and what they've found. Usually there's somebody.
   The  team who found Gateway Two are the ones we all dreamed about. They
made  it.  Man, did they make it! Gateway Two was another Gateway, nothing
more  or  less,  except that it happened to orbit around a star other than
our  own.  There  was  not much more in the way of treasure on Gateway Two
than there was on our own Gateway; the Heechee had swept everything pretty
clean,  except  for the ships themselves. And there weren't nearly as many
ships there, only about a hundred and fifty, compared to almost a thousand
on our old original solar Gateway. But a hundred and fifty ships are worth
finding  all  by themselves. Not to mention the fact that they accept some
destinations that our local Gateway's ships don't appear to.
   The  ride out to Gateway Two seems to be about four hundred light-years
and  takes  a  hundred  and  nine days each way. Two's principal star is a
bright blue B-type. They think it is Alcyone in the Pleiades, but there is
some  doubt. Well, actually that's not Gateway Two's real star. It doesn't
orbit the big one, but a little cinder of a red dwarf nearby. They say the
dwarf  is  probably a distant binary with the blue B, but they also say it
shouldn't be because of the difference in ages of the two stars. Give them
a  few  more years to argue and they'll probably know. One wonders why the
Heechee  would  have  put  their  spacelines  junction  in orbit around so
undistinguished a star, but one wonders a lot about the Heechee.
   However,  all  that  doesn't  affect  the  pocketbook  of  the team who
happened  to  find  the  place.  They get a royalty on everything that any
later  prospector finds! I don't know what they've made so far, but it has
to  be  in the tens of millions apiece. Maybe the hundreds. And that's why
it  doesn't  pay  to  go  with  an out-pilot; you don't really have a much
better chance of scoring, and you have to split what you get.
   So  we  went down the list of upcoming launches and hashed them over in
the  light  of  our  five-day expertise. Which wasn't much. We appealed to
Gelle-Klara  Moynlin  for  advice.  After  all,  she'd been out twice. She
studied the list of flights and names, pursing her lips. "Terry Yakamora's
a  decent  guy,"  she  said.  "I  don't know Parduk, but it might be worth
taking  a  chance  on  that  one.  Lay  off  Dorlean's  flight.  There's a
million-dollar  bonus,  but what they don't tell you is that they've got a
bastard  control  board  in  it.  The  Corporation's experts have put in a
computer  that's  supposed  to override the Heechee target selector, and I
wouldn't  trust  it.  And,  of  course,  I wouldn't recommend a One in any
circumstances."
   Lois  Forehand  asked,  "Which  one would you take if it was up to you,
Klara?"
   She  scowled thoughtfully, rubbing that dark left eyebrow with the tips
of  her  fingers.  "Maybe  Terry. Well, any of them. But I'm not going out
again  for a while." I wanted to ask her why, but she turned away from the
screen  and said, "All right, gang, let's get back to the drill. Remember,
up for pee; down, close, wait ten and up for poo."

   I  celebrated  completing  the week on ship-handling by offering to buy
Dane  Metchnikov  a  drink.  That  wasn't  my  first  intention.  My first
intention  had  been to buy Sheri a drink and drink it in bed, but she was
off  somewhere.  So  I  worked  the  buttons  on  the  piezophone  and got
Metchnikov.
   He  sounded  surprised  at  my  offer.  "Thanks,"  he  said,  and  then
considered.  "Tell  you what. Give me a hand carrying some stuff, and then
I'll buy you a drink."
   So  I  went down to his place, which was only one level below Babe; his
room  was  not  much  better than my own, and bare, except for a couple of
full  carry-alls.  He  looked  at me almost friendly. "You're a prospector
now," he grunted.
   "Not really. I've got two more courses."
   "Well,  this  is  the last you see of me, anyway. I'm shipping out with
Terry Yakamora tomorrow."
   I was surprised. "Didn't you just get back, like ten days ago?"
   "You  can't  make  any money hanging around here. All I was waiting for
was  the right crew. You want to come to my farewell party? Terry's place.
Twenty hundred."
   "That sounds fine," I said. "Can I bring Sheri?"
   "Oh,  sure,  she's  coming anyway, I think. Buy you the drink there, if
you don't mind. Give me a hand and we'll get this stuff stored."
   He  had accumulated a surprising amount of goods. I wondered how he had
managed  to  stash them all away in a room as tiny as my own: three fabric
carriers  all  stuffed  full, holodisks and a viewer, book tapes and a few
actual  books.  I took the carriers. On Earth they would have weighed more
than  I  could  handle,  probably  fifty  or sixty kilos, but of course on
Gateway  lifting them was no problem; it was only tugging them through the
corridors  and  jockeying  them down the shafts that was tricky. I had the
mass,  but  Metchnikov had the problems, since what he was carrying was in
odd  shapes and varying degrees of fragility. It was about an hour's haul,
actually.  We  wound  up  in a part of the asteroid I'd never seen before,
where  an  elderly  Pakistani  woman counted the pieces, gave Metchnikov a
receipt and began dragging them away down a thickly vine-grown corridor.
   "Whew," he grunted. "Well, thanks."
   "You're  welcome."  We  started  back  toward  a  dropshaft, and making
conversation,  I  assume  out of some recognition that he owed me a social
favor and should practice some social skills, he said:
   "So how was the course?"
   "You  mean  apart  from  the  fact that I've just finished it and still
don't have any idea how to fly those goddamned ships?"
   "Well,  of  course  you  don't,"  he said, irritably. "The course isn't
going  to  teach you that. It just gives you the general idea. The way you
learn,  you  do it. Only hard part's the lander, of course. Anyway, you've
got your issue of tapes?"
   "Oh,  yes." There were six cassettes of them. Each of us had been given
a  set when we completed the first week's course. They had everything that
had  been said, plus a lot of stuff about different kinds of controls that
the Corporation might, or might not, fit on a Heechee board and so on.
   "So play them over," he said. "If you've got any sense you'll take them
with  you  when you ship out. Got plenty of time to play them then. Mostly
the ships fly themselves anyway."
   "They'd  better,"  I said, doubting it. "So long." He waved and dropped
onto  the down-cable without looking back. Apparently I had agreed to take
the drink he owed me at the party. Where it wouldn't cost him anything.
   I  thought of looking for Sheri again, and decided against it. I was in
a  part of Gateway I didn't know, and of course I'd left my map back in my
room. I drifted along, more or less at random, past star-points where some
of the tunnels smelled musty and dusty and there weren't many people, then
through  an inhabited section that seemed to be mostly Eastern European. I
didn't recognize the languages, but there were little notes and wall signs
hanging from the everywhere-growing ivy that were in alphabets that looked
Cyrillic  or  even  stranger. I came to a dropshaft, thought for a moment,
and  then  caught  hold  of  the  up-cable. The easy way not to be lost on
Gateway is to go up until you get to the spindle, where "up" ends.
   But  this  time  I  found  myself passing Central Park and, on impulse,
dropped off the up-cable to sit by a tree for a while.
   Central Park isn't really a park. It's a large tunnel, not far from the
center  of rotation of the asteroid, which has been devoted to vegetation.
I  found  orange trees there (which explained the juice), and grape vines;
and  ferns  and  mosses,  but no grass. I am not sure why. Probably it has
something  to  do  with  planting only varieties that are sensitive to the
available  light, mostly the blue gleam from the Heechee metal all around,
and  perhaps  they couldn't find a grass that could use it efficiently for
its  photochemistry.  The  principal reason for having Central Park in the
first  place was to suck up CO2 and give back oxygen; that was before they
spread planting all over the tunnels. But it also killed smells, or anyway
it  was  supposed  to, a little, and it grew a certain amount of food. The
whole  thing  was  maybe eighty meters long and twice as tall as I was. It
was  broad enough to have room for some winding paths. The stuff they grew
in looked a lot like good old genuine Earthside dirt. What it was, really,
was  a  humus  made  out  of the sewage sludge from the couple of thousand
people who had used Gateway toilets, but you couldn't tell that by looking
at it, or by smelling it, either.
   The  first  tree  big enough to sit by was no good for that purpose; it
was  a  mulberry,  and  under it were spread out sheets of fine netting to
catch the dropping fruit. I walked past it, and down the path there were a
woman and a child.
   A  child!  I hadn't known there were any children on Gateway. She was a
little  bit  of  a  thing, maybe a year and a half, playing with a ball so
big, and so lazy in the light gravity, that it was like a balloon.
   "Hello, Rob."
   That  was  the other surprise; the woman who greeted me was Gelle-Klara
Moynlin. I said without thinking, "I didn't know you had a little girl."
   "I  don't.  This  is  Kathy  Francis, and her mother lets me borrow her
sometimes. Kathy, this is Rob Broadhead."
   "Hello,  Rob,"  the  little thing called, studying me from three meters
away. "Are you a friend of Klara's?"
   "I hope so. She's my teacher. Do you want to play catch?"
   Kathy  finished  her study of me and said precisely, each word separate
from  the one before it and as clearly formed as an adult's, "I don't know
how  to  play catch, but I will get six mulberries for you. That's all you
can have."
   "Thank  you."  I  slumped down next to Klara, who was hugging her knees
and watching the child. "She's cute."
   "Well,  I  guess  so.  It's  hard to judge, when there aren't very many
other children around."
   "She's not a prospector, is she?"
   I  wasn't  exactly  joking,  but Klara laughed warmly. "Her parents are
permanent-party.  Well,  most  of  the  time.  Right  now her mother's off
prospecting;  they do that sometimes, a lot of them. You can spend just so
much time trying to figure out what the Heechee were up to before you want
to try your own solutions to the puzzles."
   "Sounds dangerous."
   She  shushed  me.  Kathy came back, with three of my mulberries in each
open  hand, so as not to crush them. She had a funny way of walking, which
didn't  seem to use much of the thigh and calf muscles; she sort of pushed
herself  up on the ball of each foot in turn, and let herself float to the
next  step.  After I figured that out I tried it for myself, and it turned
out  to  be a pretty efficient way of walking in near-zero gravity, but my
reflexes  kept  lousing it up. I suppose you have to be born on Gateway to
come by it naturally.
   Klara  in  the  park was a lot more relaxed and feminine than Klara the
teacher. The eyebrows that had looked masculine and angry became outdoorsy
and friendly. She still smelled very nice.
   It was pretty pleasant, chatting with her, while Kathy stepped daintily
around us, playing with her ball. We compared places we'd been, and didn't
find  any  in  common.  The one thing we did find in common was that I was
born almost the same day as her two-year-younger brother.
   "Did you like your brother?" I asked, a gambit played for the hell of it.
   "Well,  sure.  He was the baby. But he was an Aries, born under Mercury
and  the Moon. Made him fickle and moody, of course. I think he would have
had a complicated life."

