The Gateway Trip Read online

  Fourteen months after the program officially started, a mission got lucky.

  Their ship was what was generally called a Five, but the system had not yet begun to operate in a standardized way. This time only four volunteers went along. They were officially chosen by the four Earth powers that had established the Gateway Corporation (the Martians took an interest later), and so they were an American, a Chinese, a Soviet, and a Brazilian. They had learned from the experience of Colonel Kaplan and others who had gone before. They brought along enough food, water, and oxygen to last them for six months; they were taking no chances this time.

  As it happened, they didn’t need all those provisions. Their ship brought them back in forty-nine days, and they didn’t come back empty-handed.

  Their destination had turned out to be an orbit around a planet about the size of the Earth. They had managed to make the lander work, and three of them had actually used it to set foot on the surface of the planet.

  For the first time in human history, men walked on the surface of a heavenly body that was not part of the Sun’s entourage.

  First impressions were a bit disappointing. The four-power party discovered quickly enough that the planet had had some bad times. Its surface was seared, as though by great heat, and parts of it made their radiation detectors squeal. They knew they could not stay there long. But a mile or less from the lander, down a barren slope from the mountaintop mesa where they had landed, they found some rock and metal formations that looked artificial, and poking around them they dug up three items they thought worth bringing home. One was a flat tile with a triangular design still visible on its glazed surface. The second was a ceramic object about the size of a cigar, with thread markings—a bolt? The third was a yard-long metal cylinder, made of chromium and pierced with a couple of holes; it could have been a musical instrument, or part of a machine—even a Hilsch tube.

  Whatever they were, they were artifacts.

  When the four-power crew proudly displayed their trophies back on the Gateway asteroid, they created an immense stir. None of the three looked like a major technological breakthrough. Nevertheless, if such things could be found, then there were certainly others—and no doubt things that would be of a lot more practical value.

  That was when the interstellar gold rush began in earnest.

  It was a long time before anyone got that lucky again. Overall, the statistics on missions out of the Gateway asteroid showed that four out of five trips came back with nothing to show but some pictures and instrument readings. Fifteen percent never came back at all. It was only one ship out of twenty that brought back any tangible piece of Heechee technology, and most of those things were only curiosities—but the very few that were more than curiosities were treasures beyond price.

  They were few and far between, to be sure. The exploration of Venus had shown that was probable, for in all the hundreds of miles of Heechee tunnels under the surface of the planet Venus no more than a dozen gadgets had been found.

  To be sure, some of those meant big profits for those who learned to copy them. The anisokinetic punch was a marvel. Hammer it on one end, and the force of the blow came out at the side. What was even more marvelous was that scientists managed to figure out how it worked, and its principle had applications in every area of construction, manufacture, and even home repair. The fire-pearls were a mystery. So were the so-called prayer fans.

  Then, of course, humans reached the Gateway asteroid, and that fleet of ships was the biggest treasure trove of all. But all there was on the asteroid were the ships themselves. The ships were empty of anything but their operating gear. The whole asteroid was empty, almost surgically clean…as though the Heechee had deliberately left the ships but removed everything else that could be of value.

  Over a period of twenty years and more the Gateway explorers went out to seek whatever could be found. They came back with pictures and stories, and kinds of living things and minerals; but of Heechee artifacts they found very few.

  That was why so, many Gateway prospectors died poor—or just died.

  MISSION TOOLBOX

  Some also died rich, without knowing they had become rich. That was the case in one of the biggest finds. Unfortunately, it did three of its five discoverers little good, because they did not survive the trip.

  The mission started with three Austrians, two brothers and an uncle, using the last of an inheritance to pay their way to Gateway. They were determined to ship out only in an armored ship. As the only such vessel available was a Five, at the last minute they recruited a South American, Manuel de los Fintas, and an American, Sheri Loffat, to go with them.

  They reached a planet; they landed on the planet; they found nothing much there. But their instruments showed Heechee metal somewhere around, and they tracked it down.

  It was a lander. It had been abandoned there, heaven knew when. But it was not empty.

  The biggest thing they found in the lander was a stack of Heechee metal hexagonal boxes, not more than half a meter across and less than half that tall, weight twenty-three kilograms. They were tools. Some of the items were familiar, and useless as far as anyone had been able to tell: almost a dozen little prayer fans of the kind that littered so many Heechee tunnels and artifacts. But there were also things like screwdrivers but with flexible shafts; things like socket wrenches but made out of some soft material; things that resembled electrical test probes but turned out to be spare parts for other Heechee machines.

  It was a grand success. They wound up millionaires—or, at least, the survivors did.

  That find was lying right on the surface of the planet. But before long the Gateway prospectors learned that planet surfaces were not the most likely places to look for examples of Heechee treasures. Under the surface was much, much richer.

