Gateway Read online

  Or you can take a shot at the bonuses: a hundred million dollars if you find an alien civilization, fifty million for the first crew to locate a Heechee ship bigger than a Five, a million bucks to locate a habitable planet.

  Seems funny that they would only pay a lousy million for a whole new planet? But the trouble is, once you’ve found it, what do you do with it? You can’t export a lot of surplus population when you can only move them four at a time. That, plus the pilot, is all you can get into the largest ship in Gateway. (And if you don’t have a pilot, you don’t get the ship back.) So the Corporation has underwritten a few little colonies, one’s very healthy on Peggy and the others are spindly. But that does not solve the problem of twenty-five billion human beings, most of them underfed.

  You’ll never get that kind of bonus on a rerun. Maybe you can’t get some of those bonuses at all; maybe the things they’re for don’t exist.

  It is strange that no one has ever found a trace of another intelligent creature. But in eighteen years, upwards of two thousand flights, no one has. There are about a dozen habitable planets, plus another hundred or so that people could live on if they absolutely had to, as we have to on Mars and on, or rather in, Venus. There are a few traces of past civilizations, neither Heechee nor human. And there are the souvenirs of the Heechee themselves. At that, there’s more in the warrens of Venus than we’ve found almost anywhere else in the Galaxy, so far. Even Gateway was swept almost clean before they abandoned it.

  Damn Heechee, why did they have to be so neat?

  So we gave up on the rerun deals because there wasn’t enough money in them, and put the special finders’ bonuses out of our heads, because there’s just no way of planning to look for them.

  And finally we just stopped talking, and looked at each other, and then we didn’t even look at each other.

  No matter what we said, we weren’t going. We didn’t have the nerve. Klara’s had run out on her last trip, and I guess I hadn’t ever had it.

  “Well,” said Klara, getting up and stretching, “I guess I’ll go up and win a few bucks at the casino. Want to watch?”

  I shook my head. “Guess I’d better get back to my job. If I still have one.”

  So we kissed good-bye at the upshaft, and when we came to my level I reached up and patted her ankle and jumped off. I was not in a very good mood. We had spent so much effort trying to reassure ourselves that there weren’t any launches that offered a promise of reward worth the risks that I almost believed it.

  Of course, we hadn’t even mentioned the other kind of rewards: the danger bonuses.

  You have to be pretty frayed to go for them. Like, the Corporation will sometimes put up half a million or so incentive bonus for a crew to take the same course as some previous crew tried and didn’t come back from. Their reasoning is that maybe something went wrong with the ship, ran out of gas or something, and a second ship might even rescue the crew from the first one. (Fat chance!) More likely, of course, whatever killed the first crew would still be there, and ready to kill you.

  Then there was a time when you could sign up for a million, later they raised it to five million, if you would try changing the course settings after launch.

  The reason they raised the bonus to five million was that crews stopped volunteering when none of them, not one of them, ever came back. Then they cut it out, because they were losing too many ships, and finally they made it a flat no-no. Every once in a while they come up with a bastard control panel, a snappy new computer that’s supposed to work symbiotically with the Heechee board. Those ships aren’t good gambling bets, either. There’s a reason for the safety lock on the Heechee board. You can’t change destination while it’s on. Maybe you can’t change destination at all, without destroying the ship.

  I saw five people try for a ten-million-dollar danger bonus once. Some Corporation genius from the permanent-party was worrying about how to transport more than five people, or the equivalent in cargo, at once. We didn’t know how to build a Heechee ship, and we’d never found a really big one. So he figured that maybe we could end-run around that obstacle by using a Five as a sort of tractor.

  So they built a sort of space barge out of Heechee metal. They loaded it with scraps of junk, and ran a Five out there on lander power. That’s just hydrogen and oxygen, and it’s easy enough to pump that back in. Then they tied the Five to the barge with monofilament Heechee metal cables.

  MISSION REPORT

  Vessel 5-2, Voyage 08D33. Crew L. Konieczny, B. Konieczny, P. Ito, F. Lounsbury, A. Akaga.

