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| may find during or as a result of exploration
| involving any craft furnished me or information
| given me by the Gateway Authority irrevocably to
| said Gateway Authority.
| 2. Gateway Authority may, in its own sole
| direction, elect to sell, lease or otherwise
| dispose of any artifact, object or other thing of
| value arising from my activities under this
| contract. If it does so, it agrees to assign to me
| 50% (fifty percent) of all revenues arising from
| such sale, lease, or disposal, up to the costs of
| the exploration trip itself (including my own
| costs in coming to Gateway and my subsequent costs
| of living while there), and 10% (ten percent) of
| all subsequent revenues once the aforesaid costs
| have been repaid. I accept this assignment as
| payment in full for any obligations arising to me
| from the Gateway Authority of whatever kind, and
| specifically undertake not to lay any claim for
| additional payment for any reason at any time.
| 3. I irrevocably grant to Gateway Authority
| the full power and authority to make decisions of
| all kinds relating to the exploitation, sale, or
| lease of rights in any such discoveries, including
| the right, at Gateway Authority's sole discretion,
| to pool my discoveries or other things of value
| arising under this contract with those of others
| for purpose of exploitation, lease, or sale, in
| which case my share shall be whatever proportion
| of such earnings Gateway Authority may deem
| proper; and I further grant to Gateway Authority
| the right to refrain from exploiting any or all
| such discoveries or things of value in any way, at
| its own sole discretion.
| 4. I release Gateway Authority from any and
| all claims by me or on my behalf arising from any
| injury, accident, or loss of any kind to me in
| connection with my activities under this contract.
| 5. In the event of any disagreement arising
| from this Memorandum of Agreement, I agree that
| the terms shall be interpreted according to the
| laws and precedents of Gateway itself, and that no
| laws or precedents of any other jurisdiction shall
| be considered relevant in any degree.
"Oh, hell, man! It's in that packet of stuff they gave you."
I opened the lockers at random until I found where I had put the
envelope. Inside it were my copy of the articles of agreement, a booklet
entitled Welcome to Gateway, my room assignment, my health questionnaire
that I would have to fill out before 0800 the next morning... and a folded
sheet that, opened up, looked like a wiring diagram with names on it.
"That's it. Can you locate where you are? Remember your room number:
Level Babe, Quadrant East, Tunnel Eight, Room Fifty-one. Write it down."
"It's already written here, Dane, on my room assignment."
"Well, don't lose it." Dane reached behind his neck and unhooked
himself, let himself fall gently to the floor. "So why don't you look
around by yourself for a while. I'll meet you here. Anything else you need
to know right now?"
I thought, while he looked impatient. "Well-mind if I ask you a
question about you, Dane? Have you been out yet?"
"Six trips. All right, I'll see you at twenty-two hundred." Then he
pushed the flexible door open, slipped out into the jungly green of the
corridor and was gone.
I let myself flop-so gently, so slowly-into my one real chair and tried
to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.
I don't know if I can make you feel it, how the universe looked to me
from Gateway: like being young with Full Medical. Like a menu in the best
restaurant in the world, when somebody else is going to pick up the check.
Like a girl you've just met who likes you. Like an unopened gift.
The things that hit you first on Gateway are the tininess of the
tunnels, feeling tinier even than they are because they're lined with
windowboxy things of plants; the vertigo from the low gravity, and the
stink. You get Gateway a little bit at a time. There's no way of seeing it
all in one glance; it is nothing but a maze of tunnels in the rock. I'm
not even sure they've all been explored yet. Certainly there are miles of
them that nobody ever goes into, or not very often.
That's the way the Heechees were. They grabbed the asteroid, plated it
over with wall metal, drove tunnels into it, filled them with whatever
sort of possessions they had-most were empty by the time we got there,
just as everything that ever belonged to the Heechees is, all over the
universe. And then they left it, for whatever reason they left.
The closest thing to a central point in Gateway is Heecheetown. That's
a spindle-shaped cave near the geometric center of the asteroid. They say
that when the Heechees built Gateway they lived there. We lived there too,
at first, or close to it, all of us new peopie off Earth. (And elsewhere.
A ship from Venus had come in just before ours.) That's where the company
housing is. Later on, if we got rich on a prospecting trip, we could move
out farther toward the surface, where there was a little more gravity and
less noise. And above all, less smell. A couple thousand people had
breathed the air I was breathing, one time or another, voided the water I
drank and exuded their smells into the atmosphere. The people didn't stay
around very long, most of them. But the smells were still there.
I didn't care about the smell. I didn't care about any of it. Gateway
was my big, fat lottery ticket to Full Medical, a nine-room house, a
couple of kids, and a lot of joy. I had won one lottery already. It made
me cocky about my chances of winning another.
It was all exciting, although at the same time it was dingy enough,
too. There wasn't much luxury around. For your $238,575 what you get is
transportation to Gateway, ten days' worth of food, lodging, and air, a
cram course in ship handling, and an invitation to sign up on the next
ship out. Or any ship you like. They don't make you take any particular
ship, or for that matter any ship at all.
The Corporation doesn't make any profit on any of that. All the prices
are fixed at about cost. That doesn't mean they were cheap, and it
certainly doesn't mean that what you got was good. The food was just about
what I had been digging, and eating, all my life. The lodging was about
the size of a large steamer trunk, one chair, a bunch of lockers, a
fold-down table, and a hammock that you could stretch across it, corner to
corner, when you wanted to sleep.
My next-door neighbors were a family from Venus. I caught a glimpse
through the part-opened door. Imagine! Four of them sleeping in one of
those cubicles! It looked like two to a hammock, with two hammocks
crisscrossed across the room. On the other side was Sheri's room. I
scratched at her door, but she didn't answer. The door wasn't locked.
Nobody locks his door much on Gateway, because there's nothing much worth
stealing among other reasons. Sheri wasn't there. The clothes she had been
wearing on the ship were thrown all over.
I guessed that she had gone out exploring, and wished I had been a
little earlier. I would have liked someone to explore with. I leaned
against the ivy growing out of one wall of the tunnel and pulled out my
map.
It did give me some idea of what to look for. There were things marked
"Central Park" and "Lake Superior." What were they? I wondered about
"Gateway Museum," which sounded interesting, and "Terminal Hospital,"
which sounded pretty bad-I found out later that "terminal" meant as in end
of the line, on your return trip from wherever you went to. The
Corporation must have known that it had another sound to it, too; but the
Corporation never went to much trouble to spare a prospector's feelings.
What I really wanted was to see a ship!
As soon as that thought percolated out of my mind I realized that I
wanted it a lot. I puzzled over how to get to the outer skin, where the
ship docks were located of course. Holding onto a railing with one hand, I
tried to keep the map open with the other. It didn't take me long to
locate myself. I was at a five-way intersection which seemed to be the one
marked "East Star Babe G" on the map. One of the five tunnels out of it
led to a dropshaft, but I couldn't tell which.
I tried one at random, wound up in a dead end, and on the way back
scratched on a door for directions. It opened. "Excuse me-" I said... and
stopped.
The man who opened the door seemed as tall as I, but was not. His eyes
were on a level with my own. But he stopped at the waist. He had no legs.
He said something, but I didn't understand it; it wasn't in English. It
wouldn't have mattered. My attention was taken up with him. He wore gauzy
bright fabric strapped from wrists to waist, and he fluttered the wings
gently to stay in the air. It wasn't hard, in Gateway's low-G. But it was
surprising to see. I said, "I'm sorry. I just wanted to know how to get to
Level Tanya." I was trying not to stare, but I wasn't succeeding.
He smiled, white teeth in an unlined, old face. He had jet eyes under a
crest of short white hair. He pushed past me out into the corridor and
said in excellent English, "Certainly. Take the first turning on your
right. Go to the next star, and take the second turning on your left.
It'll be marked." He indicated with his chin the direction toward the
star.
| WELCOME TO GATEWAY!
|
| Congratulations!
|
| You are one of a very few people each year who
| may become a limited partner in Gateway
| Enterprises, Inc. Your first obligation is to sign
| the enclosed Memorandum of Agreement. You need not
| do this at once. You are encouraged to study the
| agreement and to seek legal advice, if available.
|
| However, until you sign you will not be
| eligible to occupy Corporation housing, dine at
| the Corporation commissary or participate in the
| Corporation instruction courses.
|
| Accommodations are available at the Gateway
| Hotel and Restaurant for those who are here as
| visitors, or who do not at present wish to sign
| the Memorandum of Agreement.
| KEEPING GATEWAY GOING
|
| In order to meet the costs of maintaining
| Gateway, all persons are required to pay a daily
| per-capita assessment for air, temperature
| control, administration, and other services.
| If you are a guest, this cost is included in
| your hotel bill.
| Rates for other persons are posted. The tax
| may be prepaid up to one year in advance if
| desired. Failure to pay the daily per-capita tax
| will result in immediate expulsion from Gateway.
| Note: Availability of a ship to receive
| expelled persons cannot be guaranteed.
I thanked him and left him floating behind me. I wanted to turn back,
but it didn't seem good manners. It was strange. It hadn't occurred to me
that there would be any cripples on Gateway.
That's how naive I was then.
Having seen him, I knew Gateway in a way I had not known it from the
statistics. The statistics are clear enough, and we all studied them, all
of us who came up as prospectors, and all of that vastly larger number who
only wished they could. About eighty percent of flights from Gateway come
up empty. About fifteen percent don't come back at all. So one person in
twenty, on the average, comes back from a prospecting trip with something
that Gateway-that mankind in general-can make a profit on. Most of even
those are lucky if they collect enough to pay their costs for getting here
in the first place.
And if you get hurt while you're out... well, that's tough. Terminal
Hospital is about as well equipped as any anywhere. But you have to get
there for it to do you any good. You can be months in transit. If you get
hurt at the other end of your trip-and that's where it usually
happens-there's not much that can be done for you until you get back to
Gateway. By then it can be too late to make you whole, and likely enough
too late to keep you alive.
There's no charge for a return trip to where you came from, by the way.
The rockets always come up fuller than they return. They call it wastage.
The return trip is free... but to what?
I let go the down-cable on Level Tanya, turned into a tunnel, and ran
into a man with cap and armband. Corporation Police. He didn't speak
English, but he pointed and the size of him was convincing; I grabbed the
up-cable, ascended one level, crossed to another dropshaft, and tried
again.
