The Gateway Trip Read online

  You didn’t have to do it that way. The police barricades were all one-way. If you chose to cross them the police would let you through. A grizzled old cop might try to warn you that going out among the crowds was a bad idea, if he happened to be charitably moved. But none of them would stop you if you insisted.

  Then you were on your own. Which meant that you were immediately plunged into a noisy, smelly, dirty kind of unbarred zoo where you were immersed in a crowd of clamoring vendors: of drugs; of plastic reproductions of the Great Wall, the Eiffel Tower, or the New York Bubble; of handmade key charms and hand-carved trinkets; of guide services, or discount coupons to night clubs; of—very often—themselves. That was a scary experience for any member of the privileged classes encountering it for the first time. It wasn’t necessarily very dangerous, though. The police wouldn’t actually let them murder you or snatch your wallet—as long as you were in sight, anyway.

  Quite often, the charging poor wouldn’t harm you even if they succeeded in luring you away from the police cordons, especially if you offered them some less chancy way of making money from you. But that was not guaranteed. Most of the poor people were desperate.

  For the rich, of course, the world was quite different. It always is. The rich lived long, healthy lives with other people’s organs replacing any of their own that wore out. They lived those lives in balmy climates under the domes of major cities, if they chose, or cruising the warm and still-unpolluted southern seas, or even traveling in space for the pure joy of it. When there were wars (and there often were, frequent though small—though quite large enough, of course, to satisfy the people killed in them), the rich went elsewhere until the wars were over. They felt that was their due. After all, they were the ones who paid the taxes—as much as they couldn’t avoid, anyway.

  The main trouble with being rich was that not all of the poor people acquiesced in being poor. Quite a few tried to find ways to better themselves, and sometimes they did so violently.

  Kidnapping became a growth industry in America again. So did extortion. You paid what they demanded, or out of hiding someone would shoot away your kneecap (or torch your house, or boobytrap your flyer, or poison your pets). Few in the solvent classes would send their children to school without a bodyguard anymore. That did have a useful side effect. As it turned out, it helped ease the unemployment situation, a little, as some millions of the extortionists put on uniforms and began drawing salaries to protect their employers against extortion.

  And, of course, there was political terror, too. It flourished in the same soil that nurtured kidnapping and extortion, and there was even more of it. Among the apathetic majority of the landless and the hungry, there were always a few who banded together to work the vengeance of the have-nots on the haves. Hostages were taken, officials were shot from ambush, aircraft were bombed out of the sky, reservoirs were poisoned, food supplies infected…oh, there were a thousand ingenious, injurious tricks the terror-wielders devised, and all of them devastating—at least, to those who had something to lose in the first place.

  Nevertheless, in spite of all the fears and inconveniences, the haves had it made. And most other people didn’t even have hope.

  Then, into the life of this seething, overfull planet, along came Gateway.

  For most of the ten billion people alive on the used-up planet of Earth, Gateway was an unexpected hope of paradise. Like the gold-rush miners of ’49, like the hungry Irish fleeing their potato famine in the holds of immigrant ships, like the sodbusting pioneers of the American West and human emigrants everywhere, through all of history, the poverty-stricken billions were willing to take any risk for the sake of—well, wealth, if wealth could be had; but at least for a chance to feed and clothe and house their children.

  Even the rich saw that this surprising new event might offer them a good chance to get even richer. That made for a serious problem, for a while. The national governments who had built the space rockets that first visited other planets and later supported the Gateway operation felt they were entitled to whatever profits came out of the Gateway discoveries. The rich people who owned the governments agreed. But they couldn’t all own it, after all.

  So there was a certain amount of buying and selling and horse-trading (and some pretty cutthroat wheeling and dealing, too, with the stakes as high as they were). Compromises were made. Bargains were struck; and out of the competing greeds of all the claimants to the limitless wealth that the galaxy promised came the just, or fairly just, invention of the Gateway Corporation.

  Was Gateway a benefit to Earth’s poor?

