The Gateway Trip Page 12

  Gateway didn’t smell good. Air was precious. It didn’t feel good, either, at least not to fresh prospectors just up from Earth. The asteroid had a slow spin, so there was a sort of microgravity, but there wasn’t much of it. Anyone who made a sudden move anywhere in Gateway was likely to find himself floating away.

  Of course, no one ever looked at the Gateway asteroid as a resort paradise. There was only one reason why any human being would be willing to put up with its expense, its inaccessibility, its discomforts, and its stink, and the reason was the Heechee spaceships.

  Flying a Heechee spaceship took a lot of courage, and not much else. Each ship was like every other ship in its class. The biggest of them, the Fives, were not very big—about the same volume of space as a hotel bathroom, and that to be shared by five people. The ships called the Ones (because they could hold only one person for any length of time) were not much bigger than the bathtub itself. Each ship contained a minimum of fittings, and most of the fittings were of unknown importance. There was always a golden coil that seemed to have something to do with the ship’s drive, because it was observed to change color at start, finish, and turnaround of each trip. There was always a diamond-shaped golden box about the size of a coffin, too. In a few of the ships there was an even more mysterious device that looked like a twisted rod of crystal in a black ebon base; it didn’t seem to do anything at all (but, as it turned out much later, was capable of some truly astonishing feats). No one knew exactly what was inside any of those things, because whenever anyone tried to open one it exploded. And then there was the control system, with a curious, painful forked bench to sit on before it. Knurled knobs, flashing lights, the go-teat—they were what made the ship go.

  Of course, the ships lacked a great many things that human beings really didn’t want to get along without: the people who ultimately flew them had some human furnishings added, like freezers, more comfortable seats, bunks, cooking tools—and a whole catalogue of cameras, radio antennae, and scientific instruments of all kinds.

  There was nothing hard about flying a Heechee ship. Anybody could learn as much as anybody else knew in half an hour: you fiddled around with the course-setting wheels, pretty much at random because no one knew what the settings meant. Actually (it was learned, much later and at great cost) there were some 14,922 separate destinations preprogrammed into the 731 operable ships on the asteroid—there were about another 200 ships that simply didn’t work at all. But it took a lot of time, and a lot of lives, to find out what some of those destinations were.

  Then, when you had set up some combination (and crossed your fingers, or yourself), you squeezed the go-teat. After that you were on your way. That was all there was to it.

  For that reason, anybody could become a prospector. Anybody, that is, who was willing to pay his way to Gateway and then to pay the steep charges for air, food, water, and living space while he was in the asteroid…and who was brave enough, or desperate enough, to take his chances on a highly likely and often very nasty death.

  Over the years a great many human beings escaped from their Earthside poverty to take their chances in a Gateway ship. First and last, there were 13,842 of these gold-rush gamblers, in those chancy years before exact navigation of a Heechee ship became possible and the random exploration program was discontinued.

  Quite a few of the prospectors survived. Many became famous. A few became vastly rich. And no one remembers the others.

  PART FOUR

  THE

  STARSEEKERS

  When one of those bold, faintly crazy early prospectors set out in a Heechee spacecraft, he didn’t expect the ship to go exactly where he wanted it to go. He (or, almost as often, she) could never count on that for many reasons, not least because none of those early prospectors had any idea what destinations were worth aiming for. But that ignorance carried no penalty, anyway. Since no Gateway prospector knew how to navigate a Heechee ship, the first ships followed whatever destination settings had been left on the board by the last long-ago Heechee pilot.

  Considering the risks, it was a good thing for those early Gateway prospectors that the Heechee had been so much like human beings in important ways. For instance, the Heechee had possessed the primate-human itch of curiosity—in fact, they had a lot of it. That meant that a lot of the preprogrammed destinations were to places that human beings also found interesting to look at. They were just as interesting to human beings as they had been to the old Heechee, and the particular branch of the human race that delighted most in what the first waves of Gateway explorers found was the astronomers. Those astronomical people had become very ingenious at teasing information from whatever photons landed in their instruments—whether those photons were visible light, X-rays, infrared, whatever. But photons couldn’t tell them everything they wanted to know. The human astronomers sighed over their knowledge that there was such a lot of stuff out there that didn’t radiate at all—black holes, planets, heaven knew what! They could only guess at such things.

  Now, with the Heechee spacecraft, someone could go out and see them firsthand!

  That was a pretty wonderful break for astronomers…although often enough it turned out to be a lot less wonderful for the men and women who went out to look.

  The trouble with astronomy, from the point of view of the prospector who had just risked his life on a shot-in-the-dark voyage on a Heechee ship, was that you couldn’t sell a neutron star. What the prospectors were after was money. That meant that, if they were lucky, they might find some kind of high-tech Heechee gadgets that could be brought back and studied and copied and made into fortunes. There wasn’t any commercial market for a supernova shell or an interstellar gas cloud; those things just didn’t pay the bills.