The only difference was that this time the guard spoke English. "You
can't come through here," he said.
"I just want to see the ships."
"Sure. You can't. You've got to have a blue badge," he said, tapping
his own. "That's Corporation specialist, flight crew or maintenance."
"I am flight crew."
He grinned. "You're a new fish off the Earth transport, aren't you?
Friend, you'll be flight crew when you sign on for a flight and not
before. Go on back up."
I said reasonably, "You understand how I feel, don't you? I just want
to get a look."
"You can't, till you've finished your course, except they'll bring you
down here for part of it. After that, you'll see more than you want."
I argued a little more, but he had too many arguments on his side. But
as I reached for the up-cable the tunnel seemed to lurch and a blast of
sound hit my ears. For a minute I thought the asteroid was blowing up. I
stared at the guard, who shrugged, in a not unfriendly way. "I only said
you couldn't see them," he said. "I didn't say you couldn't hear them."
I bit back the "wow" or "Holy God!" that I really wanted to say, and
said, "Where do you suppose that one's going?"
"Come back in six months. Maybe we'll know by then."
Well, there was nothing in that to feel elated about. All the same, I
felt elated. After all those years in the food mines, here I was, not only
on Gateway, but right there when some of those intrepid prospectors set
out on a trip that would bring them fame and incredible fortune! Never
mind the odds. This was really living on the top line.
So I wasn't paying much attention to what I was doing, and as a result
I got lost again on the way back. I reached Level Babe ten minutes late.
Dane Metchnikov was striding down the tunnel away from my room. He
didn't appear to recognize me. I think he might have passed me if I hadn't
put out my arm.
"Huh," he grunted. "You're late."
"I was down on Level Tanya, trying to get a look at the ships."
"Huh. You can't go down there unless you have a blue badge or a bangle."
Well, I had found that out already, hadn't I? So I tagged along after
him, without wasting energy on attempts at further conversation.
Metchnikov was a pale man, except for the marvelously ornatecurled
whisker that followed the line of his jaw. It seemed to be waxed, so that
each separate curl stood out with a life of its own. "Waxed" was wrong. It
had something in it besides hair, but whatever it was wasn't stiff. The
whole thing moved as he moved, and when he talked or smiled the muscles
moored to the jawbone made the beard ripple and flow. He finally did
smile, after we got to the Blue Hell. He bought the first drink,
explaining carefully that that was the custom, but that the custom only
called for one. I bought the second. The smile came when, out of turn, I
also bought the third.
| WHAT IS GATEWAY?
|
| Gateway is an artifact created by the
| so-called Heechee. It appears to have been formed
| around an asteroid, or the core of an atypical
| comet. The time of this event is not known, but it
| almost surely precedes the rise of human
| civilization.
| Inside Gateway the environment resembles
| Earth,except that there is relatively little
| gravity. (There is actually none, but centrifugal
| force derived from Gateway's rotation gives a
| similar effect.) If you have come from Earth you
| will notice some difficulty in breathing for the
| first few days because of the low atmospheric
| pressure. However, the partial pressure of oxygen
| is identical with the 2000-meter elevation at
| Earth and is fully adequate for all persons in
| normal health.
Over the noise in the Blue Hell talk wasn't easy, but I told him about
hearing a launch. "Right," he said, lifting his glass. "Hope they have a
good trip." He wore six blue-glowing Heechee metal bracelets, hardly
thicker than wire. They tinkled faintly as he swallowed half the drink.
"Are they what I think they are?" I asked. "One for every trip out?"
He drank the other half of the drink. "That's right. Now I'm going to
dance," he said. My eyes followed his back as he lunged toward a woman in
a luminous pink sari. He wasn't much of a talker, that was sure.
On the other hand, at that noise level you couldn't talk much anyhow.
You couldn't really dance much, either. The Blue Hell was up in the center
of Gateway, part of the spindle-shaped cave. Rotational G was so low that
we didn't weigh more than two or three pounds; if anyone had tried to
waltz or polka he would have gone flying. So they did those no-touching
junior-high-school sort of dances that appear to be designed so
fourteen-year-old boys won't have to look up at too sharp an angle to the
fourteen-year-old girls they're dancing with. You pretty much kept your
feet in place, and your head and arms and shoulders and hips went where
they wanted to. Me, I like to touch. But you can't have everything. I like
to dance, anyway.
I saw Sheri, way across the room, with an older woman I took to be her
proctor, and danced one with her. "How do you like it so far?" I shouted
over the tapes. She nodded and shouted something back, I couldn't say
what. I danced with an immense black woman who wore two blue bracelets,
then with Sheri again, then with a girl Dane Metchnikov dropped on me,
apparently because he wanted to be rid of her, then with a tall,
strong-faced woman with the blackest, thickest eyebrows I had ever seen
under a female hairdo. (She wore it pulled back in two pigtails that
floated around behind her as she moved.) She wore a couple of bracelets,
too. And between dances I drank.
They had tables that were meant for parties of eight or ten, but there
weren't any parties of eight or ten. People sat where they wanted to, and
took each other's seats without worrying about whether the owner was
coming back. For a while there were half a dozen crewmen in Brazilian Navy
dress whites sitting with me, talking to each other in Portuguese. A man
with one golden earring joined me for a while, but I couldn't understand
what he was saying, either. (I did, pretty well, understand what he
meant.)
There was that trouble all the time I was in Gateway. There always is.
Gateway sounds like an international conference when the translation
equipment has broken down. There's a sort of lingua franca you hear a lot,
pieces of a dozen different languages thrown together, like, "Ecoutez,
gospodin, tu es verreckt." I danced twice with one of the Brazilians, a
skinny, dark little girl with a hawk nose but sweet brown eyes, and tried
to say a few simple words. Maybe she understood me. One of the men she was
with, though, spoke fine English, introduced himself and the others all
around. I didn't catch any of the names but his, Francesco Hereira. He
bought me a drink, and let me buy one for the crowd, and then I realized
I'd seen him before: He was one of the detail that searched us on the way
in.
While we were commenting on that, Dane leaned over me and grunted in my
ear, "I'm going to gamble. So long, unless you really want to come."
It wasn't the warmest invitation I'd ever had, but the noise in the
Blue Hell was getting heavy. I tagged after him and discovered a
full-scale casino just next to the Blue Hell, with blackjack tables,
poker, a slow-motion roulette with a big, dense ball, craps with dice that
took forever to stop, even a roped-off section for baccarat. Metchnikov
headed for the blackjack tables and drummed his fingers on the back of a
player's chair, waiting for an opening. Around then he noticed I had come
with him.
"Oh." He looked around the room. "What do you like to play?"
"I've played it all," I said, slurring the words a little. Bragging a
little, too. "Maybe a little baccarat."
He looked at me first with respect, then amusement. "Fifty's the
minimum bet."
I had five or six thousand dollars left in my account. I shrugged.
"That's fifty thousand," he said.
I choked. He said absently, moving over behind a player whose chip
stack was running out, "You can get down for ten dollars at roulette.
Hundred minimum for most of the others. Oh, there's a ten-dollar slot
machine around somewhere, I think." He dived for the open chair and that
was the last I saw of him.
I watched for a moment and realized that the black-eyebrowed girl was
at the same table, busy studying her cards. She didn't look up.
I could see I wasn't going to be able to afford much gambling here. At
that point I realized I couldn't really afford all the drinks I'd been
buying, either, and then my interior sensory system began to make me
realize just how many of those drinks I had had. The last thing I realized
was that I had to get back to my room, pretty fast.
| SYLVESTER MACKLEN: FATHER OF GATEWAY
|
| Gateway was discovered by Sylvester Macklen, a
| tunnel explorer on Venus, who found an operable
| Heechee spacecraft in a dig. He succeeded in
| getting it to the surface and bringing it to
| Gateway, where it now rests In Dock 5-33.
| Tragically, Macklen was not able to return and,
| although he succeeded in signaling his presence by
| exploding the fuel tank of the lander of his ship,
| he was dead before Investigators reached Gateway.
| Macklen was a courageous and resourceful man,
| and the plaque at Dock 5-33 commemorates his
| unique service to humanity. Services are held at
| appropriate times by representatives of the
| various faiths.
I am on the mat, and I am not very comfortable. Physically, I mean. I
have had an operation not long ago and probably the stitches aren't yet
absorbed.
Sigfrid says, "We were talking about your job, Rob."
That's dull enough. But safe enough. I say, "I hated my job. Who
wouldn't hate the food mines?"
"But you kept it, Rob. You never even tried to get on anywhere else.
You could have switched to sea-farming, maybe. And you dropped out of
school."
"You're saying I stuck myself in a rut?"
"I'm not saying anything, Rob. I'm asking you what you feel."
"Well. I guess in a sense I did do that. I thought about making some
kind of a change. I thought about it a lot," I say, remembering how it was
in those bright early days with Sylvia. I remember sitting with her in the
cockpit of a parked sailplane on a January night-we had no other place to
go-and talking about the future. What we would do. How we would beat the
odds. There's nothing there for Sigfrid, as far as I can see. I've told
Sigfrid all about Sylvia, who married a stockholder in the long run. But
we'd broken up long before that. "I suppose," I say, pulling myself up
short and trying to get my money's worth out of this session, "that I had
a kind of death wish."
"I prefer that you don't use psychiatric terms, Rob."
"Well, you understand what I mean. I knew time was going by. The longer
I stayed in the mines the harder it would be to get out. But nothing else
looked any better. And there were compensations. My girlfriend, Sylvia. My
mother, while she was alive. Friends. Even some fun things. Sailplaning.
It is great over the hills, and when you're up high enough Wyoming doesn't
look so bad and you can hardly smell the oil."
"You mentioned your girlfriend, Sylvia. Did you get along with her?"
I hesitated, rubbing at my belly. I have almost half a meter of new
intestine in there now. They cost fearfully, those things, and sometimes
you get the feeling the previous owner wants them back. You wonder who he
was. Or she. How he died. Or did he die? Could he still be alive, so poor
that he sells off parts of himself, the way I've heard of pretty girls
doing with a well-shaped breast or ear?
"Did you make friends with girls easily, Rob?"
"I do now, all right."
"Not now, Rob. I think you said you didn't make friends easily as a
child."