  At first, not very much. It gave each of them a little hope—the hope of a lottery ticket, although few of them could raise the money even to buy that one-way ticket that might make them into winners. But it was a long time before any stay-at-home peasant or slum-dweller was a penny or a meal richer for anything the Heechee had left behind.

  In fact, the knowledge that there were rich, empty planets out there was more tantalizing than useful to Earth’s teeming billions. The livable planets were too far away. They could only be reached by faster-than-light travel. Although human beings actually improved on some Heechee space-travel techniques (using Lofstrom loops to get into orbit instead of Heechee landers, for instance, and thus sparing further damage to the acidified lakes and the ozone layer), no one had the slightest idea of how to build a Heechee ship—and the ships on Gateway were far too few and much too small to carry sizable migrant populations to the new planets.

  So a few prospectors got rich, when they didn’t get dead instead. A number of rich people got quickly richer. But most of the penniless billions stayed on Earth.

  And in the cities like Calcutta, with its two hundred million paupers, and on the starved farms and paddies of Africa and the Orient, hunger remained a fact of life, and terrorism and poverty got worse instead of better.

  PART SIX

  OTHER

  WORLDS

  As our teachers keep telling us, the longest journey begins with a single step. That first step for the Gateway asteroid—the first voyage of exploration any human being ever took in a Heechee spaceship—wasn’t planned in advance. It wasn’t even authorized. And it certainly wasn’t prudent.

  The name of the man who took that first trip into the unknown was Lieutenant Senior Grade Ernest T. Kaplan. He was a marine officer from the U.S. Space Navy cruiser Roanoke. Kaplan wasn’t a scientist. He was so far from being a scientist that he had been given strict orders not to touch anything, but anything, on the Gateway asteroid. The only reason he was on the asteroid in the first place was that he had been ordered there as a guard, to keep anyone else from touching anything while the scientists who came hurrying up from Earth tried to figure out just what the devil they had here.

  But Kaplan had a mind full of itchy curiosity, and what’s more, he had access to the parked ships. And one day, for lack of anything better to do, he sat down in the one ship that happened to have been equipped with food lockers and air and water tanks, just in case anyone got the locks closed and was trapped inside. Kaplan thought for a while about old Sylvester Macklin. Just for the fun of it, he practiced opening and closing the locks a few times. Then he played with the knurled wheels for a while, watching the changing colors.

  Then he squeezed the funny-looking little thing at the base.

  That was what later, more expert pilots would call “the launch teat,” and as soon as he squeezed it Lieutenant Senior Grade Kaplan became the second human being to fly a Heechee ship. He was gone.

  Ninety-seven days later he was back at the Gateway asteroid.

  It was a miracle that he’d managed to return; it was even a bigger miracle that he was still alive. The supplies in the ship had been meant to last for a few days, not for months. For drinking water he had been reduced to catching the condensation from his own sweat and emanations as it beaded the lander port. For the last five weeks he hadn’t eaten anything at all. He was scrawny and filthy and half out of
his mind…

  But he had been there. His ship had orbited a planet far out from a small, reddish star; a planet that had so little light that it seemed only grayish, with swirling yellow clouds—a little the way Jupiter or Saturn or Uranus might have appeared, if their orbits had been as far from the Sun as the twilit Pluto.

  The first reaction of the United States government was to court-martial him. He certainly deserved it. He even expected it.

  But before the court was convened the news services carried the word that the Brazilian parliament, carried away at the thought of sharing in the exploration of the galaxy, had voted Kaplan a million-dollar cash bonus. Then the Soviets not only made him an honorary citizen but invited him to Moscow to receive the Order of Lenin. The dam had burst. Every talk show on every television network in the world was begging him to be a guest.

  You couldn’t court-martial a hero.

  So the American president jumped Lieutenant Kaplan to full colonel and then to general, in the same orders that grounded Colonel (or General) Kaplan forever. Then the president called all the spacefaring nations together to decide just how to handle this situation.

  The result was the Gateway Corporation.