  Transit time out 27 days 16 hours. Primary not identified but probability high as star in cluster 47 Tucanae.

  Summary: “Emerged in free-fall. No planet nearby. Primary A6, very bright and hot, distance approximately 3.3 A.U.

  “By masking the primary star we obtained a glorious view of what seemed to be two or three hundred nearby very bright stars, apparent magnitude ranging from 2 to -7. However, no artifacts, signals, planets or landable asteroids were detected. We could remain on station only three hours because of intense radiation from the A6 star. Larry and Evelyn Konieczny were seriously ill on the return trip, apparently due to radiation exposure, but recovered. No artifacts or samples secured.”

  We watched the whole thing from Gateway on PV. We saw the cables take up slack as the Five put a strain on them with its lander jets. Craziest-looking thing you ever saw.

  Then they must have activated the long-range start-teat.

  All we saw on the PV was that the barge sort of twitched, and the Five simply disappeared from sight.

  It never came back. The stop-motion tapes showed at least the first little bit of what happened. The cable truss had sliced that ship into segments like a hard-boiled egg. The people in it never knew what hit them. The Corporation still has that ten million; nobody wants to try for it anymore.

  I got a politely reproachful lecture from Shicky, and a really ugly, but brief, P-phone call from Mr. Hsien, but that was all. After a day or two Shicky began letting us take time off again.

  I spent most of it with Klara. A lot of times we’d arrange to meet in her pad, or once in a while mine, for an hour in bed. We were sleeping together almost every night; you’d think we would have had enough of that. We didn’t. After a while I wasn’t sure what we were copulating for, the fun of it or the distraction it gave from the contemplation of our own self-images. I would lie there and look at Klara, who always turned over, snuggled down on her stomach, and closed her eyes after sex, even when we were going to get up two minutes later. I would think how well I knew every fold and surface of her body. I would smell that sweet, sexy smell of her and wish — oh, wish! Just wish, for things I couldn’t spell out: for an apartment under the Big Bubble with Klara, for an airbody and a cell in a Venusian tunnel with Klara, even for a life in the food mines with Klara. I guess it was love. But then I’d still be looking at her, and I would feel the inside of my eyes change the picture I was seeing, and what I would see would be the female equivalent of myself: a coward, given the greatest chance a human could have, and scared to take advantage of it.

  When we weren’t in bed we would wander around Gateway together. It wasn’t like dating. We didn’t go much to the Blue Hell or the holofilm halls, or even eat out. Klara did. I couldn’t afford it, so I took most of my meals from the Corporation’s refectories, included in the price of my per-capita per diem. Klara was not unwilling to pick up the check for both of us, but she wasn’t exactly anxious to do it, either — she was gambling pretty heavily, and not winning much. There were groups to be involved with — card parties, or just parties; folk dance groups, music-listening groups, discussion groups. They were free, and sometimes interesting. Or we just explored.

  Several times we went to the museum. I didn’t really like it that much. It seemed — well, reproachful.

  The first time we went there was right after I got off work, the day Willa Forehand shipped out. Usually the museum was full of visitors, l
ike crew members on pass from the cruisers, or ship’s crews from the commercial runs, or tourists. This time, for some reason, there were only a couple of people there, and we had a chance to look at everything. Prayer fans by the hundreds, those filmy, little crystalline things that were the commonest Heechee artifact; no one knew what they were for, except that they were sort of pretty, but the Heechee had left them all over the place. There was the original anisokinetic punch, that had earned a lucky prospector something like twenty million dollars in royalties already. A thing you could put in your pocket. Furs. Plants in formalin. The original piezophone, that had earned three crews enough to make every one of them awfully rich.