"Does anyone?"
"If I understand that question, Robbie, you are asking if anyone
remembers childhood as a perfectly happy and easy experience, and of
course the answer is 'no.' But some people seem to carry the effects of it
over into their lives more than others."
"Yeah. I guess, thinking back, that I was a little afraid of my peer
group-sorry about that, Sigfrid! I mean the other kids. They all seemed to
know each other. They had things to say to each other all the time.
Secrets. Shared experiences. Interests. I was a loner."
"You were an only child, Robbie?"
"You know I was. Yeah. Maybe that was it. Both my parents worked. And
they didn't like me playing near the mines. Dangerous. Well, it really was
dangerous for kids. You can get hurt around those machines, or even if
there's a slide in the tailings or an outgassing. I stayed at home a lot,
watching shows, playing cassettes. Eating. I was a fat kid, Sigfrid. I
loved all the starchy, sugary stuff with all the calories. They spoiled
me, buying me more food than I needed."
I still like to be spoiled. Now I get a higher class of diet, not as
fattening, about a thousand times as expensive. I've had real caviar.
Often. It gets flown in from the aquarium at Galveston. I have real
champagne, and butter.... "I remember lying in bed," I say, "I guess I was
very small, maybe about three. I had a teddytalker. I took it to bed with
me, and it told me little stories, and I stuck pencils into it and tried
to pull its ears off. I loved that thing, Sigfrid."
Maybe maturity is wanting what you want, instead of what somebody else
tells you you should want.
Maybe, Sigfrid, dear old tin god, but what it feels like is mature is
dead.
I stop, and Sigfrid picks up immediately. "Why are you crying, Robbie?"
"I don't know!" I bawl, tears running down my face, and I look at my
watch, the skipping green numerals rippling through the tears. "Oh," I
say, very conversationally, and sit up, the tears still rolling down my
face but the fountain turned off, "I've really got to go now, Sigfrid.
I've got a date. Her name's Tania. Beautiful girl. The Houston Symphony.
She loves Mendelssohn and roses, and I want to see if I can pick up some
of those dark-blue hybrids that will go with her eyes."
"Rob, we've got nearly ten minutes left."
"I'll make it up another time." I know he can't do that, so I add
quickly, "May I use your bathroom? I need to."
"Are you going to excrete your feelings, Rob?"
"Oh, don't be smart. I know what you're saying. I know this looks like
a typical displacement mechanism-"
"Rob."
"-all right, I mean, it looks like I'm copping out. But I honestly do
have to go. To the bathroom, I mean. And to the florist's, too. Tani is
pretty special. She's a fine person. I'm not talking about sex, but that's
great, too. She can g-She can-"
"Rob? What are you trying to say?"
I take a breath and manage to say: "She's great at oral sex, Sigfrid."
"Rob?"
I recognize that tone. Sigfrid's repertory of vocal modes is quite
large, but parts of it I have learned to identify. He thinks he is on the
track of something.
"What?"
"Rob, what do you call it when a woman gives you oral sex?"
"Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, what kind of dumb game is this one?"
"What do you call it, Rob?"
"Ah! You know as well as I do."
"Please tell me what you call it, Rob."
"They say, like, 'She eats me.'"
"What other expression, Rob?"
"Lots of them! 'Giving head,' that's one. I guess I've heard a thousand
terms for it."
"What other, Rob?"
I have been building up to rage and pain and it suddenly boils over.
"Don't play these fucking games with me, Sigfrid!" My gut aches, and I am
afraid I am going to mess my pants; it is lIke being a baby again. "Jesus,
Sigfrid! When I was a little kid I used to talk to my teddy. Now I'm
forty-five and I'm still talking to a stupid machine as if it was alive!"
"But there is another term, isn't there, Rob?"
"There are thousands of them! Which one do you want?"
"I want the expression you were going to use and didn't, Rob. Please
try to say it. That term means something special to you, so that you can't
say the words without trouble."
I crumple over onto the mat, and now I'm really crying.
"Please say it, Rob. What's the term?"
"Damn you, Sigfrid! Going down! That's it. Going down, going down,
going down!"
"Good morning," said somebody, speaking right into the middle of a
dream about getting stuck in a sort of quicksand in the middle of the
Orion Nebula. "I have brought you some tea."
I opened an eye. I looked over the edge of the hammock into a nearby
pair of coalsack-black eyes set into a sand-colored face. I was fully
dressed and hung over; something smelled very bad, and I realized it was
me.
"My name," said the person with the tea, "is Shikitei Baldu. Please
drink this tea. It will help rehydrate your tissues."
I looked a little further and saw that he ended at the waist; he was
the legless man with the strap-on wings whom I had seen in the tunnel the
day before. "Uh," I said, and tried a little harder and got as far as,
"Good morning." The Orion Nebula was fading back into the dream, and so
was the sensation of having to push through rapidly solidifying gas
clouds. The bad smell remained. The room smelled excessively foul, even by
Gateway standards, and I realized I had thrown up on the floor. I was only
millimeters from doing it again. Bakin, slowly stroking the air with his
wings, dexterously dropped a stoppered flask next to me on the hammock at
the end of one stroke. Then he propelled himself to the top of my chest of
drawers, sat there, and said:
| WHO OWNS GATEWAY?
|
| Gateway is unique In the history of humanity,
| and it was quickly realized that it was too
| valuable a resource to be given to any one group
| of persons, or any one government. Therefore
| Gateway Enterprises, Inc., was formed.
| Gateway Enterprises (usually referred to as
| "the Corporation") is a multinational corporation
| whose general partners are the governments of the
| United States of America, the Soviet Union, the
| United States of Brazil, the Venusian
| Confederation, and New People's Asia, and whose
| limited partners are all those persons who, like
| yourself, have signed the attached Memorandum of
| Agreement.
"I believe you have a medical examination this morning at oh eight
hundred hours."
"Do I?" I managed to get the cap off the tea and took a sip. It was
very hot, sugarless, and almost tasteless, but it did seem to tip the
scales inside my gut in the direction opposite to throwing up again.
"Yes. I think so. It's customary. And in addition, your P-phone has
rung several times."
I went back to, "Uh?"
"I presume it was your proctor caffing you to remind you. It is now
seven-fifteen, Mr:"
"Broadhead," I said thickly, and then more carefully: "My name is Rob
Broadhead."
"Yes. I took the liberty of making sure you were awake. Please enjoy
your tea, Mr. Broadhead. Enjoy your stay on Gateway."
He nodded, fell forward off the chest, swooped toward the door, handed
himself through it, and was gone. With my head thudding at every change of
attitude I got myself out of the hammock, trying to avoid the nastier
spots on the floor, and somehow succeeded in getting reasonably clean. I
thought of depilating, but I had about twelve days on a beard and decided
to let it go for a while; it no longer looked unshaven, exactly, and I
just didn't have the strength.
When I wobbled into the medical examining room I was only about five
minutes late. The others in my group were all ahead of me, so I had to
wait and go last. They extracted three kinds of blood from me, fingertip,
inside of the elbow, and lobe of the ear, I was sure they would all run
ninety proof. But it didn't matter. The medical was only a formality. If
you could survive the trip up to Gateway by spacecraft in the first place;
you could survive a trip in a Heechee ship. Unless something went wrong.
In which case you probably couldn't survive anyway, no matter how healthy
you were.
I had time for a quick cup of coffee off a cart that someone was
tending next to a dropshaft (private enterprise on Gateway? I hadn't known
that existed), and then I got to the first session of the class right on
the tick. We met in a big room on Level Dog, long and narrow and
low-ceilinged. The seats were arranged two on each side with a center
aisle, sort of like a schoolroom in a converted bus. Sheri came in late,
looking fresh and cheerful, and slipped in beside me; our whole group was
there, all seven of us who had come up from Earth together, the family of
four from Venus and a couple others I knew to be new fish like me. "You
don't look too bad," Sheri whispered as the instructor pondered over some
papers on his desk.
| SHOWER PROCEDURE
|
| This shower will automatically deliver two
| 45-second sprays. Soap between sprays.
| You are entitled to 1 use of the shower in
| each 3-day period.
| Additional showers may be charged against your
| credit balance at the rate of 45 seconds-$5
"Does the hangover show?"
"Actually not. But I assume it's there. I heard you coming in last
night. In fact," she added thoughtfully, "the whole tunnel heard you."
I winced. I could still smell myself, but most of it was apparently
inside me. None of the others seemed to be edging away, not even Sheri.
The instructor stood up and studied us thoughtfully for a while. "Oh,
well," he said, and looked back at his papers. Then he shook his head. "I
won't take attendance," he said. "I teach the course in how to run a
Heechee ship." I noticed he had a batch of bracelets; I couldn't count
them, but there were at least half a dozen. I wondered briefly about these
people I kept seeing who had been out a lot of times and still weren't
rich. "This is only one of the three courses you get. After this you get
survival in unfamiliar environments, and then how to recognize what's
valuable. But this one is in ship-handling, and the way we're going to
start learning it is by doing it. All of you come with me."
So we all got up and gaggled after him, out of the room, down a tunnel,
onto the down-cable of a dropshaft and past the guards-maybe the same ones
who had chased me away the night before. This time they just nodded to the
instructor and watched us go past. We wound up in a long, wide,
low-ceilinged passage with about a dozen squared-off and stained metal
cylinders sticking up out of the floor. They looked like charred tree
stumps, and it was a moment before I realized what they were.
I gulped.
"They're ships," I whispered to Sheri, louder than I intended. A couple
of people looked at me curiously. One of them, I noticed, was a girl I had
danced with the night before, the one with the dense black eyebrows. She
nodded to me and smiled; I saw the bangles on her arm, and wondered what
she was doing there-and how she had done at the gambling tables.
The instructor gathered us around him, and said, "As someone just said,
these are Heechee ships. The lander part. This is the piece you go down to
a planet in, if you're lucky enough to find a planet. They don't look very
big, but five people can fit into each of those garbage cans you see. Not
comfortably, exactly. But they can. Generally speaking, of course, you'll
always leave one person in the main ship, so there'll be at most four in
the lander."
He led us past the nearest of them, and we all satisfied the impulse to
touch, scratch, or pat it. Then he began to lecture:
"There were nine hundred and twenty-four of these ships docked at
Gateway when it was first explored. About two hundred, so far, have proved
nonoperational. Mostly we don't know why; they just don't work. Three
hundred and four have actually been sent out on at least one trip.