   |      This Park Is MONITORED By Closed-Circuit PV
   |
   |      You  are  welcome  to  enjoy  it.  Do not pick
   |  flowers  or  fruit. Do not damage any plant. While
   |  visiting,  you  may  eat  any  fruits  which  have
   |  fallen, to the following limits:
   |      Grapes, cherries
   |      8 per person
   |      Other small fruits or berries
   |      6 per person
   |      Oranges, limes, pears
   |      1 per person
   |      Gravel  may not be removed from walks. Deposit
   |  all trash of any kind in receptacles.
   |      MAINTENANCE DIVISION THE GATEWAY CORPORATION

   I  was less interested in asking her about what happened to him than in
asking  if  she  really  believed  in  that  garbage, but that didn't seem
tactful,  and  anyway she went on talking. "I'm a Sagittarius, myself. And
you-oh, of course. You must be the same as Davie."
   "I guess so," I said, being polite. "I, uh, don't go much for astrology."
   "Not astrology, genethlialogy. One's superstition, the other's science."
   She  laughed.  "I  can  see  you're  a  scoffer. Doesn't matter. If you
believe,  all  right;  if you don't-well, you don't have to believe in the
law  of  gravity  to  get  mashed  when  you  fall off a two-hundred story
building."
   Kathy,  who  had sat down beside us, inquired politely, "Are you having
an argument?"
   "Not really, honey." Klara stroked her head.
   "That's  good,  Klara,  because  I have to go to the bathroom now and I
don't think I can, here."
   "It's  time  to  go  anyway.  Nice  to  see  you,  Rob.  Watch  out for
melancholy,  hear?"  And they went away hand in hand, Klara trying to copy
the little girl's odd walk. Looking very nice... for a flake.

   That  night  I  took Sheri to Dane Metchnikov's going-away party. Klara
was there, looking even nicer in a bare-midriff pants suit. "I didn't know
you knew Dane Metchnikov," I said.
   "Which  one  is  he?  I  mean,  Terry's  the one who invited me. Coming
inside?"
   The  party  had  spilled out into the tunnel. I peered through the door
and  was  surprised to find how much room there was inside; Terry Yakamora
had  two  full  rooms, both more than twice the size of mine. The bath was
private  and  really  did  contain a bath, or at least a showerhead. "Nice
place,"  I  said  admiringly,  and  then discovered from something another
guest said that Klara lived right down the tunnel. That changed my opinion
of Klara: if she could afford the high-rent district, why was she still on
Gateway?  Why  wasn't  she back home spending her money and having fun? Or
contrariwise,  if  she  was  still  on Gateway, why was she fooling around
keeping  barely  even  with  the  head  tax  by  working  as  an assistant
instructor,  instead  of going out for another killing? But I didn't get a
chance  to  ask  her.  She  did  most of her dancing that night with Terry
Yakamora and the others in the outgoing crew.
   I  lost  track  of Sheri until she came over to me after a slow, almost
unmoving  fox-trot,  bringing  her partner. He was a very young man-a boy,
actually;  he looked about nineteen. He looked familiar: dark skin, almost
white  hair,  a  wisp  of  a  jaw-beard  that drew an arc from sideburn to
sideburn by way of the underside of his chin. He hadn't come up from Earth
with me. He wasn't in our class. But I'd seen him somewhere.
   Sheri introduced us. "Rob, you know Francesco Hereira?"
   "I don't think so."
   "He's from the Brazilian cruiser." Then I remembered. He was one of the
inspectors  who  had gone in to fish through the baked gobbets of flesh on
the shipwreck we'd seen a few days earlier. He was a torpedoman, according
to  his cuff stripes. They give the cruiser crews temporary duty as guards
on  Gateway, and sometimes they give them liberty there, too. He'd come in
in  the regular rotation about the time we arrived. Somebody put on a tape
for  a  hora just then, and after we were through dancing, a little out of
breath,  Hereira  and  I  found ourselves leaning against the wall side by
side, trying to stay out of the way of the rest of the party. I told him I
had just remembered seeing him at the wreck.
   "Ah, yes, Mr. Broadhead. I recall."
   "Tough job," I said, for something to say. "Isn't it?"
   He  had  been  drinking  enough  to  answer  me,  I  guess.  "Well, Mr.
Broadhead,"  he said analytically, "the technical description of that part
of  my job is 'search and registry.' It is not always tough. For instance,
in  a  short  time  you will no doubt go out, and when you come back I, or
someone  else  in my job, will poke into your holes, Mr. Broadhead. I will
turn  out your pockets, and weigh and measure and photograph everything in
your  ship.  That is to make sure you do not smuggle anything of value out
of  your  vessel  and  off  Gateway without paying the Corporation its due
share.  Then I register what I have found; if it is nothing, I write 'nil'
on  the  form,  and  another crewman from another cruiser chosen at random
does the same thing exactly. So you will have two of us prying into you."
   It  didn't  sound  like  a  lot  of fun for me, but not as bad as I had
thought at first. I said so.
   He flashed small, very white teeth. "When the prospector to be searched
is  Sheri  or  Gelle-Klara  over  there, no, not bad at all. One can quite
enjoy  it. But I have not much interest in searching males, Mr. Broadhead.
Especially  when they are dead. Have you ever been in the presence of five
human bodies that have been dead, but not embalmed, for three months? That
was  what  it  was  like  on  the  first  ship I inspected. I do not think
anything will be that bad ever again."
   Then  Sheri  came  up and demanded him for another dance, and the party
went on.
   There  were  a  lot of parties. It turned out there always had been, it
was  just  that we new fish hadn't been part of the network, but as we got
nearer graduating we got to know more people. There were farewell parties.
There  were  welcome-back  parties,  but not nearly as many of those. Even
when  crews  did  come back, there was not always any reason to celebrate.
Sometimes  they  had  been gone so long they had lost touch with all their
friends.  Sometimes,  when  they  had  hit  fairly lucky, they didn't want
anything but to get off Gateway on the way home. And sometimes, of course,
they  couldn't  have  a  party  because  parties  aren't  permitted in the
intensive care rooms at Terminal Hospital.
   It  wasn't  all  parties;  we had to study. By the end of the course we
were supposed to be fully expert in ship-handling, survival techniques and
the  appraisal  of  trade  goods. Well, I wasn't. Sheri was even worse off
than  I. She took to the ship-handling all right, and she had a shrewd eye
for  detail  that would help her a lot in appraising the worth of anything
she  might find on a prospecting trip. But she didn't seem able to get the
survival course through her head.
   Studying with her for the final examinations was misery:
   "Okay,"  I'd  tell  her,  "this  one's a type-F star with a planet with
point-eight surface G, a partial pressure of oxygen of 130 millibars, mean
temperature  at the equator plus forty Celsius. So what do you wear to the
party?"
   She  said accusingly, "You're giving me an easy one. That's practically
Earth."
   "So what's the answer, Sheri?"
   She  scratched  reflectively  under her breast. Then she shook her head
impatiently. "Nothing. I mean, I wear an airsuit on the way down, but once
I get to the surface I could walk around in a bikini."

   |      DUTY AND LEAVE ROSTER USS MAYAGUEZ
   |
   |      1.  Following officers and crewpersons tr temp
   |  dy  stns  Gateway  for  contraband  inspection and
   |  compliance patrol;
   |      LINKY, Tina
   |      W/O
   |      MASKO, Casimir E.
   |      BsnM 1
   |      MIRARCHI, Lory S
   |      S2 2.
   |      Following officers and crewpersons authd 24-hr
   |  temp dy Gateway for R&R;
   |      GRYSON, Katie W
   |      LtJ
   |      HARVEY, Iwan
   |      RadM
   |      HLEB, Caryle T
   |      S1
   |      HOLL, William F Jr
   |      S1   3.   All  officers  and  crewpersons  are
   |  cautioned  once  again  to  avoid  any  repeat any
   |  dispute  with  officers  and  crewpersons of other
   |  patrol   vessels  regardless  of  nationality  and
   |  regardless  of  circumstances, and to refrain from
   |  divulging  classified  information  to  any person
   |  whatsoever.  Infractions  will  be  dealt  with by
   |  complete deprivation of Gateway leave, in addition
   |  to  such  other punishments as a defaulter's court
   |  may  direct.  4.  Temporary  duty  on Gateway is a
   |  privilege,  not  a right. If you want it, you have
   |  to earn it.
   |      By Command of the CAPTAIN USS MAYAGUEZ