  Colonel Kaplan, like everyone before him, had failed to make one vital discovery, and that was that each one of the Heechee ships was actually two ships. Part One was the interstellar vessel that traveled faster than light to a programmed destination. Part Two was the smaller, simpler landing craft that nestled into the base of the ship itself.

  The interstellar ships themselves, with their unreproducible faster-than-light drives, were totally beyond the understanding of human scientists. It was a long time before any Earth person knew how they worked. Those who tried too hard to find out generally died because their drive engines blew up. The landers were much simpler. Basically, they were ordinary rockets. True, the guidance system was Heechee, but fortunately for the Gateway prospectors the controls turned out to be even simpler to operate than the faster-than-light vessels. The prospectors could use the lander successfully, even if they didn’t know exactly how it worked, just as any average seventeen-year-old can learn to drive a car without any comprehension of the geometry of steering linkages or gear chains.

  So when any Gateway prospector came out of FTL drive and found himself in the vicinity of an interesting-looking planet, he could use the lander for the purpose for which it was designed: to go down to the surface of the planet and see what it had to offer.

  That was what Gateway was all about.

  The planets were where you had to go, because they were the most likely places to look for the kind of precious thing the prospector could bring back and turn in to make his fortune—and, naturally, to add to the Corporation’s.

  It was easy to describe the kind of planets they were looking for. They were looking for another Earth. Or something enough like Earth, anyway, to support some form of organic life, because inorganic processes hardly ever produced anything worth the carrying space it took to bring it home.

  The most disappointing planets were the closest. When the Heechee came to Earth’s solar system they gave it a good looking-over, and some of the ships on the Gateway asteroid reflected that. They still had stored navigation codes for places so near that human beings could have visited them on their own—if they wanted to. Some of them in fact had already been reached by the crude human rockets—places like Venus, the Moon, Mars’s south polar ice cap. Some were hardly worth the trouble, like Saturn’s moon, Dione.

  The prospectors were after bigger game than that. They wanted planets no man or woman had ever seen. They found a bewildering array of them.

  The planets they reached in the Magic Mystery Bus Rides came in all shapes and sizes. There were two basic types. There were the orbiting rocks (like Earth; solid and landable-on), and then there were the would-be stars (like Jupiter; the gas giants, that were just a bit too small to start nuclear fusion in their cores and turn themselves into suns). No Gateway prospector ever landed on a gas giant, of course. They had nothing solid enough to land on. (That was a pity, for a few of them were interesting anyway…but that’s another story.)

  It was the orbiting rocks that were prospected as vigorously as a few thousand scared, hurried human beings could explore them. There were plenty of the solid planets. Most of them had no apparent life at all, unfortunately. They were too far from their sun, so they were eternally frozen, or they were too close, so they were as scorched as the planet Mercury. Many of them had too little atmosphere (or none at all), like Mars (or the Moon). Some of them had satellites of their own, like the Earth’s Moon. Some of the target objects were satellites, but big ones, big enough to retain atmospheres and to land on.

  There were something over two hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, and a hellish lot of them possessed planets of one kind or another. Even the Heechee ships weren’t programmed to set a course for all the possible planets to explore. There were hardly course settings for one planet in a hundred thousand, in fact. Still, that left plenty for the Gateway prospectors to visit—many more of them than a few thousand men and women could reach in the course of a few dozen years.

  So the first discovery the Gateway prospectors made was that there were plenty of planets to choose from. Human astronomers were glad to know that, because they’d always wondered, and, the Corporation didn’t even have to pay a discovery bonus to find it out: all they had to do was add up the findings of the returning explorers. It developed that binary stars didn’t ordinarily have planets. Solitary stars, on the other hand, generally did. Astronomers thought the reason for that probably had something to do with conserving rotational velocity. When two stars condensed together out of a single gas cloud they seemed to take care of each other’s excess rotational energy. Bachelor stars apparently had to dissipate it on smaller satellites.

  Hardly any of the planets were really Earth-like, though.