Thirty-three of those are here now, and available for prospecting trips.
The others haven't been tried yet." He hiked himself up on the stumpy
cylinder and sat there while he went on:
"One thing you have to decide is whether you want to take one of the
thirty-three tested ones or one of the ones that has never been flown. By
human beings, I mean. There you just pay your money and take your choice.
It's a gamble either way. A high proportion of the trips that didn't come
back were in first flights, so there's obviously some risk there. Well,
that figures, doesn't it? After all, nobody has done any maintenance on
them for God knows how long, since the Heechee put them there.
"On the other hand, there's a risk in the ones that have been out and
back safely, too. There's no such thing as perpetual motion. We think some
of the no-returns have been because the ships ran out of fuel. Trouble is,
we don't know what the fuel is, or how much there is, or how to tell when
a ship is about to run out."
He patted the stump. "This, and all the others you see here, were
designed for five Heechees in the crews. As far as we can tell. But we
send them out with three human beings. It seems the Heechee were more
tolerant of each other's company in confined spaces than people are. There
are bigger and smaller ships, but the no-return rate on them has been very
bad the last couple of orbits. It's probably just a string of bad luck,
but... Anyway, I personally would stick with a Three. You people, you do
what you want.
"So you come to your second choice, which is who you go with. Keep your
eyes open. Look for companions-What?"
Sheri had been semaphoring her hand until she got his attention. "You
said 'very bad,'" she said. "How bad is that?"
The instructor said patiently, "In the last fiscal orbit about three
out of ten Fives came back. Those are the biggest ships. In several cases
the crews were dead when we got them open, even so."
"Yeah," said Sheri, "that's very bad."
"No, that's not bad at all, compared to the one-man ships. Two orbits
ago we went a whole orbit and only two Ones came back at all. That's bad."
"Why is that?" asked the father of the tunnel-rat family. Their name
was Forehand. The instructor looked at him for a moment.
"If you ever find out," he said, "be sure and tell somebody. Now. As
far as selecting a crew is concerned, you're better off if you can get
somebody who's already been out. Maybe you can, maybe you can't.
Prospectors who strike it rich generally quit; the ones that are still
hungry may not want to break up their teams. So a lot of you fish are
going to have to go out with other virgins. Umm." He looked around
thoughtfully. "Well, let's get our feet wet. Sort yourselves out into
groups of three-don't worry about who's in your group, this isn't where
you pick your partners-and climb into one of those open landers. Don't
touch anything. They're supposed to be in deactive mode, but I have to
tell you they don't always stay deactive. Just go in, climb down to the
control cabin and wait for an instructor to join you."
That was the first I'd heard that there were other instructors. I
looked around, trying to work out which were teachers and which were fish,
while he said, "Are there any questions?"
Sheri again. "Yeah. What's your name?"
"Did I forget that again? I'm Jimmy Chou. Pleased to meet you all. Now
let's go."
Now I know a lot more than my instructor did, including what happened
to him half an orbit later-poor old Jimmy Chou, he went out before I did,
and came back while I was on my second trip, very dead. Flare burns, they
say his eyes were boiled out of his bead. But at that time he knew it all,
and it was all very strange and wonderful to me.
So we crawled into the funny elliptical hatch that let you slip between
the thrusters and down into the landing capsule, and then down a
peg-ladder one step further into the main vehicle itself.
We looked around, three Ali Babas staring at the treasure cave. We
heard a scratching above us, and a head poked in. It had shaggy eyebrows
and pretty eyes, and it belonged to the girl I had been dancing with the
night before. "Having fun?" she inquired. We were clinging together as far
from anything that looked movable as we could get, and I doubt we really
looked at ease. "Never mind," she said, "just look around. Get familiar
with it. You'll see a lot of it. That vertical line of wheels with the
little spokes sticking out of them? That's the target selector. That's the
most important thing not to touch for now-maybe ever. That golden spiral
thing over next to you there, the blond girl? Anybody want to guess what
that's for?"
You-there-blond-girl, who was one of the Forehand daughters, shrank
away from it and shook her head. I shook mine, but Sheri hazarded, "Could
it be a hatrack?"
Teacher squinted at it thoughtfully. "Hmm. No, I don't think so, but I
keep hoping one of you fish will know the answer. None of us here do. It
gets hot sometimes in flight; nobody knows why. The toilet's in there.
You're going to have a lot of fun with that. But it does work, after you
learn how. You can sling your hammocks and sleep there-or anywhere you
want to, actually. That corner, and that recess are pretty dead space. If
you're in a crew that wants some privacy, you can screen them off. A
little bit, anyway."
Sheri said, "Don't any of you people like to tell your names?" Teacher
grinned. "I'm Gelle-Klara Moynlin. You want to know the rest about me?
I've been out twice and didn't score, and I'm killing time until the right
trip comes along. So I work as assistant instructor."
"How do you know which is the right trip?" asked the Forehand girl.
"Bright fellow, you. Good question. That's another of those questions
that I like to hear you ask, because it shows you're thinking, but if
there's an answer I don't know what it is. Let's see. You already know
this ship is a Three. It's done six round trips already, but it's a
reasonable bet that it's got enough reserve fuel for a couple more. I'd
rather take it than a One. That's for long-shot gamblers."
"Mr. Chou said that," said the Forehand girl, "but my father says he's
been all through the records since Orbit One, and the Ones aren't that
bad."
| WHAT DOES THE CORPORATION DO?
|
| The purpose of the Corporation is to exploit
| the spacecraft left by the Heechee, and to trade
| in, develop, or otherwise utilize all artifacts,
| goods, raw materials, or other things of value
| discovered by means of these vessels.
| The Corporation encourages commercial
| development of Heechee technology, and grants
| leases on a royalty basis for this purpose.
| Its revenues are used to pay appropriate
| shares to limited partners, Such as you, who have
| been instrumental in discovering new things of
| value; to pay the costs of maintaining Gateway
| itself over and above the per-capita tax
| contribution; to pay to each of the general
| partners an annual sum sufficient to cover the
| cost of maintaining surveillance by means of the
| space cruisers you will have observed in orbit
| nearby; to create and maintain an adequate reserve
| for contingencies; and to use the balance of its
| income to subsidize research and development on
| the objects of value themselves.
| In the fiscal year ending February 30 last,
| the total revenues of the Corporation exceeded 3.
| 7 x 10^12 dollars U. S.
"Your father can have mine," said Gelle-Klara Moynlin. "It's not just
statistics. Ones are lonesome. Anyway, one person can't really handle
everything if you hit lucky, you need shipmates, one in orbit-most of us
keep one man in the ship, feels safer that way; at least somebody might
get help if things go rancid. So two of you go down in the lander to look
around. Of course, if you do hit lucky you have to split it three ways. If
you hit anything big, there's plenty to go around. And if you don't hit,
one-third of nothing is no less than all of it."
"Wouldn't it be even better in a Five, then?" I asked.
Klara looked at me and half-winked; I hadn't thought she remembered
dancing the night before. "Maybe, maybe not. The thing about Fives is that
they have almost unlimited target acceptance."
"Please talk English," Sheri coaxed.
"Fives will accept a lot of destinations that Threes and Ones won't. I
think it's because some of those destinations are dangerous. The worst
ship I ever saw come back was a Five. All scarred and seared and bent;
nobody knows how it made it back at all. Nobody knows where it had been,
either, but I heard somebody say it might've actually been in the
photosphere of a star. The crew couldn't tell us. They were dead.
"Of course," she went on meditatively, "an armored Three has almost as
much target acceptance as a Five, but you take your chances any way you
swing. Now let's get with it, shall we? You-" she pointed at Sheri, "sit
down over there."
The Forehand girl and I crawled around the mix of human and Heechee
furnishings to make room. There wasn't much. If you cleared everything out
of a Three you'd have a room about four meters by three by three, but of
course if you cleared everything out it wouldn't go.
Sheri sat down in front of the column of spoked wheels, wriggling her
bottom to try to get a fit. "What kind of behinds did the Heechee have?"
she complained.
Teacher said, "Another good question, same no-good answer. If you find
out, tell us. The Corporation puts that webbing in the seat. It isn't
original equipment. Okay. Now, that thing you're looking at is the target
selector. Put your hand on one of the wheels. Any one. Just don't touch
any other. Now move it." She peered down anxiously as Sheri touched the
bottom wheel, then thrust with her fingers, then laid the heel of her hand
on it, braced herself against the V-shaped arms of the seat, and shoved.
Finally it moved, and the lights along the row of wheels began to flicker.
"Wow," said Sheri, "they must've been pretty strong!"
We took turns trying with that one wheel-Klara wouldn't let us touch
any other that day-and when it came my turn I was surprised to find that
it took about as much muscle as I could bring to bear to make it move. It
didn't feel rusted stuck; it felt as though it were meant to be hard to
turn. And, when you think how much trouble you can get into if you turn a
setting by accident in the middle of a flight, it probably was.
Of course, now I know more about that, too, than my teacher did then.
Not that I'm so smart, but it has taken, and is still taking, a lot of
people a hell of a long time to figure out what goes on just in setting up
a target on the course director.
What it is is a vertical row of number generators. The lights that show
up display numbers; that's not easy to see, because they don't look like
numbers. They aren't positional, or decimal. (Apparently the Heechee
expressed numbers as sums of primes and exponents, but all that's way over
my head.) Only the check pilots and the course programmers working for the
Corporation really have to be able to read the numbers, and they don't do
it directly, only with a computing translator. The first five digits
appear to express the position of the target in space, reading from bottom
to top. (Dane Metchnikov says the prime ordering isn't from bottom to top
but from front to back, which says something or other about the Heechee.
They were three-D oriented, like primitive man, instead of two-D oriented,
like us.) You would think that three numbers would be enough to describe
any position anywhere in the universe, wouldn't you? I mean, if you make a
threedimensional representation of the Galaxy you can express any point in
it by means of a number for each of the three dimensions. But it took the
Heechee five. Does that mean there were five dimensions that were
perceptible to the Heechee? Metchnikov says not....