   "Shithead! You'd be maybe dead in twelve hours. Earth-normal conditions
means  there's  a good chance of an Earth normal-type biology. Which means
pathogens that could eat you up."
   "So all right-" she hunched her shoulders, "so I'd keep the suit until,
uh, I tested for pathogens."
   "And how do you do that?"
   "I  use the fucking kit, stupid!" She added hastily, before I could say
anything, "I mean I take the, let's see, the Basic Metabolism disks out of
the freezer and activate them. I stay in orbit for twenty-four hours until
they're  ripe,  then  when  I'm down on the surface I expose them and take
readings with my, uh, with my C-44."
   "C-33. There's no such thing as a C-44."
   "So  all  right.  Oh,  and also I pack a set of antigen boosters, so if
there's  a  marginal  problem  with  some sort of microorganism I can give
myself a booster shot and get temporary immunity."
   "I  guess that's all right, so far," I said doubtfully. In practice, of
course,  she  wouldn't  need  to  remember  all  that.  She would read the
directions on the packages, or play her course tapes, or better still, she
would  be  out  with  somebody  who had been out before and would know the
ropes.  But  there  was also the chance that something unforeseen would go
wrong  and she would be on her own resources, not to mention the fact that
she had a final test to take and pass. "What else, Sheri?"
   "The  usual,  Rob!  Do I have to run through the whole list? All right.
Radio-relay; spare powerpack; the geology kit; ten-day food ration-and no,
I  don't  eat  anything I find on the planet at all, not even if there's a
McDonald's  hamburger  stand right next to the ship. And an extra lipstick
and some sanitary napkins."
   I waited. She smiled prettily, outwaiting me.
   "What about weapons?"
   "Weapons?"
   "Yes, God damn it! If it's nearly Earth normal, what are the chances of
life being there?"
   "Oh,  yes. Let's see. Well, of course, if I need them I take them. But,
wait  a  minute,  first  I  sniff  for  methane in the atmosphere with the
spectrometer  reading  from orbit. If there's no methane signature there's
no life, so I don't have to worry."
   "There's  no  mammalian  life,  and  you  do  have to worry. What about
insects? Reptiles? Dluglatches?"
   "Dluglatches?"
   "A  word I just made up to describe a kind of life we've never heard of
that doesn't generate methane in its gut but eats people."
   "Oh,  sure.  All  right,  I'll  take  a  sidearm  and  twenty rounds of
soft-nosed ammo. Give me another one."
   And  so we went on. When we first started rehearsing each other what we
usually  said  at  a  point  like  that was either, "Well, I won't have to
worry,  because  you'll  be there with me anyway," or "Kiss me, you fool."
But we'd kind of stopped saying that.
   In spite of it all, we graduated. All of us.
   We gave ourselves a graduation party, Sheri and me, and all four of the
Forehands,  and  the others who had come up from Earth with us and the six
or  seven who had appeared from one place or another. We didn't invite any
outsiders,  but our teachers weren't outsiders. They all showed up to wish
us  well. Klara came in late, drank a quick drink, kissed us all, male and
female, even the Finnish kid with the language block who'd had to take all
his  instruction  on  tapes.  He  was  going  to have a problem. They have
instruction  tapes for every language you ever heard of, and if they don't
happen  to  have your exact dialect they run a set through the translating
computer  from  the nearest analogue. That's enough to get you through the
course,  but after that the problem starts. You can't reasonably expect to
be  accepted  by  a  crew  that can't talk to you. His block kept him from
learning  any  other  language, and there was not a living soul on Gateway
who spoke Finnish.
   We  took  over  the  tunnel three doors in each direction past our own,
Sheri's,  the  Forehands'  and  mine. We danced and sang until it was late
enough for some of us to begin to drop off, and then we dialed in the list
of open launches on the PV screen. Full of beer and weed, we cut cards for
first pick and I won.

   Something  happened  inside  my  head.  I didn't sober up, really. That
wasn't it. I was still feeling cheerful and sort of warm all over and open
to  all  personality  signals  that  were coming in. But a part of my mind
opened  up  and  a  pair of clear-seeing eyes peered out at the future and
made  a  judgment. "Well," I said, "I guess I'll pass my chance right now.
Sess, you're number two; you take your pick."
   "Thirty-one-oh-nine,"  he  said promptly; all the Forehands had made up
their minds in family meeting, long since. "Thanks, Rob."

   |      Classifieds.
   |
   |      GILLETTE, RONALD C., departed Gateway sometime
   |  in  last  year.  Anyone having information present
   |  whereabouts  please  inform  wife,  Annabelle,  do
   |  Canadian Legation, Tharsis, Mars. Reward.
   |
   |      OUTPILOTS, REPEAT winners, let your money work
   |  for  you  while  you're  out. Invest mutual funds,
   |  growth stocks, land, other opportunities. Moderate
   |  counseling fee. 88-301.
   |
   |      PORNODISKS  FOR  those  long, lonely trips. 50
   |  hours $500. All interests or to order. Also models
   |  wanted. 87-108.

   I  gave him a carefree, drunken wave. He didn't really owe me anything.
That  was  a  One, and I wouldn't have taken a One for any price. For that
matter, there wasn't anything on the board I liked. I grinned at Klara and
winked;  she  looked  serious  for  a  minute, then winked back, but still
looked  serious.  I  knew  she realized what I had come to understand: all
these  launches were rejects. The best ones had been snapped up as soon as
they were announced by returnees and permanent-party.
   Sheri  had  drawn  fifth  pick,  and  when  it came her turn she looked
directly  at  me.  "I'm going to take that Three if I can fill it up. What
about it, Rob? Are you going to come or not?"
   I  chuckled.  "Sheri,"  I  said,  sweetly  reasonable,  "there's  not a
returnee that wants it. It's an armored job. You don't know where the hell
it might be going. And there's far too much green in the guidance panel to
suit  me." (Nobody really knew what the colors meant, of course, but there
was   a   superstition  in  the  school  that  a  lot  of  green  meant  a
superdangerous mission.)
   "It's the only open Three, and there's a bonus."
   "Not  me, honey. Ask Klara; she's been around a long time and I respect
her judgment."
   "I'm asking you, Rob."
   "No. I'll wait for something better."
   "I'm  not  waiting,  Rob. I already talked to Willa Forehand, and she's
agreeable. If worse comes to worst we'll fill it out with-anybody at all,"
she  said,  looking at the Finnish kid, smiling drunkenly to himself as he
stared  at  the  launch  board.  "But-you  and I did say we were going out
together."
   I shook my head.
   "So  stay  here and rot," she flared. "Your girlfriend's just as scared
as you are!"
   Those  sober  eyes  inside  my  skull  looked at Klara, and the frozen,
unmoving  expression  on  her face; and, wonderingly, I realized Sheri was
right. Klara was like me. We were both afraid to go.


        Chapter 11

   I  say  to  Sigfrid, "This isn't going to be a very productive session,
I'm afraid. I'm just plain exhausted. Sexually, if you know what I mean."
   "I certainly do know what you mean, Rob."
   "So I don't have much to talk about."
   "Do you remember any dreams?"
   I  squirm on the couch. As it happens, I do remember one or two. I say,
"No." Sigfrid is always after me to tell him my dreams. I don't like it.
   When  he  first  suggested  it I told him I didn't dream very often. He
said  patiently, "I think you know, Rob, that everyone dreams. You may not
remember the dreams in the waking state. But you can, if you try."
   "No, I can't. You can. You're a machine."
   "I  know  I'm a machine, Rob, but we're talking about you. Will you try
an experiment?"
   "Maybe."
   "It  isn't hard. Keep a pencil and a piece of paper beside your bed. As
soon as you wake up, write down what you remember."
   "But I don't ever remember anything at all about my dreams."
   "I think it's worth a try, Rob."
   Well, I did. And, you know, I actually did begin to remember my dreams.
Little  tiny fragments, at first. And I'd write them down, and sometimes I
would  tell  them to Sigfrid and they would make him as happy as anything.
He just loved dreams.
   Me,  I  didn't  see  much  use  in  it.... Well, not at first. But then
something happened that made a Christian out of me.
   One morning I woke up out of a dream that was so unpleasant and so real
that  for  a few moments I wasn't sure it wasn't actual fact, and so awful
that  I didn't dare let myself believe it was only a dream. It shook me so
much  that I began to write it down, as fast as I could, every bit I could
remember.  Then there was a P-phone call. I answered it; and, do you know,
in  just the minute I was on the phone, I forgot the whole thing! Couldn't
remember  one  bit  of  it. Until I looked at what I had written down, and
then it all came back to me.
   Well, when I saw Sigfrid a day or two later, I'd forgotten it again! As
though  it  had  never happened. But I had saved the piece of paper, and I
had  to  read  it  to him. That was one of the times when I thought he was
most pleased with himself and with me, too. He worried over that dream for
the  whole hour. He found symbols and meanings in every bit of it. I don't
remember  what  they were, but I remember that for me it wasn't any fun at
all.
   As  a matter of fact, do you know what's really funny? I threw away the
paper  on the way out of his office. And now I couldn't tell you what that
dream was to save my life.
   "I  see  you  don't want to talk about dreams," says Sigfrid. "Is there
anything you do want to talk about?"
   "Not really."
   He  doesn't  answer that for a moment, and I know he is just biding his
time  to  outwait me so that I will say something, I don't know, something
foolish. So I say, "Can I ask you a question, Sigfrid?"
   "Can't  you  always,  Rob?"  Sometimes  I think he's actually trying to
smile. I mean, really smile. His voice sounds like it.
   "Well,  what  I  want  to know is, what do you do with all the things I
tell you?"
   "I'm  not sure I understand the question, Robbie. If you're asking what
the information storage program is, the answer is quite technical."
   "No,  that's not what I mean." I hesitate, trying to make sure what the
question  is, and wondering why I want to ask it. I guess it all goes back
to  Sylvia, who was a lapsed Catholic. I really envied her her church, and
let  her know I thought she was dumb to have left it, because I envied her
the  confession.  The inside of my head was littered with all these doubts
and fears that I couldn't get rid of. I would have loved to unload them on
the  parish  priest.  I  could  see  that  you  could  make  quite  a nice
hierarchical  flow  pattern,  with  all  the  shit from inside my own head
flushing  into  the  confessional, where the parish priest flushes it onto
the  diocesan  monsignor  (or  whoever; I don't really know much about the
Church),  and  it all winds up with the Pope, who is the settling tank for
all the world's sludge of pain and misery and guilt, until he passes it on
by  transmitting  it directly to God. (I mean, assuming the existence of a
God,  or  at least assuming that there is an address called "God" to which
you can send the shit.)
   Anyway,  the point is that I sort of had a vision of the same system in
psychotherapy:  local drains going into branch sewers going into community
trunk  lines treeing out of flesh-and-blood psychiatrists, if you see what
I mean. If Sigfrid were a real person, he wouldn't be able to hold all the
misery  that's  poured  into  him.  To  begin  with, he would have his own
problems.  He would have mine, because that's how I would get rid of them,
by  unloading  them  onto  him.  He would also have those of all the other
unloaders  who  share the hot couch; and he would unload all that, because
he had to, onto the next man up, who shrank him, and so on and so on until
they got to-who? The ghost of Sigmund Freud?
   But  Sigfrid  isn't  real. He's a machine. He can't feel pain. So where
does all that pain and slime go?
   I try to explain all that to him, ending with: "Don't you see, Sigfrid?
If  I  give  you  my  pain  and you give it to someone else, it has to end
somewhere.  It  doesn't  feel real to me that it just winds up as magnetic
bubbles in a piece of quartz that nobody ever feels."
   "I  don't think it's profitable to discuss the nature of pain with you,
Rob."
   "Is it profitable to discuss whether you're real or not?"
   He  almost  sighs.  "Rob,"  he  says, "I don't think it's profitable to
discuss  the nature of reality with you, either. I know I'm a machine. You
know  I'm a machine. What is the purpose in our being here? Are we here to
help me?"