  To deal with that problem, the Gateway Corporation started a program of paying science bonuses to the explorers who came back with great pictures and instrument readings but nothing commercial to sell.

  That was virtuous of the Gateway Corporation, to pay off for pure, noncommercial knowledge. It was also a good way of coaxing more hungry humans into those scary and often deadly little ships.

  By the time the Gateway Corporation had been in operation for two full years more than one hundred trips had set out, and sixty-two of them had returned, more or less safely. (Not counting the odd prospector who arrived dead, dying, or scared out of his wits.)

  The ships had visited at least forty different stars—all kinds of stars: baby blue-white giants, immense and short-lived, like Regulus and Spica and Altair; yellow normal-sequence stars like Procyon A and their dwarf counterparts, like Procyon B; staid G-type stars like the Sun, and their giant yellow relatives, like Capella. The red giants, of the types of Aldebaran and Arcturus, and their supergiant counterparts, like Betelgeuse and Antares…and their tiny red-dwarf relatives, like Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359.

  The astronomers were thrilled. Every trip’s harvest triumphantly supported much of what they thought they had known about the birth and death of stars—and demanded quick revisions of much else that they thought they had known, but hadn’t. The masters of the Corporation were less delighted. It was all very well to expand the horizons of astronomical science, but the pictures of the twentieth white dwarf looked pretty much like the pictures of the first. The hungry billions of Earth could not be fed on astronomical photographs. They already had a number of astronomical observatories in orbit. They weren’t pleased to see their once-in-a-lifetime treasure trove turned into just one more of them.

  But even the Corporation had to be pleased at some of the things the prospectors brought back.

  MISSION PULSAR

  The first big science bonus was paid to a man named Chou Yengbo, and he might not have earned it if he hadn’t happened to have taken a few elementary science courses before he discovered that even a college degree couldn’t get you a decent job, those days, in Shensi Province.

  When Chou’s ship came out of the faster-than-light drive, Chou had no trouble figuring out w
hich objects the Heechee had set the controls for.

  Actually there were three objects in view. They were weird. The first was wholly unlike anything Chou had ever seen before, even in the holograms of his astronomy course. It wasn’t quite like anything any other human being had ever seen before, either, except in imagination. The object was an irregular, cone-shaped splash of light, and even on the viewscreen its colors hurt his eyes.

  What the thing looked like was a searchlight beam fanning out through patches of mist. When Chou looked more carefully, magnifying the image, he saw that there was another beam like it, sketchier and fainter and fanning out in the opposite direction. And between the two points of the cones formed by those beams, the third object was something almost too tiny to see.

  When he put the magnification up to max, he saw that that something was a puny-looking, unhealthily colored little star.

  It was much too small to be a normal star. That limited the possibilities; even so, it took Chou some time to realize that he was in the presence of a pulsar.

  Then those Astronomy 101 lessons came back to him. It was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, back in the middle of the twentieth century, who had calculated the genesis of neutron stars. His model was simple. A large star, Chandrasekhar said, uses up its hydrogen fuel and then collapses. It throws off most of the outer sections of itself as a supernova. What is left falls in toward the star’s center, at almost the speed of light, compressing most of the star’s mass into a volume smaller than a planet—smaller, in fact, than some mountains. This particular sort of collapse can only happen to big stars, Chandrasekhar calculated. They had to be 1.4 times as massive as Earth’s Sun, at least, and so that number was called Chandrasekhar’s Limit.

  After that supernova explosion and collapse has happened, the object that remains—star heavy, asteroid sized—is a “neutron star.” It has been crushed together so violently by its own immense gravitation that the electrons of its atoms are driven into its protons, creating the chargeless particles called neutrons. Its substance is so dense that a cubic inch of it weighs two million tons or so; it is like compressing the hugest of Earth’s old supertankers into something the size of a coin. Things do not leave a neutron star easily; with that immense, concentrated mass pulling things down to its surface, escape velocity becomes something like 120,000 miles a second. More than that: its rotational energy has been “compressed,” too. The blue-white giant star that used to turn on its axis once a week is now a superheavy asteroid-sized thing that whirls around many times a second.

  Chou knew there were observations that he had to make—magnetic, X-ray, infrared, and many others. The magnetometer readings were the most important. Neutron stars have superfluid cores and so, as they rotate, they generate intense magnetic fields—just like the Earth. Not really just like the Earth, though, because the neutron star’s magnetic field, too, is compressed. It is one trillion times stronger than the Earth’s. And as it spins it generates radiation. The radiation can’t simply flow out from all parts of the star at once—the lines of magnetic force confine it. It can only escape at the neutron star’s north and south magnetic poles.

  The magnetic poles of any object aren’t necessarily in the same place as its poles of rotation. (The Earth’s north magnetic pole is hundreds of miles away from the point where the meridians of longitude meet.) So all the neutron star’s radiated energy pours out in a beam, around and around, pointing a little, or sometimes a lot, away from its true rotational poles.