Anyway. Once you get a lock on the first five numbers, the other seven
can be turned to quite arbitrary settings and you'll still go when you
| involving any craft furnished me or information
| given me by the Gateway Authority irrevocably to
| said Gateway Authority.
| 2. Gateway Authority may, in its own sole
| direction, elect to sell, lease or otherwise
| dispose of any artifact, object or other thing of
| value arising from my activities under this
| contract. If it does so, it agrees to assign to me
| 50% (fifty percent) of all revenues arising from
| such sale, lease, or disposal, up to the costs of
| the exploration trip itself (including my own
| costs in coming to Gateway and my subsequent costs
| of living while there), and 10% (ten percent) of
| all subsequent revenues once the aforesaid costs
| have been repaid. I accept this assignment as
| payment in full for any obligations arising to me
| from the Gateway Authority of whatever kind, and
| specifically undertake not to lay any claim for
| additional payment for any reason at any time.
| 3. I irrevocably grant to Gateway Authority
| the full power and authority to make decisions of
| all kinds relating to the exploitation, sale, or
| lease of rights in any such discoveries, including
| the right, at Gateway Authority's sole discretion,
| to pool my discoveries or other things of value
| arising under this contract with those of others
| for purpose of exploitation, lease, or sale, in
| which case my share shall be whatever proportion
| of such earnings Gateway Authority may deem
| proper; and I further grant to Gateway Authority
| the right to refrain from exploiting any or all
| such discoveries or things of value in any way, at
| its own sole discretion.
| 4. I release Gateway Authority from any and
| all claims by me or on my behalf arising from any
| injury, accident, or loss of any kind to me in
| connection with my activities under this contract.
| 5. In the event of any disagreement arising
| from this Memorandum of Agreement, I agree that
| the terms shall be interpreted according to the
| laws and precedents of Gateway itself, and that no
| laws or precedents of any other jurisdiction shall
| be considered relevant in any degree.
"Oh, hell, man! It's in that packet of stuff they gave you."
I opened the lockers at random until I found where I had put the
envelope. Inside it were my copy of the articles of agreement, a booklet
entitled Welcome to Gateway, my room assignment, my health questionnaire
that I would have to fill out before 0800 the next morning... and a folded
sheet that, opened up, looked like a wiring diagram with names on it.
"That's it. Can you locate where you are? Remember your room number:
Level Babe, Quadrant East, Tunnel Eight, Room Fifty-one. Write it down."
"It's already written here, Dane, on my room assignment."
"Well, don't lose it." Dane reached behind his neck and unhooked
himself, let himself fall gently to the floor. "So why don't you look
around by yourself for a while. I'll meet you here. Anything else you need
to know right now?"
I thought, while he looked impatient. "Well-mind if I ask you a
question about you, Dane? Have you been out yet?"
"Six trips. All right, I'll see you at twenty-two hundred." Then he
pushed the flexible door open, slipped out into the jungly green of the
corridor and was gone.
I let myself flop-so gently, so slowly-into my one real chair and tried
to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.
I don't know if I can make you feel it, how the universe looked to me
from Gateway: like being young with Full Medical. Like a menu in the best
restaurant in the world, when somebody else is going to pick up the check.
Like a girl you've just met who likes you. Like an unopened gift.
The things that hit you first on Gateway are the tininess of the
tunnels, feeling tinier even than they are because they're lined with
windowboxy things of plants; the vertigo from the low gravity, and the
stink. You get Gateway a little bit at a time. There's no way of seeing it
all in one glance; it is nothing but a maze of tunnels in the rock. I'm
not even sure they've all been explored yet. Certainly there are miles of
them that nobody ever goes into, or not very often.
That's the way the Heechees were. They grabbed the asteroid, plated it
over with wall metal, drove tunnels into it, filled them with whatever
sort of possessions they had-most were empty by the time we got there,
just as everything that ever belonged to the Heechees is, all over the
universe. And then they left it, for whatever reason they left.
The closest thing to a central point in Gateway is Heecheetown. That's
a spindle-shaped cave near the geometric center of the asteroid. They say
that when the Heechees built Gateway they lived there. We lived there too,
at first, or close to it, all of us new peopie off Earth. (And elsewhere.
A ship from Venus had come in just before ours.) That's where the company
housing is. Later on, if we got rich on a prospecting trip, we could move
out farther toward the surface, where there was a little more gravity and
less noise. And above all, less smell. A couple thousand people had
breathed the air I was breathing, one time or another, voided the water I
drank and exuded their smells into the atmosphere. The people didn't stay
around very long, most of them. But the smells were still there.
I didn't care about the smell. I didn't care about any of it. Gateway
was my big, fat lottery ticket to Full Medical, a nine-room house, a
couple of kids, and a lot of joy. I had won one lottery already. It made
me cocky about my chances of winning another.
It was all exciting, although at the same time it was dingy enough,
too. There wasn't much luxury around. For your $238,575 what you get is
transportation to Gateway, ten days' worth of food, lodging, and air, a
cram course in ship handling, and an invitation to sign up on the next
ship out. Or any ship you like. They don't make you take any particular
ship, or for that matter any ship at all.
The Corporation doesn't make any profit on any of that. All the prices
are fixed at about cost. That doesn't mean they were cheap, and it
certainly doesn't mean that what you got was good. The food was just about
what I had been digging, and eating, all my life. The lodging was about
the size of a large steamer trunk, one chair, a bunch of lockers, a
fold-down table, and a hammock that you could stretch across it, corner to
corner, when you wanted to sleep.
My next-door neighbors were a family from Venus. I caught a glimpse
through the part-opened door. Imagine! Four of them sleeping in one of
those cubicles! It looked like two to a hammock, with two hammocks
crisscrossed across the room. On the other side was Sheri's room. I
scratched at her door, but she didn't answer. The door wasn't locked.
Nobody locks his door much on Gateway, because there's nothing much worth
stealing among other reasons. Sheri wasn't there. The clothes she had been
wearing on the ship were thrown all over.
I guessed that she had gone out exploring, and wished I had been a
little earlier. I would have liked someone to explore with. I leaned
against the ivy growing out of one wall of the tunnel and pulled out my
map.
It did give me some idea of what to look for. There were things marked
"Central Park" and "Lake Superior." What were they? I wondered about
"Gateway Museum," which sounded interesting, and "Terminal Hospital,"
which sounded pretty bad-I found out later that "terminal" meant as in end
of the line, on your return trip from wherever you went to. The
Corporation must have known that it had another sound to it, too; but the
Corporation never went to much trouble to spare a prospector's feelings.
What I really wanted was to see a ship!
As soon as that thought percolated out of my mind I realized that I
wanted it a lot. I puzzled over how to get to the outer skin, where the
ship docks were located of course. Holding onto a railing with one hand, I
tried to keep the map open with the other. It didn't take me long to
locate myself. I was at a five-way intersection which seemed to be the one
marked "East Star Babe G" on the map. One of the five tunnels out of it
led to a dropshaft, but I couldn't tell which.
I tried one at random, wound up in a dead end, and on the way back
scratched on a door for directions. It opened. "Excuse me-" I said... and
stopped.
The man who opened the door seemed as tall as I, but was not. His eyes
were on a level with my own. But he stopped at the waist. He had no legs.
He said something, but I didn't understand it; it wasn't in English. It
wouldn't have mattered. My attention was taken up with him. He wore gauzy
bright fabric strapped from wrists to waist, and he fluttered the wings
gently to stay in the air. It wasn't hard, in Gateway's low-G. But it was
surprising to see. I said, "I'm sorry. I just wanted to know how to get to
Level Tanya." I was trying not to stare, but I wasn't succeeding.
He smiled, white teeth in an unlined, old face. He had jet eyes under a
crest of short white hair. He pushed past me out into the corridor and
said in excellent English, "Certainly. Take the first turning on your
right. Go to the next star, and take the second turning on your left.
It'll be marked." He indicated with his chin the direction toward the
star.
| WELCOME TO GATEWAY!
|
| Congratulations!
|
| You are one of a very few people each year who
| may become a limited partner in Gateway
| Enterprises, Inc. Your first obligation is to sign
| the enclosed Memorandum of Agreement. You need not
| do this at once. You are encouraged to study the
| agreement and to seek legal advice, if available.
|
| However, until you sign you will not be
| eligible to occupy Corporation housing, dine at
| the Corporation commissary or participate in the
| Corporation instruction courses.
|
| Accommodations are available at the Gateway
| Hotel and Restaurant for those who are here as
| visitors, or who do not at present wish to sign
| the Memorandum of Agreement.
| KEEPING GATEWAY GOING
|
| In order to meet the costs of maintaining
| Gateway, all persons are required to pay a daily
| per-capita assessment for air, temperature
| control, administration, and other services.
| If you are a guest, this cost is included in
| your hotel bill.
| Rates for other persons are posted. The tax
| may be prepaid up to one year in advance if
| desired. Failure to pay the daily per-capita tax
| will result in immediate expulsion from Gateway.
| Note: Availability of a ship to receive
| expelled persons cannot be guaranteed.
I thanked him and left him floating behind me. I wanted to turn back,
but it didn't seem good manners. It was strange. It hadn't occurred to me
that there would be any cripples on Gateway.
That's how naive I was then.
Having seen him, I knew Gateway in a way I had not known it from the
statistics. The statistics are clear enough, and we all studied them, all
of us who came up as prospectors, and all of that vastly larger number who
only wished they could. About eighty percent of flights from Gateway come
up empty. About fifteen percent don't come back at all. So one person in
twenty, on the average, comes back from a prospecting trip with something
that Gateway-that mankind in general-can make a profit on. Most of even
those are lucky if they collect enough to pay their costs for getting here
in the first place.
And if you get hurt while you're out... well, that's tough. Terminal
Hospital is about as well equipped as any anywhere. But you have to get
there for it to do you any good. You can be months in transit. If you get
hurt at the other end of your trip-and that's where it usually
happens-there's not much that can be done for you until you get back to
Gateway. By then it can be too late to make you whole, and likely enough
too late to keep you alive.
There's no charge for a return trip to where you came from, by the way.
The rockets always come up fuller than they return. They call it wastage.
The return trip is free... but to what?
I let go the down-cable on Level Tanya, turned into a tunnel, and ran
into a man with cap and armband. Corporation Police. He didn't speak
English, but he pointed and the size of him was convincing; I grabbed the
up-cable, ascended one level, crossed to another dropshaft, and tried
again.