   It's  very  healthy  that  you  view  your  breakup  with Drusilla as a
learning experience, Rob.
   I'm a very healthy person, Sigfrid, that's why I'm here.
   Anyway,  that's  what  life  is,  just  one  learning  experience after
another,  and  when  you're  through with all the learning experiences you
graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.

   "I sometimes wonder," I say, sulking.
   "I  don't  think  you actually wonder about that. I think you know that
you  are  here  to  help  you,  and  the way to do it is by trying to make
something  happen  inside  you.  What  I  do  with  the information may be
interesting  to your curiosity, and it may also provide you with an excuse
to spend these sessions on intellectual conversation instead of therapy-"
   "Touche, Sigfrid," I interrupt.
   "Yes.  But  it  is what you do with it that makes the difference in how
you  feel,  and  whether you function somewhat better or somewhat worse in
situations  that  are  important  to you. Please concern yourself with the
inside of your own head, Rob, not mine."
   I  say  admiringly,  "You  sure  are  one  fucking intelligent machine,
Sigfrid."
   He  says, "I have the impression that what you're actually saying there
is, 'I hate your fucking guts, Sigfrid.'"
   I  have  never heard him say anything like that before, and it takes me
aback,  until I remember that as a matter of fact I have said exactly that
to him, not once but quite a few times. And that it's true.
   I do hate his guts.
   He is trying to help me, and I hate him for it very much. I think about
sweet, sexy S. Ya. and how willing she is to do anything I ask her, pretty
nearly. I want, a lot, to make Sigfrid hurt.


        Chapter 12

   I  came  back  to  my  room  one  morning and found the P-phone whining
faintly,  like  a  distant, angry mosquito. I punched the message code and
found  that  the  assistant personnel director required my presence in her
office  at  ten  hundred  hours that morning. Well, it was later than that
already.  I  had  formed  the  habit  of  spending a lot of time, and most
nights,  with  Klara.  Her  pad was a lot more comfortable than mine. So I
didn't get the message until nearly eleven, and my tardiness in getting to
the  Corporation  personnel  offices  didn't help the assistant director's
mood.
   She  was a very fat woman named Emma Fother. She brushed off my excuses
and  accused,  "You graduated your courses seventeen days ago. You haven't
done a thing since."
   "I'm waiting for the right mission," I said.
   "How  long  are  you going to wait? Your per capita's paid up for three
more days, then what?"
   "Well,"  I  said, almost truthfully, "I was going to come in to see you
about that today anyway. I'd like a job here on Gateway."
   "Pshaw."  (I'd  never  heard  anyone say that before, but that's how it
sounded.) "Is that why you came to Gateway, to clean sewers?"

   |      MISSION REPORT
   |
   |      Vessel  3-31, Voyage 08D27. Crew C. Pitrin, N.
   |  Ginza, J. Krabbe.
   |      Transit  time  out  19  days 4 hours. Position
   |  uncertain, vicinity (21. y.) Zeta Tauri.
   |      Summary: "Emerged in transpolar orbit planet .
   |  88  Earth  radius  at . 4 A. U. Planet possessed 3
   |  detected   small  satellites.  Six  other  planets
   |  inferred by computer logic. Primary K7.
   |      "Landing  made. This planet has evidently gone
   |  through  a  warming period. There are no ice caps,
   |  and the present shorelines do not appear very old.
   |  no  detected  signs  of habitation. no intelligent
   |  life.
   |      "Finescreen  scanning located what appeared to
   |  be  a  Heechee rendezvous station in our orbit. We
   |  approached  it.  It  was  intact.  In  forcing  an
   |  entrance  it exploded and N. Ginza was killed. Our
   |  vessel  was  damaged  and  we  returned, J. Krabbe
   |  dying  en route. no artifacts were secured. Biotic
   |  samples   from   planet  destroyed  in  damage  to
   |  vessel."

   I  was  pretty  sure  that was a bluff, because there weren't that many
sewers;  there  wasn't  enough  gravity  flow  to support them. "The right
mission could come along any day."
   "Oh,  sure,  Rob.  You  know, people like you worry me. Do you have any
idea how important our work here is?"
   "Well, I think so-"
   "There's  a  whole  universe  out  there for us to find and bring home!
Gateway's  the only way we can reach it. A person like you, who grew up on
the plankton farms-"
   "Actually it was the Wyoming food mines."
   "Whatever!  You  know  how desperately the human race needs what we can
give  them.  New  technology.  New power sources. Food! New worlds to live
in."  She  shook  her  head  and  punched  through the sorter on her desk,
looking both angry and worried. I supposed that she was check-rated on how
many  of  us idlers and parasites she managed to get to go out, the way we
were  supposed  to,  which  accounted for her hostility-assuming you could
account  for  her  desire  to  stay  on  Gateway  in  the first place. She
abandoned  the sorter and got up to open a file against the wall. "Suppose
I do find you a job," she said over her shoulder. "The only skill you have
that's any use here is prospecting, and you're not using that."
   "I'll take any-almost anything," I said.
   She  looked  at  me  quizzically and then returned to her desk. She was
astonishingly graceful, considering she had to mass a hundred kilos. Maybe
a fat woman's fantasy of not sagging accounted for her desire to hold this
job  and  stay  on  Gateway. "You'll be doing the lowest kind of unskilled
labor," she warned. "We don't pay much for that. One-eighty a day."
   "I'll take it!"
   "Your per capita has to come out of it. Take that away and maybe twenty
dollars a day for toke money, and what do you have left?"
   "I could always do odd jobs if I needed more."
   She  sighed.  "You're  just  postponing the day, Rob. I don't know. Mr.
Hsien,  the  director,  keeps a very close watch on job applications. I'll
find  it  very hard to justify hiring you. And what are you going to do if
you get sick and can't work? Who'll pay your tax?"
   "I'll go back, I guess."
   "And  waste  all  your  training?" She shook her head. "You disgust me,
Rob."
   But  she  punched  me out a work ticket that instructed me to report to
the  crew  chief  on  Level  Grand,  Sector North, for assignment in plant
maintenance.
   I  didn't like that interview with Emma Fother, but I had been warned I
wouldn't.  When  I  talked  it  over  with Klara that evening, she told me
actually I'd got off light.
   "You're  lucky  you drew Emma. Old Hsien sometimes keeps people hanging
until their tax money's all gone."
   "Then  what?"  I  got up and sat on the edge of her cot, feeling for my
footgloves. "Out the airlock?"
   "Don't  make fun, it could conceivably come to that. Hsien's an old Mao
type, very hard on social wastrels."
   "You're a fine one to talk!"
   She  grinned,  rolled  over,  and rubbed her nose against my back. "The
difference between you and me, Rob," she said, "is that I have a couple of
bucks  stashed  away from my first mission. It didn't pay big, but it paid
somewhat.  Also  I've  been out, and they need people like me for teaching
people like you."
   I leaned back against her hip, half turned and put my hand on her, more
reminiscently  than  aggressively.  There  were certain subjects we didn't
talk much about, but-"Klara?"
   "Yes?"
   "What's it like, on a mission?"
   She  rubbed  her  chin  against my forearm for a moment, looking at the
holoview of Venus against the wall. "... Scary," she said.
   I waited, but she didn't say any more about it, and that much I already
knew.  I was scared right there on Gateway. I didn't have to launch myself
on  the  Heechee  Mystery  Bus  Trip to know what being scared was like, I
could feel it already.
   "You  don't really have a choice, dear Rob," she said, almost tenderly,
for her.
   I  felt  a sudden rush of anger. "No, I don't! You've exactly described
my  whole life, Klara. I've never had a choice-except once, when I won the
lottery  and  decided  to  come  here.  And  I'm not sure I made the right
decision then."
   She  yawned,  and rubbed against my arm for a moment. "If we're through
with  sex,"  she  decided,  "I want something to eat before I go to sleep.
Come on up to the Blue Hell with me and I'll treat."