  There were a lot of tests for that sort of thing that could be applied from a considerable distance. Temperature sensing, for one. Organic life didn’t seem to develop except where water could exist in its liquid phase, which was to say in the narrow, 100-degree band between about 270 and 370 Kelvin. At lower temperatures the stuff was useless ice. At higher ones water wasn’t usually there at all, because the heat vaporized it and the sunlight—from whatever sun was nearby—split the hydrogen out of the water molecule and it was lost into space.

  That meant that each star had a quite narrow area of possible planetary orbits that might be worth investigating. As planets didn’t care whether or not they were going to be hospitable to life when they were condensing out of the interstellar gases, most of them took orbits inside that life zone, or in the cold spaces outside it.

  Most alien life, like most Earthly life, was based on the chemistry of the carbon atoms. Carbon was the best of all possible elements for forming useful long-chain compounds, and happily it is so frequently found that it is the fourth most common element in the universe. Most alien life had something like DNA, too. That wasn’t for any panspermian reason, but simply because systems like DNA provided a cheap and efficient way for organisms to replicate themselves.

  So most living things followed certain basic guidelines. That was probably because they all started in pretty much the same way, since there is a timetable to the development of life. The first step is just chemistry: inorganic chemicals get forced to react with each other, under the spur of some sort of externally supplied energy—usually the light from their nearby star. Then crude, single-celled little things appear. These are only factories whose raw materials are the other inorganic chemicals in the soup that surrounds them. They, too, use the energy of sunlight (or whatever) to process the inorganic chemicals into more of themselves, and that’s about all they do for a living. Since they are photosynthetic, you might call them plants.

  Then these primitive “plants” themselves turn out to be pretty rich sources of assimilable chemicals. Since they’ve
gone to the trouble of concentrating the more appetizing inorganic compounds into a preprocessed form, it is only a question of time until some of them learn a new diet. These new ones don’t eat the raw materials of the environment. They eat their own weaker, more primitive cousins. Call this new batch of creatures “animals.” The first animals aren’t usually much. They consist of a mouth at one end, an anus at the other, and some sort of processing system in between. That’s all they are. But then, that’s all they need to be to feast on their neighbors.

  Then things get more complicated.

  Evolution begins to happen. The fittest survive, pretty much the way Charles Darwin figured it out as he fondled his captive finches on board the Beagle. The plants go on making appetizing chemicals for the animals to feast on, and the animals go on feasting on the plants and on each other—but some plants accidentally develop traits that give their predators trouble, and so those plants survive; and some animals learn tricks to get around those defenses. Later generations of animals develop senses to locate their prey more efficiently, and musculatures to catch it, and ultimately complex behavioral systems (like the web of a spider or the stalking of a great cat) that make their predation more and more successful. (Then, of course, the plants, or the herbivores, or the less successful predators begin to develop defense mechanisms of their own: the poisons in a shrub’s leaf, the quills of a porcupine, the fleet legs of a gazelle.) The competition never stops getting more intense, and more sophisticated on all parts—until, finally, some of the creatures become “intelligent.” But they take a lot longer to evolve…and it took the Gateway prospectors a lot longer to find any of them, too.

  In the myriad worlds that the Heechee had explored—and to which the human Gateway prospectors followed them hundreds of thousands of years later—all those basics of the evolution of life were played out a thousand times, with a thousand variations. The variations were sometimes quite surprising. For instance, Earthly plants have one conspicuous trait in common: they don’t move. But there wasn’t any reason why that trait had to be universal, and in fact it wasn’t. The Gateway prospectors found bushes that rolled from place to place, setting roots down to one side and pulling them up on the other, like slow-motion tumbleweeds as they sought the richest soils and the best access to groundwater and the surest sunlight. Then, too, Earthly animals don’t normally bother with photosynthesis. But in the seas, of other worlds there were things like jellyfish that floated to the surface by day to generate their own hydrocarbons from the sun and the air, and then sank down to feast on algal things at night. Earthly corals stay in one place. Prospectors found some unearthly ones—or, at least, some unearthly things that looked more or less like corals—that flew apart into their component little animals when the coast was clear, to eat and mate, and then returned to form collective rockhard fortresses when the prowling marine predators approached.