The only difference was that this time the guard spoke English. "You
can't come through here," he said.
"I just want to see the ships."
"Sure. You can't. You've got to have a blue badge," he said, tapping
his own. "That's Corporation specialist, flight crew or maintenance."
"I am flight crew."
He grinned. "You're a new fish off the Earth transport, aren't you?
Friend, you'll be flight crew when you sign on for a flight and not
before. Go on back up."
I said reasonably, "You understand how I feel, don't you? I just want
to get a look."
"You can't, till you've finished your course, except they'll bring you
down here for part of it. After that, you'll see more than you want."
I argued a little more, but he had too many arguments on his side. But
as I reached for the up-cable the tunnel seemed to lurch and a blast of
sound hit my ears. For a minute I thought the asteroid was blowing up. I
stared at the guard, who shrugged, in a not unfriendly way. "I only said
you couldn't see them," he said. "I didn't say you couldn't hear them."
I bit back the "wow" or "Holy God!" that I really wanted to say, and
said, "Where do you suppose that one's going?"
"Come back in six months. Maybe we'll know by then."
Well, there was nothing in that to feel elated about. All the same, I
felt elated. After all those years in the food mines, here I was, not only
on Gateway, but right there when some of those intrepid prospectors set
out on a trip that would bring them fame and incredible fortune! Never
mind the odds. This was really living on the top line.
So I wasn't paying much attention to what I was doing, and as a result
I got lost again on the way back. I reached Level Babe ten minutes late.
Dane Metchnikov was striding down the tunnel away from my room. He
didn't appear to recognize me. I think he might have passed me if I hadn't
put out my arm.
"Huh," he grunted. "You're late."
"I was down on Level Tanya, trying to get a look at the ships."
"Huh. You can't go down there unless you have a blue badge or a bangle."
Well, I had found that out already, hadn't I? So I tagged along after
him, without wasting energy on attempts at further conversation.
Metchnikov was a pale man, except for the marvelously ornatecurled
whisker that followed the line of his jaw. It seemed to be waxed, so that
each separate curl stood out with a life of its own. "Waxed" was wrong. It
had something in it besides hair, but whatever it was wasn't stiff. The
whole thing moved as he moved, and when he talked or smiled the muscles
moored to the jawbone made the beard ripple and flow. He finally did
smile, after we got to the Blue Hell. He bought the first drink,
explaining carefully that that was the custom, but that the custom only
called for one. I bought the second. The smile came when, out of turn, I
also bought the third.
| WHAT IS GATEWAY?
|
| Gateway is an artifact created by the
| so-called Heechee. It appears to have been formed
| around an asteroid, or the core of an atypical
| comet. The time of this event is not known, but it
| almost surely precedes the rise of human
| civilization.
| Inside Gateway the environment resembles
| Earth,except that there is relatively little
| gravity. (There is actually none, but centrifugal
| force derived from Gateway's rotation gives a
| similar effect.) If you have come from Earth you
| will notice some difficulty in breathing for the
| first few days because of the low atmospheric
| pressure. However, the partial pressure of oxygen
| is identical with the 2000-meter elevation at
| Earth and is fully adequate for all persons in
| normal health.
Over the noise in the Blue Hell talk wasn't easy, but I told him about
hearing a launch. "Right," he said, lifting his glass. "Hope they have a
good trip." He wore six blue-glowing Heechee metal bracelets, hardly
thicker than wire. They tinkled faintly as he swallowed half the drink.
"Are they what I think they are?" I asked. "One for every trip out?"
He drank the other half of the drink. "That's right. Now I'm going to
dance," he said. My eyes followed his back as he lunged toward a woman in
a luminous pink sari. He wasn't much of a talker, that was sure.
On the other hand, at that noise level you couldn't talk much anyhow.
You couldn't really dance much, either. The Blue Hell was up in the center
of Gateway, part of the spindle-shaped cave. Rotational G was so low that
we didn't weigh more than two or three pounds; if anyone had tried to
waltz or polka he would have gone flying. So they did those no-touching
junior-high-school sort of dances that appear to be designed so
fourteen-year-old boys won't have to look up at too sharp an angle to the
fourteen-year-old girls they're dancing with. You pretty much kept your
feet in place, and your head and arms and shoulders and hips went where
they wanted to. Me, I like to touch. But you can't have everything. I like
to dance, anyway.
I saw Sheri, way across the room, with an older woman I took to be her
proctor, and danced one with her. "How do you like it so far?" I shouted
over the tapes. She nodded and shouted something back, I couldn't say
what. I danced with an immense black woman who wore two blue bracelets,
then with Sheri again, then with a girl Dane Metchnikov dropped on me,
apparently because he wanted to be rid of her, then with a tall,
strong-faced woman with the blackest, thickest eyebrows I had ever seen
under a female hairdo. (She wore it pulled back in two pigtails that
floated around behind her as she moved.) She wore a couple of bracelets,
too. And between dances I drank.
They had tables that were meant for parties of eight or ten, but there
weren't any parties of eight or ten. People sat where they wanted to, and
took each other's seats without worrying about whether the owner was
coming back. For a while there were half a dozen crewmen in Brazilian Navy
dress whites sitting with me, talking to each other in Portuguese. A man
with one golden earring joined me for a while, but I couldn't understand
what he was saying, either. (I did, pretty well, understand what he
meant.)
There was that trouble all the time I was in Gateway. There always is.
Gateway sounds like an international conference when the translation
equipment has broken down. There's a sort of lingua franca you hear a lot,
pieces of a dozen different languages thrown together, like, "Ecoutez,
gospodin, tu es verreckt." I danced twice with one of the Brazilians, a
skinny, dark little girl with a hawk nose but sweet brown eyes, and tried
to say a few simple words. Maybe she understood me. One of the men she was
with, though, spoke fine English, introduced himself and the others all
around. I didn't catch any of the names but his, Francesco Hereira. He
bought me a drink, and let me buy one for the crowd, and then I realized
I'd seen him before: He was one of the detail that searched us on the way
in.
While we were commenting on that, Dane leaned over me and grunted in my
ear, "I'm going to gamble. So long, unless you really want to come."
It wasn't the warmest invitation I'd ever had, but the noise in the
Blue Hell was getting heavy. I tagged after him and discovered a
full-scale casino just next to the Blue Hell, with blackjack tables,
poker, a slow-motion roulette with a big, dense ball, craps with dice that
took forever to stop, even a roped-off section for baccarat. Metchnikov
headed for the blackjack tables and drummed his fingers on the back of a
player's chair, waiting for an opening. Around then he noticed I had come
with him.
"Oh." He looked around the room. "What do you like to play?"
"I've played it all," I said, slurring the words a little. Bragging a
little, too. "Maybe a little baccarat."
He looked at me first with respect, then amusement. "Fifty's the
minimum bet."
I had five or six thousand dollars left in my account. I shrugged.
"That's fifty thousand," he said.
I choked. He said absently, moving over behind a player whose chip
stack was running out, "You can get down for ten dollars at roulette.
Hundred minimum for most of the others. Oh, there's a ten-dollar slot
machine around somewhere, I think." He dived for the open chair and that
was the last I saw of him.
I watched for a moment and realized that the black-eyebrowed girl was
at the same table, busy studying her cards. She didn't look up.
I could see I wasn't going to be able to afford much gambling here. At
that point I realized I couldn't really afford all the drinks I'd been
buying, either, and then my interior sensory system began to make me
realize just how many of those drinks I had had. The last thing I realized
was that I had to get back to my room, pretty fast.
| SYLVESTER MACKLEN: FATHER OF GATEWAY
|
| Gateway was discovered by Sylvester Macklen, a
| tunnel explorer on Venus, who found an operable
| Heechee spacecraft in a dig. He succeeded in
| getting it to the surface and bringing it to
| Gateway, where it now rests In Dock 5-33.
| Tragically, Macklen was not able to return and,
| although he succeeded in signaling his presence by
| exploding the fuel tank of the lander of his ship,
| he was dead before Investigators reached Gateway.
| Macklen was a courageous and resourceful man,
| and the plaque at Dock 5-33 commemorates his
| unique service to humanity. Services are held at
| appropriate times by representatives of the
| various faiths.
I am on the mat, and I am not very comfortable. Physically, I mean. I
have had an operation not long ago and probably the stitches aren't yet
absorbed.
Sigfrid says, "We were talking about your job, Rob."
That's dull enough. But safe enough. I say, "I hated my job. Who
wouldn't hate the food mines?"
"But you kept it, Rob. You never even tried to get on anywhere else.
You could have switched to sea-farming, maybe. And you dropped out of
school."
"You're saying I stuck myself in a rut?"
"I'm not saying anything, Rob. I'm asking you what you feel."
"Well. I guess in a sense I did do that. I thought about making some
kind of a change. I thought about it a lot," I say, remembering how it was
in those bright early days with Sylvia. I remember sitting with her in the
cockpit of a parked sailplane on a January night-we had no other place to
go-and talking about the future. What we would do. How we would beat the
odds. There's nothing there for Sigfrid, as far as I can see. I've told
Sigfrid all about Sylvia, who married a stockholder in the long run. But
we'd broken up long before that. "I suppose," I say, pulling myself up
short and trying to get my money's worth out of this session, "that I had
a kind of death wish."
"I prefer that you don't use psychiatric terms, Rob."
"Well, you understand what I mean. I knew time was going by. The longer
I stayed in the mines the harder it would be to get out. But nothing else
looked any better. And there were compensations. My girlfriend, Sylvia. My
mother, while she was alive. Friends. Even some fun things. Sailplaning.
It is great over the hills, and when you're up high enough Wyoming doesn't
look so bad and you can hardly smell the oil."
"You mentioned your girlfriend, Sylvia. Did you get along with her?"
I hesitated, rubbing at my belly. I have almost half a meter of new
intestine in there now. They cost fearfully, those things, and sometimes
you get the feeling the previous owner wants them back. You wonder who he
was. Or she. How he died. Or did he die? Could he still be alive, so poor
that he sells off parts of himself, the way I've heard of pretty girls
doing with a well-shaped breast or ear?
"Did you make friends with girls easily, Rob?"
"I do now, all right."
"Not now, Rob. I think you said you didn't make friends easily as a
child."