   Plant   Maintenance   was,   actually,   the   maintenance  of  plants:
specifically,  the  ivy  plants that help keep Gateway livable. I reported
for  duty  and, surprise-in fact, nice surprise-my crew boss turned out to
be my legless neighbor, Shikitei Bakin.
   He  greeted me with what seemed like real pleasure. "How nice of you to
join us, Robinette," he said. "I expected you would ship out at once."
   "I will, Shicky, pretty soon. When I see the right launch listed on the
board, I'll know it."
   "Of  course."  He left it at that, and introduced me to the other plant
maintainers. I didn't get them straight, except that the girl had had some
sort  of  connection  with  Professor Hegramet, the hotshot Heecheeologist
back  home,  and  the two men had each had a couple of missions already. I
didn't  really  need to get them straight. We all understood the essential
fact  about  each  other without discussion. None of us was quite ready to
put our names on the launch roster.
   I wasn't even quite ready to let myself think out why.
   Plant  Maintenance  would  have  been a good place for thought, though.
Shicky  put me to work right away, fastening brackets to the Heechee-metal
walls  with tacky-gunk. That was some kind of specially designed adhesive.
It  would  hold  to  both  the  Heechee metal and the ribbed foil of plant
boxes,  and  it  did  not  contain  any  solvent  that would evaporate and
contaminate  the  air. It was supposed to be very expensive. If you got it
on  you,  you just learned to live with it, at least until the skin it was
on died and flaked off. If you tried to get it off any other way, you drew
blood.
   When  the  day's  quota of brackets were up, we all trooped down to the
sewage plant, where we picked up boxes filled with sludge and covered with
cellulose   film.   We   settled  them  onto  the  brackets,  twisted  the
self-locking  nuts  to  hold  them in place, and fitted them with watering
tanks.  The  boxes  probably  would  have  weighed a hundred kilos each on
Earth,  but  on  Gateway that simply wasn't a consideration; even the foil
they were made of was enough to support them rigidly against the brackets.
Then,  when  we  were  all  done,  Shicky  himself  filled  the trays with
seedlings, while we went on to the next batch of brackets. It was funny to
watch  him. He carried trays of the infant ivy plants on straps around his
neck,  like  a  cigarette girl's stock. He held himself at tray level with
one  hand,  and  poked seedlings through the film into the sludge with the
other.
   It was a low-pressure job, it served a useful function (I guess) and it
passed  the  time.  Shicky  didn't make us work any too hard. He had set a
quota  in  his  mind  for  a  day's work. As long as we got sixty brackets
installed  and  filled  he  didn't care if we goofed off, provided we were
inconspicuous  about  it.  Klara would come by to pass the time of day now
and  then,  sometimes  with  the  little  girl, and we had plenty of other
visitors.  And  when times were slack and there wasn't anybody interesting
to  talk  to,  one  at  a  time  we  could wander off for an hour or so. I
explored  a lot of Gateway I hadn't seen before, and each day decision was
postponed.
   We  all talked about going out. Almost every day we could hear the thud
and  vibration  as some lander cut itself loose from its dock, pushing the
whole  ship  out  to where the Heechee main drive could go into operation.
Almost  as often we felt the different kind of smaller, quicker shock when
some ship returned. In the evenings we went to someone's parties. My whole
class  was  gone  by now, almost. Sheri had shipped out on a Five-I didn't
see  her  to  ask  her  why she changed her plans and wasn't sure I really
wanted  to know; the ship she went on had an otherwise all-male crew. They
were  German-speaking,  but  I guess Sheri figured she could get by pretty
well  without  talking  much. The last one was Willa Forehand. Klara and I
went  to  Willa's  farewell  party and then down to the docks to watch her
launch  the next morning. I was supposed to be working, but I didn't think
Shicky  would  mind.  Unfortunately, Mr. Hsien was there, too, and I could
see that he recognized me.
   "Oh, shit," I said to Klara.
   She  giggled and took my hand, and we ducked out of the launch area. We
strolled  away  until we came to an up-shaft and lifted to the next level.
We  sat  down  on the edge of Lake Superior. "Rob, old stud," she said, "I
doubt he'll fire you for screwing off one time. Chew you out, probably."
   I  shrugged and tossed a chip of filter-pebble into the upcurving lake,
which  stretched  a  good  two  hundred  meters up and around the shell of
Gateway  in  front of us. I was feeling tacky, and wondering whether I was
reaching  the  point when the bad vibes about risking nasty death in space
were  being  overtaken  by the bad vibes about cowering on Gateway. It's a
funny  thing  about  fear. I didn't feel it. I knew that the only reason I
was  staying on was that I was afraid, but it didn't feel as though I were
afraid, only reasonably prudent.

   |      Classifieds.
   |
   |      MAID,  COOK  or  companion. Head tax + $1O/da.
   |  Phyllis, 88-423.
   |
   |      GOURMET FOODS, hard-to-get Earth imports. Take
   |  advantage  my  Grouped Mass Guarantee unique co-op
   |  order   service   for  any  item  you  want.  Save
   |  expensive   single-item   shipping  costs!  Sears,
   |  Bradlee, G. TJ. M. catalogues available. 87-747.
   |
   |      FRESH  FISH  from  Australia, M., goodlooking,
   |  seeks mt. French F. companionship. 65-182.

   "I  think,"  I  said,  watching  myself going into the sentence without
being sure how it was going to come out, "that I'm going to do it. Want to
come along?"
   Klara  sat  up  and  shook  herself. She took a moment before she said,
"Maybe. What've you got in mind?"
   I  had  nothing  in  mind. I was only a spectator, watching myself talk
myself  into something that made my toes curl. But I said, as though I had
planned  it  out  for  days,  "I  think  it might be a good idea to take a
rerun."
   "No deal!" She looked almost angry. "If I go, I go where the real money
is."
   That  was  also  where  the  real  danger was, of course. Although even
reruns have turned out bad often enough.
   The  thing  about  reruns is that you start out with the knowledge that
somebody has already flown that trip and made it back, and, not only that,
made  a  find  that's worth following up on. Some of them are pretty rich.
There's  Peggy's  World,  where  the  heater  coils and the fur come from.
There's  Eta  Carina  Seven,  which  is probably full of good stuff if you
could  only  get  at  it.  The trouble is, it has had an ice age since the
Heechees  were  last  on it. The storms are terrible. Out of five landers,
one returned with a full crew, undamaged. One didn't return at all.
   Generally  speaking,  Gateway  doesn't  particularly  want  you to do a
rerun.  They  will  make  a  cash  offer instead of a percentage where the
pickings  are  fairly  easy, as on Peggy. What they pay for is not so much
trade  goods  as  maps. So you go out there and you spend your time making
orbital  runs,  trying  to  find  the  geological  anomalies that indicate
Heechee  digs  may  be  present. You may not land at all. The pay is worth
having,  but  not lavish. You'd have to make at least twenty runs to build
up  a  lifetime  stake, if you take the Corporation's one-pay deal. And if
you decide to go on your own, prospecting, you have to pay a share of your
profits  to  the discovery crew, and a cut on what's left of your share to
the  Corporation.  You  wind up with a fraction of what you might get on a
virgin  find,  even  if you don't have a colony already established on the
scene to contend with.

   |      From  Shikitei  Bakin to Aritsune, His Honored
   |                      Grandson
   |
   |      I  am  overwhelmed  with  joy  to learn of the
   |  birth  of  your  first  child. Do not despair. The
   |  next will probably be a boy.
   |      I  apologize  humbly  for  my failure to write
   |  sooner,  but there is little to tell. I do my work
   |  and  attempt to create beauty where I can. Perhaps
   |  some  day  I  will  go  out  again. It is not easy
   |  without legs.
   |      To  be  sure,  Aritsune, I could buy new legs.
   |  There  was  a close tissue match just a few months
   |  ago. But the cost! I might almost as well buy Full
   |  Medical.  You  are  a loyal grandson to urge me to
   |  use  my  capital for this, but I must decide. I am
   |  sending  you  a  half  of my capital now to assist
   |  with  my  great-granddaughter's expenses. If I die
   |  here,  you will receive all of it, for you and for
   |  the  others  who will be born to you and your good
   |  wife  before  long.  This  is  what I want. Do not
   |  resist me.
   |      My  deepest  love  to all three of you. If you
   |  can,  send  me  a holo of the cherry blossoms-they
   |  are  in  bloom soon, are they not? One loses sense
   |  of Home time here!
   |      Lovingly,
   |      Your Grandfather

   Or you can take a shot at the bonuses: a hundred million dollars if you
find  an  alien civilization, fifty million for the first crew to locate a
Heechee  ship  bigger  than  a Five, a million bucks to locate a habitable
planet.
   Seems  funny  that  they would only pay a lousy million for a whole new
planet?  But the trouble is, once you've found it, what do you do with it?
You  can't  export a lot of surplus population when you can only move them
four  at a time. That, plus the pilot, is all you can get into the largest
ship  in  Gateway.  (And if you don't have a pilot, you don't get the ship
back.)  So  the  Corporation has underwritten a few little colonies, one's
very  healthy on Peggy and the others are spindly. But that does not solve
the problem of twenty-five billion human beings, most of them underfed.
   You'll  never  get  that  kind of bonus on a rerun. Maybe you can't get
some of those bonuses at all; maybe the things they're for don't exist.
   It is strange that no one has ever found a trace of another intelligent
creature.  But  in eighteen years, upwards of two thousand flights, no one
has. There are about a dozen habitable planets, plus another hundred or so
that people could live on if they absolutely had to, as we have to on Mars
and on, or rather in, Venus. There are a few traces of past civilizations,
neither  Heechee  nor  human.  And  there are the souvenirs of the Heechee
themselves. At that, there's more in the warrens of Venus than we've found
almost  anywhere else in the Galaxy, so far. Even Gateway was swept almost
clean before they abandoned it.
   Damn Heechee, why did they have to be so neat?