  So that was the explanation of the thing Chou was seeing. The cones were the two polar beams from the star that lay between them, north and south, fanning out from its poles. Of course, Chou couldn’t see the beams themselves. What he saw were the places where they illuminated tenuous clouds of gas and dust as they spread out.

  The important thing to Chou was that no Earthly astronomer had ever seen them that way. The only way anyone on Earth ever could see the beam from a neutron star was by the chance of being somewhere along the rim of the conical shape the beams described as they rotated. And then what they saw was a high-speed flicker, so fast and regular that the first observer to spot one thought it was the signal from an alien intelligence. They called the signal an “LGM” (for Little Green Men) until they figured out what was causing that sort of stellar behavior.

  Then they called the things “pulsars.”

  Chou got a four-hundred-thousand-dollar science bonus for what he had discovered. He wasn’t greedy. He took it and returned to Earth, where he found a new career lecturing to women’s clubs and college audiences on what it was like to be a Heechee prospector. He was a great success, because he was one of the first of the breed to return to Earth alive.

  Later returnees were less fortunate. For instance, there was—

  MISSION HALO

  In some ways Mission Halo was the saddest and most beautiful of all. The mission had been written off as lost, but that turned out to be wrong. The ship wasn’t lost. Only its crew was.

  The ship was an unarmored Three. When it came back its arrival was a surprise to everyone. The ship had been gone over three years. It was a certainty that nobody could have survived so long a trip. In fact, no one had. When the hatch crews on Gateway got the ports open, recoiling from the stench inside, they discovered that Jan Mariekiewicz, Rolph Stret, and Lech Szelikowitz had left a record of their experiences. It was read with compassion by the other prospectors, and with rejoicing by astronomers.

  “When we reached two hundred days without turnaround,” Stret had written in his diary, “we knew we were out of luck. We drew straws. I won. Maybe I should say I lost, but, anyway, Jan and Lech took their little suicide pills, and I put their bodies in the freezer.

  “Turnaround came finally at 271 days. I knew for sure that I wasn’t going to make it either, not even with only me alive in the ship. So I’ve tried rigging everything on automatic. I hope it works. If the ship gets back, please pass on our messages.”

  As it happened, the messages the crew left never got delivered. There was no one to deliver them to. The messages were all addressed to other Gateway prospectors who had been part of the same shipment up from Central Europe, and that batch wasn’t one of the lucky ones. Every one of them had been lost in their own ships.

  But the pictures the ship brought back belonged to the whole world.

  Stret’s jury-rigging had worked. The ship had stopped at its destination. The instruments had thoroughly mapped everything in sight. Then the ship’s return had been triggered automatically, while Stret’s corpse lay bloating under the controls.

  The record showed that their ship had been outside the Milky Way galaxy entirely.

  It brought back the first pictures ever seen of our galaxy from outside. It showed a couple of fairly nearby stars and one great, distant globular cluster—the stars and clusters of the spherical halo that surrounds our galaxy—but most of all it showed our Milky Way galaxy itself, from core to farthest spiral wisp, with its great, familiar octopus arms: the Perseus arm, the Cygnus arm, the Sagittarius-Carina arm (with our own little Orion arm, the small spur that held the Earth, nearby), as well as the large, distant arm that Earthly astronomers had never seen before. They called it simply “Far Arm” at first, but then it was renamed the Stret-Mariekiewicz-Szelikowitz arm to honor the dead discoverers. And in the center of it all was the great bellying octopus-body mass of core stars, laced with gas and dust clouds, showing the beginnings of the new growing spiral structures that might in another hundred million years become new arms themselves.

  They also showed the effects of a structure more interesting still, but not in enough detail to be recognized just then—not until some other events had taught human beings what to look for in the core. All the same, they were beautiful pictures.

  Since no one returned from Mission Halo alive, there wasn’t even a science bonus due, but the Gateway Corporation voted a special exception to the rules. Five million dollars was voted for the heirs of Mariekiewicz,
Szelikowitz, and Stret.

  It was a generous gesture but, as it turned out, a very inexpensive one. The award went unclaimed. Like so many Gateway prospectors, the three who had manned the ship had no families that anyone could find, and so the Gateway Corporation’s bursar quietly, and philosophically, returned the cash to the Corporation’s general funds.

  The first, best, and brightest hope of any exploration crew was to find a really nice planet with really nice treasures on it. Ultimately some of them did, of course, but it took a while. For a good many orbits after the systematic exploration program began the crews went out and came back with nothing but pictures and hard-luck stories—when they came back at all.

  But some of the things they had seen were wonderful. Volya Shadchuk took a One into the heart of a planetary nebula, green-tinged with the radiation from oxygen atoms, and collected fifty thousand dollars. Bill Merrian saw a recurring nova system, red giant’s gases being sucked onto a white dwarf; luckily not enough matter had accreted while he was there to blow off in a noval explosion, but he got the fifty thousand and ten percent more for “danger bonus.” And then there were the Grantlands.