"Does anyone?"
"If I understand that question, Robbie, you are asking if anyone
remembers childhood as a perfectly happy and easy experience, and of
course the answer is 'no.' But some people seem to carry the effects of it
over into their lives more than others."
"Yeah. I guess, thinking back, that I was a little afraid of my peer
group-sorry about that, Sigfrid! I mean the other kids. They all seemed to
know each other. They had things to say to each other all the time.
Secrets. Shared experiences. Interests. I was a loner."
"You were an only child, Robbie?"
"You know I was. Yeah. Maybe that was it. Both my parents worked. And
they didn't like me playing near the mines. Dangerous. Well, it really was
dangerous for kids. You can get hurt around those machines, or even if
there's a slide in the tailings or an outgassing. I stayed at home a lot,
watching shows, playing cassettes. Eating. I was a fat kid, Sigfrid. I
loved all the starchy, sugary stuff with all the calories. They spoiled
me, buying me more food than I needed."
I still like to be spoiled. Now I get a higher class of diet, not as
fattening, about a thousand times as expensive. I've had real caviar.
Often. It gets flown in from the aquarium at Galveston. I have real
champagne, and butter.... "I remember lying in bed," I say, "I guess I was
very small, maybe about three. I had a teddytalker. I took it to bed with
me, and it told me little stories, and I stuck pencils into it and tried
to pull its ears off. I loved that thing, Sigfrid."
Maybe maturity is wanting what you want, instead of what somebody else
tells you you should want.
Maybe, Sigfrid, dear old tin god, but what it feels like is mature is
dead.
I stop, and Sigfrid picks up immediately. "Why are you crying, Robbie?"
"I don't know!" I bawl, tears running down my face, and I look at my
watch, the skipping green numerals rippling through the tears. "Oh," I
say, very conversationally, and sit up, the tears still rolling down my
face but the fountain turned off, "I've really got to go now, Sigfrid.
I've got a date. Her name's Tania. Beautiful girl. The Houston Symphony.
She loves Mendelssohn and roses, and I want to see if I can pick up some
of those dark-blue hybrids that will go with her eyes."
"Rob, we've got nearly ten minutes left."
"I'll make it up another time." I know he can't do that, so I add
quickly, "May I use your bathroom? I need to."
"Are you going to excrete your feelings, Rob?"
"Oh, don't be smart. I know what you're saying. I know this looks like
a typical displacement mechanism-"
"Rob."
"-all right, I mean, it looks like I'm copping out. But I honestly do
have to go. To the bathroom, I mean. And to the florist's, too. Tani is
pretty special. She's a fine person. I'm not talking about sex, but that's
great, too. She can g-She can-"
"Rob? What are you trying to say?"
I take a breath and manage to say: "She's great at oral sex, Sigfrid."
"Rob?"
I recognize that tone. Sigfrid's repertory of vocal modes is quite
large, but parts of it I have learned to identify. He thinks he is on the
track of something.
"What?"
"Rob, what do you call it when a woman gives you oral sex?"
"Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, what kind of dumb game is this one?"
"What do you call it, Rob?"
"Ah! You know as well as I do."
"Please tell me what you call it, Rob."
"They say, like, 'She eats me.'"
"What other expression, Rob?"
"Lots of them! 'Giving head,' that's one. I guess I've heard a thousand
terms for it."
"What other, Rob?"
I have been building up to rage and pain and it suddenly boils over.
"Don't play these fucking games with me, Sigfrid!" My gut aches, and I am
afraid I am going to mess my pants; it is lIke being a baby again. "Jesus,
Sigfrid! When I was a little kid I used to talk to my teddy. Now I'm
forty-five and I'm still talking to a stupid machine as if it was alive!"
"But there is another term, isn't there, Rob?"
"There are thousands of them! Which one do you want?"
"I want the expression you were going to use and didn't, Rob. Please
try to say it. That term means something special to you, so that you can't
say the words without trouble."
I crumple over onto the mat, and now I'm really crying.
"Please say it, Rob. What's the term?"
"Damn you, Sigfrid! Going down! That's it. Going down, going down,
going down!"
"Good morning," said somebody, speaking right into the middle of a
dream about getting stuck in a sort of quicksand in the middle of the
Orion Nebula. "I have brought you some tea."
I opened an eye. I looked over the edge of the hammock into a nearby
pair of coalsack-black eyes set into a sand-colored face. I was fully
dressed and hung over; something smelled very bad, and I realized it was
me.
"My name," said the person with the tea, "is Shikitei Baldu. Please
drink this tea. It will help rehydrate your tissues."
I looked a little further and saw that he ended at the waist; he was
the legless man with the strap-on wings whom I had seen in the tunnel the
day before. "Uh," I said, and tried a little harder and got as far as,
"Good morning." The Orion Nebula was fading back into the dream, and so
was the sensation of having to push through rapidly solidifying gas
clouds. The bad smell remained. The room smelled excessively foul, even by
Gateway standards, and I realized I had thrown up on the floor. I was only
millimeters from doing it again. Bakin, slowly stroking the air with his
wings, dexterously dropped a stoppered flask next to me on the hammock at
the end of one stroke. Then he propelled himself to the top of my chest of
drawers, sat there, and said:
| WHO OWNS GATEWAY?
|
| Gateway is unique In the history of humanity,
| and it was quickly realized that it was too
| valuable a resource to be given to any one group
| of persons, or any one government. Therefore
| Gateway Enterprises, Inc., was formed.
| Gateway Enterprises (usually referred to as
| "the Corporation") is a multinational corporation
| whose general partners are the governments of the
| United States of America, the Soviet Union, the
| United States of Brazil, the Venusian
| Confederation, and New People's Asia, and whose
| limited partners are all those persons who, like
| yourself, have signed the attached Memorandum of
| Agreement.
"I believe you have a medical examination this morning at oh eight
hundred hours."
"Do I?" I managed to get the cap off the tea and took a sip. It was
very hot, sugarless, and almost tasteless, but it did seem to tip the
scales inside my gut in the direction opposite to throwing up again.
"Yes. I think so. It's customary. And in addition, your P-phone has
rung several times."
I went back to, "Uh?"
"I presume it was your proctor caffing you to remind you. It is now
seven-fifteen, Mr:"
"Broadhead," I said thickly, and then more carefully: "My name is Rob
Broadhead."
"Yes. I took the liberty of making sure you were awake. Please enjoy
your tea, Mr. Broadhead. Enjoy your stay on Gateway."
He nodded, fell forward off the chest, swooped toward the door, handed
himself through it, and was gone. With my head thudding at every change of
attitude I got myself out of the hammock, trying to avoid the nastier
spots on the floor, and somehow succeeded in getting reasonably clean. I
thought of depilating, but I had about twelve days on a beard and decided
to let it go for a while; it no longer looked unshaven, exactly, and I
just didn't have the strength.
When I wobbled into the medical examining room I was only about five
minutes late. The others in my group were all ahead of me, so I had to
wait and go last. They extracted three kinds of blood from me, fingertip,
inside of the elbow, and lobe of the ear, I was sure they would all run
ninety proof. But it didn't matter. The medical was only a formality. If
you could survive the trip up to Gateway by spacecraft in the first place;
you could survive a trip in a Heechee ship. Unless something went wrong.
In which case you probably couldn't survive anyway, no matter how healthy
you were.
I had time for a quick cup of coffee off a cart that someone was
tending next to a dropshaft (private enterprise on Gateway? I hadn't known
that existed), and then I got to the first session of the class right on
the tick. We met in a big room on Level Dog, long and narrow and
low-ceilinged. The seats were arranged two on each side with a center
aisle, sort of like a schoolroom in a converted bus. Sheri came in late,
looking fresh and cheerful, and slipped in beside me; our whole group was
there, all seven of us who had come up from Earth together, the family of
four from Venus and a couple others I knew to be new fish like me. "You
don't look too bad," Sheri whispered as the instructor pondered over some
papers on his desk.
| SHOWER PROCEDURE
|
| This shower will automatically deliver two
| 45-second sprays. Soap between sprays.
| You are entitled to 1 use of the shower in
| each 3-day period.
| Additional showers may be charged against your
| credit balance at the rate of 45 seconds-$5
"Does the hangover show?"
"Actually not. But I assume it's there. I heard you coming in last
night. In fact," she added thoughtfully, "the whole tunnel heard you."
I winced. I could still smell myself, but most of it was apparently
inside me. None of the others seemed to be edging away, not even Sheri.
The instructor stood up and studied us thoughtfully for a while. "Oh,
well," he said, and looked back at his papers. Then he shook his head. "I
won't take attendance," he said. "I teach the course in how to run a
Heechee ship." I noticed he had a batch of bracelets; I couldn't count
them, but there were at least half a dozen. I wondered briefly about these
people I kept seeing who had been out a lot of times and still weren't
rich. "This is only one of the three courses you get. After this you get
survival in unfamiliar environments, and then how to recognize what's
valuable. But this one is in ship-handling, and the way we're going to
start learning it is by doing it. All of you come with me."
So we all got up and gaggled after him, out of the room, down a tunnel,
onto the down-cable of a dropshaft and past the guards-maybe the same ones
who had chased me away the night before. This time they just nodded to the
instructor and watched us go past. We wound up in a long, wide,
low-ceilinged passage with about a dozen squared-off and stained metal
cylinders sticking up out of the floor. They looked like charred tree
stumps, and it was a moment before I realized what they were.
I gulped.
"They're ships," I whispered to Sheri, louder than I intended. A couple
of people looked at me curiously. One of them, I noticed, was a girl I had
danced with the night before, the one with the dense black eyebrows. She
nodded to me and smiled; I saw the bangles on her arm, and wondered what
she was doing there-and how she had done at the gambling tables.
The instructor gathered us around him, and said, "As someone just said,
these are Heechee ships. The lander part. This is the piece you go down to
a planet in, if you're lucky enough to find a planet. They don't look very
big, but five people can fit into each of those garbage cans you see. Not
comfortably, exactly. But they can. Generally speaking, of course, you'll
always leave one person in the main ship, so there'll be at most four in
the lander."
He led us past the nearest of them, and we all satisfied the impulse to
touch, scratch, or pat it. Then he began to lecture:
"There were nine hundred and twenty-four of these ships docked at
Gateway when it was first explored. About two hundred, so far, have proved
nonoperational. Mostly we don't know why; they just don't work. Three
hundred and four have actually been sent out on at least one trip.