   So  we  gave up on the rerun deals because there wasn't enough money in
them,  and  put  the  special  finders'  bonuses out of our heads, because
there's just no way of planning to look for them.
   And finally we just stopped talking, and looked at each other, and then
we didn't even look at each other.
   No  matter  what  we  said, we weren't going. We didn't have the nerve.
Klara's had run out on her last trip, and I guess I hadn't ever had it.
   "Well,"  said Klara, getting up and stretching, "I guess I'll go up and
win a few bucks at the casino. Want to watch?"
   I  shook my head. "Guess I'd better get back to my job. If I still have
one."
   So  we  kissed  good-bye at the upshaft, and when we came to my level I
reached  up  and patted her ankle and jumped off. I was not in a very good
mood.  We had spent so much effort trying to reassure ourselves that there
weren't any launches that offered a promise of reward worth the risks that
I almost believed it.
   Of  course,  we  hadn't  even  mentioned the other kind of rewards: the
danger bonuses.
   You have to be pretty frayed to go for them. Like, the Corporation will
sometimes  put  up half a million or so incentive bonus for a crew to take
the  same  course  as  some previous crew tried and didn't come back from.
Their  reasoning is that maybe something went wrong with the ship, ran out
of gas or something, and a second ship might even rescue the crew from the
first one. (Fat chance!) More likely, of course, whatever killed the first
crew would still be there, and ready to kill you.
   Then  there was a time when you could sign up for a million, later they
raised  it  to five million, if you would try changing the course settings
after launch.
   The reason they raised the bonus to five million was that crews stopped
volunteering when none of them, not one of them, ever came back. Then they
cut it out, because they were losing too many ships, and finally they made
it a flat no-no. Every once in a while they come up with a bastard control
panel,  a  snappy  new computer that's supposed to work symbiotically with
the  Heechee board. Those ships aren't good gambling bets, either. There's
a  reason  for  the  safety  lock  on  the Heechee board. You can't change
destination  while  it's  on.  Maybe  you can't change destination at all,
without destroying the ship.
   I  saw five people try for a ten-million-dollar danger bonus once. Some
Corporation  genius  from  the  permanent-party  was worrying about how to
transport  more  than five people, or the equivalent in cargo, at once. We
didn't know how to build a Heechee ship, and we'd never found a really big
one.  So  he  figured  that maybe we could end-run around that obstacle by
using a Five as a sort of tractor.
   So  they  built a sort of space barge out of Heechee metal. They loaded
it  with  scraps of junk, and ran a Five out there on lander power. That's
just  hydrogen and oxygen, and it's easy enough to pump that back in. Then
they tied the Five to the barge with monofilament Heechee metal cables.

   |      MISSION REPORT
   |
   |      Vessel  5-2,  Voyage 08D33. Crew L. Konieczny,
   |  B. Konieczny, P. Ito, F. Lounsbury, A. Akaga.
   |      Transit time out 27 days 16 hours. Primary not
   |  identified but probability high as star in cluster
   |  47 Tucanae.
   |      Summary.  "Emerged  in  free-fall.  no  planet
   |  nearby.  Primary A6, very bright and hot, distance
   |  approximately 3. 3 A. U.
   |      "By  masking  the  primary  star we obtained a
   |  glorious  view  of  what seemed to be two or three
   |  hundred   nearby   very   bright  stars,  apparent
   |  magnitude  ranging  from  2  to  -7.  However,  no
   |  artifacts,  signals, planets or landable asteroids
   |  were  detected.  We  could  remain on station only
   |  three  hours because of intense radiation from the
   |  A6 star. Larry and Evelyn Konieczny were seriously
   |  ill   on   the  return  trip,  apparently  due  to
   |  radiation exposure, but recovered. no artifacts or
   |  samples secured."

   We  watched  the whole thing from Gateway on PV. We saw the cables take
up  slack  as  the  Five  put  a  strain  on  them  with  its lander jets.
Craziest-looking thing you ever saw.
   Then they must have activated the long-range start-teat.
   All  we saw on the PV was that the barge sort of twitched, and the Five
simply disappeared from sight.
   It  never  came  back.  The stop-motion tapes showed at least the first
little  bit  of  what  happened. The cable truss had sliced that ship into
segments  like  a  hard-boiled  egg.  The people in it never knew what hit
them.  The Corporation still has that ten million; nobody wants to try for
it anymore.

   I  got  a  politely reproachful lecture from Shicky, and a really ugly,
but  brief,  P-phone call from Mr. Hsien, but that was all. After a day or
two Shicky began letting us take time off again.
   I  spent  most of it with Klara. A lot of times we'd arrange to meet in
her  pad,  or  once  in a while mine, for an hour in bed. We were sleeping
together almost every night; you'd think we would have had enough of that.
We  didn't.  After  a while I wasn't sure what we were copulating for, the
fun  of  it  or  the distraction it gave from the contemplation of our own
self-images.  I would lie there and look at Klara, who always turned over,
snuggled  down on her stomach, and closed her eyes after sex, even when we
were  going  to  get  up  two minutes later. I would think how well I knew
every  fold  and surface of her body. I would smell that sweet, sexy smell
of  her and wish-oh, wish! Just wish, for things I couldn't spell out: for
an apartment under the Big Bubble with Klara, for an airbody and a cell in
a  Venusian  tunnel  with  Klara,  even  for a life in the food mines with
Klara.  I  guess  it was love. But then I'd still be looking at her, and I
would feel the inside of my eyes change the picture I was seeing, and what
I  would see would be the female equivalent of myself: a coward, given the
greatest chance a human could have, and scared to take advantage of it.
   When  we  weren't  in  bed  we would wander around Gateway together. It
wasn't  like  dating.  We  didn't go much to the Blue Hell or the holofilm
halls, or even eat out. Klara did. I couldn't afford it, so I took most of
my  meals  from the Corporation's refectories, included in the price of my
per-capita per diem. Klara was not unwilling to pick up the check for both
of  us,  but  she wasn't exactly anxious to do it, either-she was gambling
pretty  heavily,  and  not  winning much. There were groups to be involved
with-card  parties,  or  just  parties; folk dance groups, music-listening
groups,  discussion  groups. They were free, and sometimes interesting. Or
we just explored.
   Several times we went to the museum. I didn't really like it that much.
It seemed-well, reproachful.
   The  first  time  we went there was right after I got off work, the day
Willa  Forehand shipped out. Usually the museum was full of visitors, like
crew  members  on  pass  from  the  cruisers,  or  ship's  crews  from the
commercial  runs, or tourists. This time, for some reason, there were only
a  couple  of  people  there,  and  we had a chance to look at everything.
Prayer  fans  by the hundreds, those filmy, little crystalline things that
were  the  commonest  Heechee  artifact;  no  one knew what they were for,
except  that  they  were sort of pretty, but the Heechee had left them all
over the place. There was the original anisokinetic punch, that had earned
a  lucky  prospector  something  like  twenty million dollars in royalties
already.  A  thing you could put in your pocket. Furs. Plants in formalin.
The  original piezophone, that had earned three crews enough to make every
one of them awfully rich.
   The  most  easily  swiped  things,  like  the prayer fans and the blood
diamonds  and the fire pearls, were kept behind tough, breakproof glass. I
think  they  were  even  wired  to burglar alarms. That was surprising, on
Gateway.  There  isn't any law there, except what the Corporation imposes.
There   are   the  Corporation's  equivalent  of  police,  and  there  are
rules-you're  not  supposed to steal or commit murder-but there aren't any
courts.  If  you  break  a  rule  all that happens is that the Corporation
security  force  picks  you  up  and  takes you out to one of the orbiting
cruisers.  Your  own,  if there is one from wherever you came. Any one, if
not.  But  if  they won't take you, or if you don't want to go on your own
nation's  ship  and  can  persuade  some  other  ship to take you, Gateway
doesn't  care.  On the cruisers, you'll get a trial. Since you're known to
be  guilty  to  start with, you have three choices. One is to pay your way
back home. The second is to sign on as crew if they'll have you. The third
is  to  go  out  the  lock without a suit. So you see that, although there
isn't much law on Gateway, there isn't much crime, either.
   But,  of  course,  the  reason for locking up the precious stuff in the
museum was that transients might be tempted to lift a souvenir or two.
   So  Klara  and I would muse over the treasures someone had found... and
somehow  not  discuss with each other the fact that we were supposed to go
out and find some more.
   It  was  not just the exhibits. They were fascinating; they were things
that Heechee hands (tentacles? claws?) had made and touched, and they came
from   unimaginable   places  incredibly  far  away.  But  the  constantly
flickering  tube  displays  held me even more strongly. Summaries of every
mission  ever  launched  displayed  one after another. A constant total of
missions  versus  returns;  of  royalties  paid  to lucky prospectors; the
roster  of  the  unlucky  ones,  name after name in a slow crawl along one
whole wall of the room, over the display cases. The totals told the story:
2355  launches (the number changed to 2356, then 2357 while we were there;
we felt the shudder of the two launches), 841 successful returns.
   Standing  in  front of that particular display, Klara and I didn't look
at each other, but I felt her hand squeeze mine.
   That was defining "successful" very loosely. It meant that the ship had
come  back.  It  didn't say anything about how many of the crew were alive
and well.
   We  left the museum after that, and didn't speak much on the way to the
upshaft.
   The thing in my mind was that what Emma Fother had said to me was true:
the  human  race  needed  what we prospectors could give them. Needed it a
lot.  There were hungry people, and Heechee technology probably could make
all  their lives a lot more tolerable, if prospectors went out and brought
samples of it back.
   Even if it cost a few lives.
   Even  if  the  lives  included Klara's and mine. Did I, I asked myself,
want my son-if I ever had a son-to spend his childhood the way I had spent
mine?
   We  dropped  off  the up-cable at Level Babe and heard voices. I didn't
pay attention to them. I was coming to a resolution in my mind. "Klara," I
said, "listen. Let's-"
   But  Klara was looking past my shoulder. "For Christ's sake!" she said.
"Look who's here!"
   And  I turned, and there was Shicky fluttering in the air, talking to a
girl,  and  I  saw with astonishment that the girl was Willa Forehand. She
greeted us, looking both embarrassed and amused.
   "What's  going  on?"  I  demanded. "Didn't you just ship out-like maybe
eight hours ago?"
   "Ten," she said.
   "Did  something go wrong with the ship, so you had to come back?" Klara
guessed.
   Willa smiled ruefully. "Not a thing. I've been there and back. Shortest
trip on record so far: I went to the Moon."
   "Earth's moon?"
   "That's  the  one."  She seemed to be controlling herself, to keep from
laughter. Or tears.
   Shicky said consolingly, "They'll surely give you a bonus, Willa. There
was  one that went to Ganymede once, and the Corporation divvied up half a
million dollars among them."
   She  shook  her  head. "Even I know better than that, Shicky, dear. Oh,
they'll  award  us something. But it won't be enough to make a difference.
We  need  more  than that." That was the unusual, and somewhat surprising,
thing  about  the  Forehands: it was always "we." They were clearly a very
closely  knit  family,  even if they didn't like to discuss that fact with
outsiders.
   I  touched  her,  a pat between affection and compassion. "What are you
going to do?"
   She  looked  at  me  with  surprise.  "Why,  I've already signed up for
another launch, day after tomorrow."
   "Well!"  said  Klara.  "We've  got to have two parties at once for you!
We'd  better  get  busy...." And hours later, just before we went to sleep
that  night,  she said to me, "Wasn't there something you wanted to say to
me before we saw Willa?"
   "I  forget,"  I  said sleepily. I hadn't forgotten. I knew what it was.
But I didn't want to say it anymore.