  One thing was clear early on about the vanished Heechee: they liked tunnels. The Heechee tunnels that honeycombed parts of the planet Venus weren’t unique. As explorations retraced the old interstellar trails they found examples of them everywhere the Heechee had gone. The inside of the Gateway asteroid was a maze of tunnels; so were the “other Gateways” that turned up as the explorations progressed. Nearly every planet the Heechee had left any signs on at all had tunnels dug into it, lined with Heechee metal. Where the surface conditions were unpleasant (as on Venus), the tunnels were extensive and complex. But even so fair a world as Peggy’s Planet had a few of them. The anthropologically trained scientists called Heecheeologists, trying passionately to figure out what these vanished people were like, supposed that they came from a burrowing race, like gophers, rather than an arboreal one, like people. The Heecheeologists turned out to be right…but it was a long time before any of them were sure of it.

  All the tunnels looked pretty much alike. They were lined with a dense, hard, metallic substance that glowed in the dark: it was called Heechee metal. In the first tunnels humans encountered, on Venus and on the Gateway asteroid itself, the glow was a pale blue. Blue was by far the commonest of Heechee-metal colors, but inside the Heechee ships there were some parts that were made of a golden Heechee metal, and later on the explorers found Heechee metal that glowed red or green.

  No one really knew why Heechee metal came in different colors. The Heecheeologists were not much help. All they could tell about the occasional variation in the color of Heechee metal was that it seemed clear that the tunnels of bluish metal were generally the ones poorest in Heechee artifacts: Gold, red, and green almost always had more treasures to be found by the explorers.

  Of course, until men and women began to learn how to explore the galaxy in the Heechee ships, they were limited to the blue-glowing tunnels of Gateway and Venus. And in them the treasures to be found were sparse, though sometimes of great value. In the tunnels found on the most productive planets, the metal walls started out blue, and then became another color just where the largest collections of useful tools were located. No one knew why…but then, no one knew much about the Heechee at all
, just then.

  MISSION HEATER

  Wu Fengtse had chosen to ship out in a One. That had its advantages, and its faults. The biggest advantage was that if there was nothing to land on, and the only reward would be some kind of science bonus for observations, he could keep it all himself.

  It didn’t happen that way, though. When he came out of FTL drive, he found himself in orbit around a more or less Earth-type planet.

  So Wu had to face the problem of every single prospector: If he took his lander down to the surface of the planet, no one would be left in the ship. If anything happened to him on the surface, no one would be there to rescue him. He was completely on his own.

  His other problem was that “Earth-type” was only a very approximate description of the world he had to explore. “Earth-type” meant that the planet was about the right size, and that it had an atmosphere and a temperature range that permitted water vapor in the air, liquid water in its shallow seas, and frozen water on its colder parts. It wasn’t heaven, though. Its colder parts included nearly all of the planet. Its best zone was around the equator, and that was not much unlike Labrador.

  If there ever had been anything on any other part of its surface, it was now covered with thousands of feet of ice. There was no point in landing on a glacier; Wu had no way of digging down to whatever lay under it. After a lot of searching Wu found a bare outcropping of rock and landed there. By then he wasn’t very optimistic anymore. The environment did not look promising—but his instruments gave him better news than he had expected.

  There was a tunnel.

  Wu had practiced tunnel entry. He even had the necessary equipment. Sweating the big power drills into place and erecting the bubble shelter that would protect it from the outside air took all of his strength, and enough time to use up the bulk of his supplies. But he got in.

  It was a blue-lined tunnel.

  That was discouraging, but as he moved along it he caught glimpses of other colors. When he got to a red segment he found a huge machine—later on, experts decided from his description that it had been a tunnel digger—but he didn’t have the strength to lift it, or the equipment (or the courage, for that matter) to try to hack pieces off it. In the green part of the tunnel were bolts of what Wu first took to be cloth but turned out to be the crystalline sheeting the “prayer fans” were made of. In the gold was—the gold.

  There were stacks and stacks of little hexagonal Heechee-metal boxes, all sealed. All heavy.

  Wu couldn’t carry them all, and his energy was running out. He managed to get two of them back to the lander and then took off, with every intention of coming back in a Five.

  Unfortunately, when he was safely back on Gateway it turned out that no Five would accept the program that had brought him there. Neither would any of the Threes or Ones that were lying in their docks, waiting for crews.

  It seemed that only the One he had found the planet in would take him back.

  That didn’t work, either. Before he could requisition it and ship out again someone else had taken his One—on a one-way trip.

  All Wu had, then, was the two little boxes, but it was their contents that bought him a home in Shensi province. One of them contained heater coils. They weren’t operating, but they were close enough to working condition so that human scientists managed to tinker them going. (Later on better and bigger ones were found on Peggy’s Planet, but Wu’s were still the first.) The other box contained a set of gauges for measuring microwave flux.

  Scientists puzzled over the gauges very diligently, but they asked the wrong questions. What they labored to ascertain was how they worked. It did not occur to any of them, just then, to wonder why the Heechee were so curious about millimeter microwave flux. If it had it might have saved a lot of people a lot of unnecessary confusion.