Thirty-three of those are here now, and available for prospecting trips.
The others haven't been tried yet." He hiked himself up on the stumpy
cylinder and sat there while he went on:
"One thing you have to decide is whether you want to take one of the
thirty-three tested ones or one of the ones that has never been flown. By
human beings, I mean. There you just pay your money and take your choice.
It's a gamble either way. A high proportion of the trips that didn't come
back were in first flights, so there's obviously some risk there. Well,
that figures, doesn't it? After all, nobody has done any maintenance on
them for God knows how long, since the Heechee put them there.
"On the other hand, there's a risk in the ones that have been out and
back safely, too. There's no such thing as perpetual motion. We think some
of the no-returns have been because the ships ran out of fuel. Trouble is,
we don't know what the fuel is, or how much there is, or how to tell when
a ship is about to run out."
He patted the stump. "This, and all the others you see here, were
designed for five Heechees in the crews. As far as we can tell. But we
send them out with three human beings. It seems the Heechee were more
tolerant of each other's company in confined spaces than people are. There
are bigger and smaller ships, but the no-return rate on them has been very
bad the last couple of orbits. It's probably just a string of bad luck,
but... Anyway, I personally would stick with a Three. You people, you do
what you want.
"So you come to your second choice, which is who you go with. Keep your
eyes open. Look for companions-What?"
Sheri had been semaphoring her hand until she got his attention. "You
said 'very bad,'" she said. "How bad is that?"
The instructor said patiently, "In the last fiscal orbit about three
out of ten Fives came back. Those are the biggest ships. In several cases
the crews were dead when we got them open, even so."
"Yeah," said Sheri, "that's very bad."
"No, that's not bad at all, compared to the one-man ships. Two orbits
ago we went a whole orbit and only two Ones came back at all. That's bad."
"Why is that?" asked the father of the tunnel-rat family. Their name
was Forehand. The instructor looked at him for a moment.
"If you ever find out," he said, "be sure and tell somebody. Now. As
far as selecting a crew is concerned, you're better off if you can get
somebody who's already been out. Maybe you can, maybe you can't.
Prospectors who strike it rich generally quit; the ones that are still
hungry may not want to break up their teams. So a lot of you fish are
going to have to go out with other virgins. Umm." He looked around
thoughtfully. "Well, let's get our feet wet. Sort yourselves out into
groups of three-don't worry about who's in your group, this isn't where
you pick your partners-and climb into one of those open landers. Don't
touch anything. They're supposed to be in deactive mode, but I have to
tell you they don't always stay deactive. Just go in, climb down to the
control cabin and wait for an instructor to join you."
That was the first I'd heard that there were other instructors. I
looked around, trying to work out which were teachers and which were fish,
while he said, "Are there any questions?"
Sheri again. "Yeah. What's your name?"
"Did I forget that again? I'm Jimmy Chou. Pleased to meet you all. Now
let's go."
Now I know a lot more than my instructor did, including what happened
to him half an orbit later-poor old Jimmy Chou, he went out before I did,
and came back while I was on my second trip, very dead. Flare burns, they
say his eyes were boiled out of his bead. But at that time he knew it all,
and it was all very strange and wonderful to me.
So we crawled into the funny elliptical hatch that let you slip between
the thrusters and down into the landing capsule, and then down a
peg-ladder one step further into the main vehicle itself.
We looked around, three Ali Babas staring at the treasure cave. We
heard a scratching above us, and a head poked in. It had shaggy eyebrows
and pretty eyes, and it belonged to the girl I had been dancing with the
night before. "Having fun?" she inquired. We were clinging together as far
from anything that looked movable as we could get, and I doubt we really
looked at ease. "Never mind," she said, "just look around. Get familiar
with it. You'll see a lot of it. That vertical line of wheels with the
little spokes sticking out of them? That's the target selector. That's the
most important thing not to touch for now-maybe ever. That golden spiral
thing over next to you there, the blond girl? Anybody want to guess what
that's for?"
You-there-blond-girl, who was one of the Forehand daughters, shrank
away from it and shook her head. I shook mine, but Sheri hazarded, "Could
it be a hatrack?"
Teacher squinted at it thoughtfully. "Hmm. No, I don't think so, but I
keep hoping one of you fish will know the answer. None of us here do. It
gets hot sometimes in flight; nobody knows why. The toilet's in there.
You're going to have a lot of fun with that. But it does work, after you
learn how. You can sling your hammocks and sleep there-or anywhere you
want to, actually. That corner, and that recess are pretty dead space. If
you're in a crew that wants some privacy, you can screen them off. A
little bit, anyway."
Sheri said, "Don't any of you people like to tell your names?" Teacher
grinned. "I'm Gelle-Klara Moynlin. You want to know the rest about me?
I've been out twice and didn't score, and I'm killing time until the right
trip comes along. So I work as assistant instructor."
"How do you know which is the right trip?" asked the Forehand girl.
"Bright fellow, you. Good question. That's another of those questions
that I like to hear you ask, because it shows you're thinking, but if
there's an answer I don't know what it is. Let's see. You already know
this ship is a Three. It's done six round trips already, but it's a
reasonable bet that it's got enough reserve fuel for a couple more. I'd
rather take it than a One. That's for long-shot gamblers."
"Mr. Chou said that," said the Forehand girl, "but my father says he's
been all through the records since Orbit One, and the Ones aren't that
bad."
| WHAT DOES THE CORPORATION DO?
|
| The purpose of the Corporation is to exploit
| the spacecraft left by the Heechee, and to trade
| in, develop, or otherwise utilize all artifacts,
| goods, raw materials, or other things of value
| discovered by means of these vessels.
| The Corporation encourages commercial
| development of Heechee technology, and grants
| leases on a royalty basis for this purpose.
| Its revenues are used to pay appropriate
| shares to limited partners, Such as you, who have
| been instrumental in discovering new things of
| value; to pay the costs of maintaining Gateway
| itself over and above the per-capita tax
| contribution; to pay to each of the general
| partners an annual sum sufficient to cover the
| cost of maintaining surveillance by means of the
| space cruisers you will have observed in orbit
| nearby; to create and maintain an adequate reserve
| for contingencies; and to use the balance of its
| income to subsidize research and development on
| the objects of value themselves.
| In the fiscal year ending February 30 last,
| the total revenues of the Corporation exceeded 3.
| 7 x 10^12 dollars U. S.
"Your father can have mine," said Gelle-Klara Moynlin. "It's not just
statistics. Ones are lonesome. Anyway, one person can't really handle
everything if you hit lucky, you need shipmates, one in orbit-most of us
keep one man in the ship, feels safer that way; at least somebody might
get help if things go rancid. So two of you go down in the lander to look
around. Of course, if you do hit lucky you have to split it three ways. If
you hit anything big, there's plenty to go around. And if you don't hit,
one-third of nothing is no less than all of it."
"Wouldn't it be even better in a Five, then?" I asked.
Klara looked at me and half-winked; I hadn't thought she remembered
dancing the night before. "Maybe, maybe not. The thing about Fives is that
they have almost unlimited target acceptance."
"Please talk English," Sheri coaxed.
"Fives will accept a lot of destinations that Threes and Ones won't. I
think it's because some of those destinations are dangerous. The worst
ship I ever saw come back was a Five. All scarred and seared and bent;
nobody knows how it made it back at all. Nobody knows where it had been,
either, but I heard somebody say it might've actually been in the
photosphere of a star. The crew couldn't tell us. They were dead.
"Of course," she went on meditatively, "an armored Three has almost as
much target acceptance as a Five, but you take your chances any way you
swing. Now let's get with it, shall we? You-" she pointed at Sheri, "sit
down over there."
The Forehand girl and I crawled around the mix of human and Heechee
furnishings to make room. There wasn't much. If you cleared everything out
of a Three you'd have a room about four meters by three by three, but of
course if you cleared everything out it wouldn't go.
Sheri sat down in front of the column of spoked wheels, wriggling her
bottom to try to get a fit. "What kind of behinds did the Heechee have?"
she complained.
Teacher said, "Another good question, same no-good answer. If you find
out, tell us. The Corporation puts that webbing in the seat. It isn't
original equipment. Okay. Now, that thing you're looking at is the target
selector. Put your hand on one of the wheels. Any one. Just don't touch
any other. Now move it." She peered down anxiously as Sheri touched the
bottom wheel, then thrust with her fingers, then laid the heel of her hand
on it, braced herself against the V-shaped arms of the seat, and shoved.
Finally it moved, and the lights along the row of wheels began to flicker.
"Wow," said Sheri, "they must've been pretty strong!"
We took turns trying with that one wheel-Klara wouldn't let us touch
any other that day-and when it came my turn I was surprised to find that
it took about as much muscle as I could bring to bear to make it move. It
didn't feel rusted stuck; it felt as though it were meant to be hard to
turn. And, when you think how much trouble you can get into if you turn a
setting by accident in the middle of a flight, it probably was.
Of course, now I know more about that, too, than my teacher did then.
Not that I'm so smart, but it has taken, and is still taking, a lot of
people a hell of a long time to figure out what goes on just in setting up
a target on the course director.
What it is is a vertical row of number generators. The lights that show
up display numbers; that's not easy to see, because they don't look like
numbers. They aren't positional, or decimal. (Apparently the Heechee
expressed numbers as sums of primes and exponents, but all that's way over
my head.) Only the check pilots and the course programmers working for the
Corporation really have to be able to read the numbers, and they don't do
it directly, only with a computing translator. The first five digits
appear to express the position of the target in space, reading from bottom
to top. (Dane Metchnikov says the prime ordering isn't from bottom to top
but from front to back, which says something or other about the Heechee.
They were three-D oriented, like primitive man, instead of two-D oriented,
like us.) You would think that three numbers would be enough to describe
any position anywhere in the universe, wouldn't you? I mean, if you make a
threedimensional representation of the Galaxy you can express any point in
it by means of a number for each of the three dimensions. But it took the
Heechee five. Does that mean there were five dimensions that were
perceptible to the Heechee? Metchnikov says not....
Anyway. Once you get a lock on the first five numbers, the other seven
can be turned to quite arbitrary settings and you'll still go when you
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