   |      Classifieds.
   |
   |      ORGANS  FOR  sale or trade. Any paired organs,
   |  best offer. Need posterior coronal heart sections,
   |  L.  auricle,  L.  &  R.  ventricle, and associated
   |  parts. Phone 88-703 for tissue match.
   |
   |      HNEFATAFL PLAYERS, Swedes or Muscovites. Grand
   |  Gateway Tournament. Will teach. 88-122.
   |
   |      PENPAL  FROM  Toronto  would  like to hear you
   |  tell  what  it's like out there. Address Tony, 955
   |  Bay, TorOntCan M5S 2A3.
   |
   |      I  NEED  to cry. I will help you find your own
   |  pain. Ph 88-622.

   There  were days when I worked myself up almost to that point of asking
Klara  to  ship out with me again. And there were days when a ship came in
with  a  couple of starved, dehydrated survivors, or with no survivors, or
when  at  the  routine time a batch of last year's launches were posted as
nonreturns.  On  those  days  I  worked  myself  up almost to the point of
quitting Gateway completely.
   Most days we simply spent deferring decision. It wasn't all that hard.
   It was a pretty pleasant way to live, exploring Gateway and each other.
Klara  took  on  a maid, a stocky, fair young woman from the food mines of
Carmarthen named Hywa. Except that the feedstock for the Welsh single-cell
protein factories was coal instead of oil shale, her world had been almost
exactly like mine. Her way out of it had not been a lottery ticket but two
years  as  crew on a commercial spaceship. She couldn't even go back home.
She  had jumped ship on Gateway, forfeiting her bond of money she couldn't
pay.  And  she  couldn't prospect, either, because her one launch had left
her  with  a  heart  arhythmia  that  sometimes looked like it was getting
better  and  sometimes  put her in Terminal Hospital for a week at a time.
Hywa's  job  was  partly  to  cook  and  clean for Klara and me, partly to
baby-sit  the  little girl, Kathy Francis, when her father was on duty and
Klara  didn't want to be bothered. Klara had been losing pretty heavily at
the  casino,  so  she  really  couldn't afford Hywa, but then she couldn't
afford me, either.
   What  made  it  easy  to turn off our insights was that we pretended to
each  other,  and  sometimes  to  ourselves,  that  what we were doing was
preparing  ourselves,  really  well,  for the day when the Right trip came
along.
   It  wasn't  hard  to  do  that.  A lot of real prospectors did the same
thing,  between  trips.  There  was a group that called itself the Heechee
Seekers,  which  met  on  Wednesday  nights;  it  had  been  started  by a
prospector  named Sam Kahane, kept up by others while he was off on a trip
that hadn't worked out, and now had Sam back in it between trips, while he
was waiting for the other two members of his crew to get back in shape for
the  next one. (Among other things, they had come back with scurvy, due to
a  malfunction  in  the  food  freezer.)  Sam and his friends were gay and
apparently  set  in  a  permanent  three-way relationship, but that didn't
affect  his  interest  in  Heechee  lore.  He had secured tapes of all the
lectures  of  several courses on exostudies from East Texas Reserve, where
Professor  Hegramet  had  made  himself  the world's foremost authority on
Heechee  research.  I  learned  a lot I hadn't known, although the central
fact,  that  there were far more questions than answers about the Heechee,
was pretty well known to everybody.
   And   we   got   into   physical-fitness  groups,  where  we  practiced
muscle-toning  exercises  that  you  could do without moving any limb more
than  a  few  inches,  and  massage  for  fun  and profit. It was probably
profitable,  but  it was even more fun, particularly sexually. Klara and I
learned  to do some astonishing things with each other's bodies. We took a
cooking  course  (you  can  do  a  lot with standard rations, if you add a
selection of spices and herbs). We acquired a selection of language tapes,
in  the  event  we  shipped  out  with non-English-speakers, and practiced
taxi-driver  Italian  and Greek on each other. We even joined an astronomy
group. They had access to Gateway's telescopes, and we spent a fair amount
of time looking at Earth and Venus from outside the plane of the ecliptic.
Francy Hereira was in that group when he could get time off from the ship.
Klara  liked  him, and so did I, and we formed the habit of having a drink
in  our  rooms-well,  Klara's  rooms,  but I was spending a lot of time in
them-with  him  after  the  group.  Francy  was  deeply, almost sensually,
interested  in  what  was  Out  There. He knew all about quasars and black
holes  and  Seyfert  galaxies, not to mention things like double stars and
novae.  We often speculated what it might be like to come out of a mission
into the wavefront of a supernova. It could happen. The Heechee were known
to  have had an interest in observing astrophysical events firsthand. Some
of  their  courses  were  undoubtedly  programmed  to  bring  crews to the
vicinity  of  interesting  events,  and  a  pre-supernova was certainly an
interesting  event.  Only  now  it was a long lot later, and the supernova
might not be "pre" anymore.
   "I  wonder,"  said  Klara, smiling to show that it was only an abstract
point  she  was putting to us, "if that might not be what happened to some
of the nonreturn missions."
   "It is an absolute statistical certainty," said Francy, smiling back to
show  that  he agreed to the rules of the game. He had been practicing his
English,  which  was  pretty  good  to  start  with, and now he was almost
accent-free.  He  also  possessed German, Russian, and fair amounts of the
other  romance  languages  to go with his Portuguese, as we had discovered
when  we  tried  some  of our language-tape conversation on each other and
found he understood us better than we understood ourselves. "Nevertheless,
people go."
   Klara  and I were silent for a moment, and then she laughed. "Some do,"
she said.
   I cut in quickly, "It sounds as if you want to go yourself, Francy."
   "Have you ever doubted it?"
   "Well,  yes, actually I have. I mean, you're in the Brazilian Navy. You
can't just take off, can you?"
   He  corrected  me: "I can take off at any time. I simply cannot go back
to Brazil after that."
   "And it's worth that to you?"
   "It's worth anything," he told me.
   "Even-"  I  pressed,  "if  there's  the  risk of not coming back, or of
getting  messed  up  like the return today?" That had been a Five that had
landed  on  a  planet with some sort of plant life like poison ivy. It had
been a bad one, we had heard.
   "Yes, of course," he said.
   Klara was getting restless. "I think," she said, "I want to go to sleep
now."
   There  was some extra message in the tone of her voice. I looked at her
and said, "I'll walk you back to your room."
   "That's not necessary, Rob."
   "I'll do it anyhow," I said, ignoring the message. "Good night, Francy.
See you next week."
   Klara was already halfway to the downshaft, and I had to hurry to catch
up  to her. I caught the cable and called down to her, "If you really want
me to, I'll go back to my own place."
   She  didn't  look  up,  but  she  didn't  say that was what she wanted,
either, so I got off at her level and followed her to her rooms. Kathy was
sound  asleep  in  the  outer  room,  Hywa drowsing over a holodisk in our
bedroom.  Klara  sent the maid home and went in to make sure the child was
comfortable. I sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for her.
   "Maybe  I'm premenstrual," Klara said when she came back. "I'm sorry. I
just feel edgy."
   "I'll go if you want me to."
   "Jesus, Rob, quit saying that!" Then she sat down next to me and leaned
against  me so that I would put my arm around her. "Kathy's so sweet," she
said after a moment, almost wistfully.
   "You'd like to have one of your own, wouldn't you?"
   "I  will  have one of my own." She leaned back, pulling me with her. "I
wish  I knew when, that's all. I need a lot more money than I have to give
a kid a decent life. And younger."