  The most easily swiped things, like the prayer fans and the blood diamonds and the fire pearls, were kept behind tough, breakproof glass. I think they were even wired to burglar alarms. That was surprising, on Gateway. There isn’t any law there, except what the Corporation imposes. There are the Corporation’s equivalent of police, and there are rules — you’re not supposed to steal or commit murder — but there aren’t any courts. If you break a rule all that happens is that the Corporation security force picks you up and takes you out to one of the orbiting cruisers. Your own, if there is one from wherever you came. Any one, if not. But if they won’t take you, or if you don’t want to go on your own nation’s ship and can persuade some other ship to take you, Gateway doesn’t care. On the cruisers, you’ll get a trial. Since you’re known to be guilty to start with, you have three choices. One is to pay your way back home. The second is to sign on as crew if they’ll have you. The third is to go out the lock without a suit. So you see that, although there isn’t much law on Gateway, there isn’t much crime, either.

  But, of course, the reason for locking up the precious stuff in the museum was that transients might be tempted to lift a souvenir or two.

  So Klara and I would muse over the treasures someone had found… and somehow not discuss with each other the fact that we were supposed to go out and find some more.

  It was not just the exhibits. They were fascinating; they were things that Heechee hands (tentacles? claws?) had made and touched, and they came from unimaginable places incredibly far away. But the constantly flickering tube displays held me even more strongly. Summaries of every mission ever launched displayed one after another. A constant total of missions versus returns; of royalties paid to lucky prospectors; the roster of the unlucky ones, name after name in a slow crawl along one whole wall of the room, over the display cases. The totals told the story: 2355 launches (the number changed to 2356, then 2357 while we were there; we felt the shudder of the two launches), 841 successful returns.

  Standing in front of that particular display, Klara and I didn’t look at each other, but I felt her hand squeeze mine.

  That was defining “successful” very loosely. It meant that the ship had come back. It didn’t say anything about how many of the crew were alive and well.

  We left the museum after that, and didn’t speak much on the way to the upshaft.

  The thing in my mind was that what Emma Fother had said to me was true: the human race needed what we prospectors could give them. Needed it a lot. There were hungry people, and Heechee technology probably could make all their lives a lot more tolerable, if prospectors went out and brought samples of it back.

  Even if it cost a few lives.

  Even if the lives included Klara’s and mine. Did I, I asked myself, want my son — if I ever had a son — to spend his childhood the way I had spent mine?

  We dropped off the up-cable at Level Babe and heard voices. I didn’t pay attention to them. I was coming to a resolution in my mind. “Klara,” I said, “listen. Let’s—”

  But Klara was looking past my shoulder. “For Christ’s sake!” she said. “Look who’s here!”

  And I turned, and there was Shicky fluttering in the air, talking to a girl, and I saw with astonishment that the girl was Willa Forehand. She greeted us, looking both embarrassed and amused.

  “What’s going on?” I demanded. “Didn’t you just ship out — like maybe eight hours ago?”

  “Ten,” she said.

  “Did something go wrong with the ship, so you had to come back?” Klara guessed.

  Willa smiled ruefully. “Not a thing. I’ve been there and back. Shortest trip on record so far: I went to the Moon.”

  “Earth’s moon?”

  “That’s the one.” She seemed to be controlling herself, to keep from laughter. Or tears.

  Shicky said consolingly, “They’ll surely give you a bonus, Willa. There was one that went to Ganymede once, and the Corporation divvied up half a million dollars among them.”

  She shook her head. “Even I know better than that, Shicky, dear. Oh, they’ll award us something. But it won’t be enough to make a difference. We need more than that.” That was the unusual, and somewhat surprising, thing about the Forehands: it was always “we.” They were clearly a very closely knit family, even if they didn’t like to discuss that fact with outsiders.

  I touched her, a pat between affection and compassion. “What are you going to do?”

  She looked at me with surprise. “Why, I’ve already signed up for another launch, day after tomorrow.”

  “Well!” said Klara. “We’ve got to have two parties at once for you! We’d better get busy…” And hours later, just before we went to sleep that night, she said to me, “Wasn’t there something you wanted to say to me before we saw Willa?”

  “I forget,” I said sleepily. I hadn’t forgotten. I knew what it was. But I didn’t want to say it anymore.