  It was in a tunnel on an otherwise unprepossessing planet that one prospector found the first specimen of the Heechee tunneling machine. It was in a tunnel on the Luna-like satellite of a distant gas giant planet that another found the “camera” that the so-called “fire-pearls” served as “film.” And it was in a tunnel that Vitaly Klemenkov found the little device that sparked a whole new industry—and earned him only a pittance.

  Klemenkov’s is a kind of hard-luck story. What he found was what human scientists came to call a “piezophone.” Its main operating part was a diaphragm made out of the same material as the “blood-diamonds” that had littered the tunnel of Venus and many others. The material was piezoelectric: when squeezed it produced an electric current, and vice versa. Of course, there were plenty of blood-diamonds around, though no one had known before Klemenkov that they were basically raw material for piezoelectric devices. Klemenkov had visions of untold riches. Unfortunately, the main communications laboratories on Earth, subsidiaries of the cable and telephone and satellite corporations, developed the Heechee model into something they could manufacture themselves. Klemenkov took it to court, naturally—but who could fight the lawyers of the biggest corporations in the world? So he settled for a small royalty—hardly more, in fact, than an average emperor’s income.

  There was one other splendidly productive variety of place to find Heechee treasures. But no one knew that at first, although if they had thought of the example of Gateway itself they might have deduced it, and certainly no one knew that these rich lodes were, actually, traps. A woman named Patricia Bover was the first Gateway prospector to report finding one—and, as was so often the case, it did her little good.

  MISSION FOOD FACTORY

  Patricia Bover set out in a One. She had no idea where she was going. She was pleased that it was a relatively short trip—turnaround in seven days, destination in fourteen—and astonished when her instruments told her that the tiny, distant star that was the nearest to her was actually the old familiar Sun.

  She was in the Oort cloud of comets, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, and she was docking on what was clearly a Heechee artifact. A big one: it was eight hundred feet long, she estimated, and it was like nothing anyone had ever before reported finding.

  When Bover got into the thing and looked around, she realized she was rich. The thing was absolutely stuffed with machines. She had no idea what they did, but there were so many of them that she had no doubt at all that some of them, maybe many of them, would be as valuable as any heater or tunneler or anisokinetic punch.

  The bubble burst when she found out she couldn’t get back to Gateway. Her ship wouldn’t move. No matter what she did to the controls it remained inert. It not only would not automatically return her to her port of origin, it wouldn’t go anywhere at all.

  Patricia Bover was stuck, some billions of miles from Earth.

  As it turned out, the artifact was still operating; in a part of it that Pat Bover never saw, it was actually still producing food, half a million years after it was left there by the Heechee, out of the raw materials of the comets themselves—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, the basic elements that make up most of human diet and body. If Pat had known that—if she had forced herself to investigate the thing—she might have lived quite long while there. (Though not long enough for anyone to get there to rescue her, of course.)

  She didn’t know that, though. What she knew was that she was in serious trouble. What she did was send a long radio message to Earth, twenty-five light-days away, explaining where she was and what had happened. Then she got into her lander and launched it in the general direction of the Sun. She took a knockout pill and crawled into the freezer…and died there.

  She knew the odds were against her. She wasn’t properly frozen for any hope of revival, and anyway the chances were small that anyone would ever find her frozen body and try to revive it. And, as a matter of fact, no one ever did.

  The Food Factory wasn’t the only Heechee artifact in space which doubled as a trap for the unwary. There were altogether twenty-nine of these large objects—they were called “collection traps”—somewhere in the galaxy.

  Pa
tricia Bover’s ill-fated find in the Oort cloud wasn’t the only artifact the Heechee had left up and running. It wasn’t even the only one to which a Gateway spaceship had a preprogrammed course. There was that other orbiting parking garage for spaceships that the Heechee had left around another star, far away—almost as big as Gateway; humans called it Gateway Two.

  And then there was Ethel’s Place.

  Ethel’s Place was discovered by an early one-woman mission. (The woman’s name was Ethel Klock.) Then it was rediscovered by a group of Canadians in an armored Three; and re-rediscovered by another One, whose pilot was a man from Cork, Ireland, named Terrance Horran. The Canadians didn’t just discover the artifact. They also discovered Ethel Klock, because she was there when they arrived. When Horran arrived he discovered them all, and later parties kept on discovering those who had come before, because they all stayed right there. As with Pat Bover on the Food Factory, it was a one-way destination for them all. There wasn’t any return. The boards on all the ships nulled themselves on arrival.

  They had no way of getting off the artifact.

  That was a great pity in the minds of all of them, because Ethel’s Place was a wonder. It was an object about the size of a cruise liner, but without any engines of any kind that they could discover. It had food machines, and air and water regenerators, and lights; and they were all still operating, even after all the millennia that had passed. The Heechee machines were built to last. Moreover, there were a lot of astronomical instruments on Ethel’s Place, and they were working, too.

  The castaways had plenty of time to investigate their new home. They had nothing else to do. The food machines fed them; their lives were not threatened. They actually made quite a self-sufficient little colony. They might even have made it a permanent one, with generations of settlers coming along, if Klock had not been past the age of childbearing by the time the Canadians got there, or if the later arrivals had included any females.