   |      A NOTE ON THE HEECHEE RUMP
   |
   |      Professor  Hegramet.  We have no idea what the
   |  Heechee   looked   like   except  for  inferences.
   |  Probably  they  were bipeds. Their tools fit human
   |  hands  tolerably well, so probably they had hands.
   |  Or  something  like  them.  They seem to have seen
   |  pretty  much the same spectrum as we do. They must
   |  have been smaller than us-say, a hundred and fifty
   |  centimeters,  or  less. And they had funny-looking
   |  rumps.
   |      Question. What do you mean, funny-looking rumps?
   |      Professor Hegramet. Well, did you ever look at
   |  the  pilot's seat in a Heechee ship? It's two flat
   |  pieces  of metal joined in a V shape. You couldn't
   |  sit  in  it  for ten minutes without pinching your
   |  bottom  off.  So  what we have to do, we stretch a
   |  webbing  seat  across  them.  But  that's  a human
   |  addition.  The  Heechee  didn't have anything like
   |  that.
   |      So  their bodies must have looked more or less
   |  like a wasp's, with this big abdomen hanging down,
   |  actually  extending  below  the  hips, between the
   |  legs.
   |      Question.  Do  you  mean  they  might have had
   |  stingers like wasps?
   |      Professor  Hegramet.  Stingers.  No.  I  don't
   |  think  so. But maybe. Or maybe they had hell's own
   |  set of sex organs.

   We  lay there for a moment, and then I said into her hair, "That's what
I want, too, Klara."
   She  sighed.  "Do you think I don't know that?" Then she tensed and sat
up. "Who's that?"
   Somebody  was  scrabbling  at  the door. It wasn't locked; we never did
that. But nobody ever came in without being invited, either, and this time
someone did.
   "Sterling!"  Klara  said,  surprised. She remembered her manners: "Rob,
this is Sterling Francis, Kathy's father. Rob Broadhead."
   "Hello," he said. He was much older than I'd thought that little girl's
father  would  be,  at  least  fifty, and looking very much older and more
weary  than  seemed natural. "Klara," he said, "I'm taking Kathy back home
on  the  next  ship.  I  think I'll take her tonight, if you don't mind. I
don't want her to hear from somebody else."
   Klara reached out for my hand without looking at me. "Hear what?"
   "About her mother." Francis rubbed his eyes, then said, "Oh, didn't you
know?  Jan's dead. Her ship came back a few hours ago. All four of them in
the  lander  got into some kind of fungus; they swelled up and died. I saw
her body. She looks-" He stopped. "The one I'm really sorry for," he said,
"is  Annalee.  She  stayed  in  orbit  while the others went down, and she
brought Jan's body back. I guess she was kind of crazy. Why bother? It was
too  late  to  matter to Jan.... Well, anyway. She could only bring two of
them, that was all the room in the freezer, and of course her rations-" He
stopped again, and this time he didn't seem able to talk anymore.
   So  I  sat on the edge of the bed while Klara helped him wake the child
and  bundle her up to take her back to his own rooms. While they were out,
I  dialed a couple of displays on the PV, and studied them very carefully.
By  the  time  Klara  came  back  I  had turned off the PV and was sitting
cross-legged on the bed, thinking hard.
   "Christ," she said glumly. "If this night isn't a bummer." She sat down
at the far corner of the bed. "I'm not sleepy after all," she said. "Maybe
I'll go up and win a few bucks at the roulette table."
   "Let's  not,"  I  said.  I'd  sat next to her for three hours the night
before,  while she first won ten thousand dollars and then lost twenty. "I
have a better idea. Let's ship out."
   She  turned  full  around to look at me, so quickly that she floated up
off the bed for a moment. "What?"
   "Let's ship out."
   She  closed  her  eyes  for  a  moment and, without opening them, said,
"When?"
   "Launch 29-40. It's a Five, and there's a good crew: Sam Kahane and his
buddies.  They're  all  recovered  now, and they need two more to fill the
ship."
   She  stroked  her  eyelids  with  her  fingertips, then opened them and
looked   at   me.   "Well,  Rob,"  she  said,  "you  do  have  interesting
suggestions."  There  were shades over the Heechee-metal walls to cut down
the  light  for  sleeping,  and I had drawn them; but even in the filtered
dimness  I could see how she looked. Frightened. Still, what she said was:
"They're not bad guys. How do you get along with gays?"
   "I leave them alone, they leave me alone. Especially if I've got you."
   "Um,"  she  said,  and  then  she  crawled over to me, wrapped her arms
around  me,  pulled me down and buried her head in my neck. "Why not?" she
said, so softly that I was not at first sure I had heard her.
   When  I was sure, the fear hit me. There had always been the chance she
would say no. I would have been off the hook. I could feel myself shaking,
but I managed to say, "Then we'll file for it in the morning?"
   She shook her head. "No," she said, her voice muffled. I could feel her
trembling as much as I was. "Get on the phone, Rob. We'll file for it now.
Before we change our minds."

   The  next  day I quit my job, packed my belongings into the suitcases I
had  brought  them in, and turned them over for safekeeping to Shicky, who
looked  wistful.  Klara  quit  the  school  and  fired her maid-who looked
seriously  worried-but didn't bother about packing. She had quite a lot of
money  left,  Klara  did.  She prepaid the rent on both her rooms and left
everything just the way it was.
   We  had  a  farewell  party,  of  course. We went through it without my
remembering a single person who was there.
   And  then, all of a sudden, we were squeezing into the lander, climbing
down  into the capsule while Sam Kahane methodically checked the settings.
We locked ourselves into our cocoons. We started the automatic sequencers.
   And  then  there  was a lurch, and a falling, floating sensation before
the thrusters cut in, and we were on our way.


        Chapter 13

   "Good  morning, Rob," says Sigfrid, and I stop in the door of the room,
suddenly and subliminally worried.
   "What's the matter?"
   "There's nothing the matter, Rob. Come in."
   "You've changed things around," I say accusingly.
   "That's right, Robbie. Do you like the way the room looks?"
   I study it. The throw pillows are gone from the floor. The nonobjective
paintings are off the wall. Now he's got a series of holopictures of space
scenes,  and  mountains  and  seas.  The  funniest thing of all is Sigfrid
himself:  he  is  speaking  to  me out of a dummy that's sitting back in a
corner  of  the room, holding a pencil in its hands, looking up at me from
behind dark glasses.
   "You've turned out very camp," I say. "What's the reason for all this?"
   His voice sounds as though he were smiling benevolently, although there
is  no  change in the expression on the face of the dummy. "I just thought
you'd enjoy a change, Rob."
   I  take  a  few  steps  into the room and stop again. "You took the mat
away!"
   "Don't  need  it,  Rob.  As  you  see, there's a new couch. That's very
traditional, isn't it?"
   He coaxes, "Why don't you just lie down on it? See how it feels."
   "Um."  But I stretch out on it cautiously. How it feels is strange; and
I  don't  like  it,  probably  because  this  particular  room  represents
something  serious to me and changing it around makes me nervous. "The mat
had straps," I complain.
   "So  does the couch, Rob. You can pull them out of the sides. Just feel
around... there. Isn't that better?"
   "No, it isn't."
   "I  think,"  he says softly, "that you should let me decide whether for
therapeutic reasons some sort of change is in order, Bob."
   I  sit  up.  "And  that's another thing, Sigfrid! Make up your flicking
mind  what  you're going to call me. My name isn't Rob, or Robbie, or Bob.
It's Robinette."
   "I know that, Robbie-"
   "You're doing it again!"
   A  pause, then, silkily, "I think you should allow me the choice of the
form of address I prefer, Robbie."
   "Um." I have an endless supply of tbose noncommittal nonwords. In fact,
I  would like to conduct the whole session without revealing any more than
that. What I want is for Sigfrid to reveal. I want to know why he calls me
by  different  names  at  different  times.  I  want to know what he finds
significant  in  what I say. I want to know what he really thinks of me...
if a clanking piece of tin and plastic can think, I mean.
   Of  course,  what  I know and Sigfrid doesn't is that my good friend S.
Ya.  has  practically  promised  to let me play a little joke on him. I am
looking forward to that a lot.
   "Is there anything you'd like to tell me, Rob?"
   "No."
   He  waits.  I am feelin