  There were days when I worked myself up almost to that point of asking Klara to ship out with me again. And there were days when a ship came in with a couple of starved, dehydrated survivors, or with no survivors, or when at the routine time a batch of last year’s launches were posted as nonreturns. On those days I worked myself up almost to the point of quitting Gateway completely.

  Most days we simply spent deferring decision. It wasn’t all that hard. It was a pretty pleasant way to live, exploring Gateway and each other. Klara took on a maid, a stocky, fair young woman from the food mines of Carmarthen named Hywa. Except that the feedstock for the Welsh single-cell protein factories was coal instead of oil shale, her world had been almost exactly like mine. Her way out of it had not been a lottery ticket but two years as crew on a commercial spaceship. She couldn’t even go back home. She had jumped ship on Gateway, forfeiting her bond of money she couldn’t pay. And she couldn’t prospect, either, because her one launch had left her with a heart arhythmia that sometimes looked like it was getting better and sometimes put her in Terminal Hospital for a week at a time. Hywa’s job was partly to cook and clean for Klara and me, partly to baby-sit the little girl, Kathy Francis, when her father was on duty and Klara didn’t want to be bothered. Klara had been losing pretty heavily at the casino, so she really couldn’t afford Hywa, but then she couldn’t afford me, either.

  Classifieds.

  ORGANS FOR sale or trade. Any paired organs, best offer. Need posterior coronal heart sections, L. auricle, L. R. ventricle, and associated parts. Phone 88-703 for tissue match.

  HNEFATAFL PLAYERS, Swedes or Muscovites. Grand Gateway Tournament. Will teach. 88-122.

  PENPAL FROM Toronto would like to hear you tell what it’s like out there. Address Tony, 955 Bay, TorOntCan M5S 2A3.

  I NEED to cry. I will help you find your own pain. Ph 88-622.

  What made it easy to turn off our insights was that we pretended to each other, and sometimes to ourselves, that what we were doing was preparing ourselves, really well, for the day when the Right trip came along.

  It wasn’t hard to do that. A lot of real prospectors did the same thing, between trips. There was a group that called itself the Heechee Seekers, which met on Wednesday nights; it had been started by a prospector named Sam Kahane, kept up by others while he was off on a trip that hadn’t worked out, and now had Sam back in it between trips, while
he was waiting for the other two members of his crew to get back in shape for the next one. (Among other things, they had come back with scurvy, due to a malfunction in the food freezer.) Sam and his friends were gay and apparently set in a permanent three-way relationship, but that didn’t affect his interest in Heechee lore. He had secured tapes of all the lectures of several courses on exostudies from East Texas Reserve, where Professor Hegramet had made himself the world’s foremost authority on Heechee research. I learned a lot I hadn’t known, although the central fact, that there were far more questions than answers about the Heechee, was pretty well known to everybody.

  And we got into physical-fitness groups, where we practiced muscle-toning exercises that you could do without moving any limb more than a few inches, and massage for fun and profit. It was probably profitable, but it was even more fun, particularly sexually. Klara and I learned to do some astonishing things with each other’s bodies. We took a cooking course (you can do a lot with standard rations, if you add a selection of spices and herbs). We acquired a selection of language tapes, in the event we shipped out with non-English-speakers, and practiced taxi-driver Italian and Greek on each other. We even joined an astronomy group. They had access to Gateway’s telescopes, and we spent a fair amount of time looking at Earth and Venus from outside the plane of the ecliptic. Francy Hereira was in that group when he could get time off from the ship. Klara liked him, and so did I, and we formed the habit of having a drink in our rooms — well, Klara’s rooms, but I was spending a lot of time in them — with him after the group. Francy was deeply, almost sensually, interested in what was Out There. He knew all about quasars and black holes and Seyfert galaxies, not to mention things like double stars and novae. We often speculated what it might be like to come out of a mission into the wavefront of a supernova. It could happen. The Heechee were known to have had an interest in observing astrophysical events firsthand. Some of their courses were undoubtedly programmed to bring crews to the vicinity of interesting events, and a pre-supernova was certainly an interesting event. Only now it was a long lot later, and the supernova might not be “pre” anymore.