Gateway (hs-1) Page 6

  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 squeeze the action teat.

  GATEWAY’S SHIPS

  The vessels available on Gateway are capable of interstellar flight at speeds greater than the velocity of light. The means of propulsion is not understood (see pilot manual). There is also a fairly conventional rocket propulsion system, using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for attitude control, and for propulsion of the landing craft which is docked into each interstellar vessel.

  There are three major classifications, designated as Class 1, Class 3, and Class 5, according to the number of persons they can carry. Some of the vessels are of particularly heavy construction and are designated “armored.” Most of the armored class are Fives.

  Each vessel is programmed to navigate itself automatically to a number of destinations. Return is automatic, and is quite reliable in practice. Your course in ship-handling will adequately prepare you for all the necessary tasks in piloting your vessel safely; however, see pilot manual for safety regulations.

  What you usually do — or what the course programmers the Corporation keeps on the payroll to do this sort of thing for you usually do — is pick four numbers at random. Then you cycle the fifth digit until you get a kind of warning pink glow. Sometimes it’s faint, sometimes it’s bright. If you stop there and press the flat oval part under the teat, the other numbers begin to creep around, just a couple of millimeters one way or another, and the pink glow gets brighter. When they stop it’s shocking pink and shockingly bright. Metchnikov says that’s an automatic fine-tuning device. The machine allows for human error — sorry, I mean for Heechee error — so when you get close to a real, valid target setting it makes the final adjustments for you automatically. Probably he’s right.

  (Of course, learning every step of this cost a lot of time and money, and most of it cost some lives. It’s dangerous being a prospector. But for the first few out, it was more like suicidal.)

  Sometimes you can cycle all the way through your fifth digit and get nothing at all. So what you do is, you swear. Then you reset one of the other four and go again. It only takes a few seconds to cycle, but check pilots have run up a hundred hours of new settings before they got good color.

  Of course, by the time I went out, the check pilots and the course programmers had worked out a couple hundred possible settings that had been logged as good color but not as yet used-as well as all the settings that had been used, and aren’t worth going back to. Or that the crews didn’t come back from.

  But all that I didn’t know at the time, and when I sat down in that modified Heechee seat it was all new, new, new. And I don’t know if I can make you understand what it felt like.

  I mean, there I was, in a seat where Heechee had sat half a million years ago. The thing in front of me was a target selector. The ship could go anywhere. Anywhere! If I selected the right target I could find myself around Sirius, Procyon, maybe even the Magellanic Clouds!

  Teacher got tired of hanging head-down and wriggled through, squeezing in behind me. “Your turn, Broadhead,” she said, resting a hand on my shoulder and what felt like her breasts on my back.

  I was reluctant to touch. I asked, “Isn’t there any way of telling where you’re going to wind up?”

  Classifieds.

  HOW DO you know you’re not a Unitarian? Gateway Fellowship now forming. 87-539.

  BILITIS WANTED for Sappho and Lesbia, joint trips till we make it, then happily ever after in Northern Ireland. Permanent trimarriage only. 87-033 or 87-034.

  STORE YOUR effects. Save rent, avoid Corporation seizure while out. Fee includes disposal instructions if nonreturn. 88-125.

  “Probably,” she said, “providing you’re a Heechee with pilot training.”

  “Not even like one color means you’re going farther from here than some other color?”

  “Not that anybody here has figured out. Of course, they keep trying. There’s a whole team that spends its time programming returned mission reports against the settings they went out with. So far they’ve come up empty. Now let’s get on with it, Broadhead. Put your whole hand on that first wheel, the one the others have used. Shove it. It’ll take more muscle than you think.”

  It did. In fact, I was almost afraid to push it hard enough to make it work. She leaned over and put her hand on mine, and I realized that that nice musk-oil smell that had been in my nostrils for the last little while was hers. It wasn’t just musk, either; her pheromones were snuggling nicely into my chemoreceptors. It made a very nice change from the rest of the Gateway stink.

  But all the same, I didn’t get even a show of color, although I tried for five minutes before she waved me away and gave Sheri another shot in my place.

  When I got back to my room somebody had cleaned it up. I wondered gratefully who that had been, but I was too tired to wonder very long. Until you get used to it, low gravity can be exhausting; you find yourself overusing all your muscles because you have to relearn a whole pattern of economies.

  I slung my hammock and was just dozing off when I heard a scratching at the lattice of my door and Sheri’s voice: “Rob?”

  “What?”

  “Are you asleep?”

  Obviously I wasn’t, but I interpreted the question the way she had intended it. “No. I’ve been lying here thinking.”

  “So was I… Rob?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Would you like me to come into your hammock?”

  I made an effort to wake myself up enough to consider the question on its merits.

  “I really want to,” she said.

  “All right. Sure. I mean, glad to have you.” She slipped into my room, and I slid over in the hammock, which swung slowly as she crawled into it. She was wearing a knitted T-shirt and underpants, and she felt warm and soft against me when we rolled gently together in the hollow of the hammock.

  “It doesn’t have to be sex, stud,” she said. “I’m easy either way.”

  “Let’s see what develops. Are you scared?”

  Her breath was the sweetest-smelling thing about her; I could feel it on my cheek. “A lot more than I thought I would be.”

  “Why?”

  “Rob—” she squirmed herself comfortable and then twisted her neck to look at me over her shoulder, “you know, you say kind of asshole things sometimes?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, I mean it. I mean, look what we’re doing. We’re going to get into a ship that we don’t know if it’s going to get where it’s supposed to go, and we don’t even know where it’s supposed to go. We go faster than light, nobody knows how. We don’t know how long we’ll be gone, even if we knew where we were going. So we could be traveling the rest of our lives and die before we got there, even if we didn’t run into something that would kill us in two seconds. Right? Right. So how come you ask me why I’m scared?”

  “Just making conversation.” I curled up along her back and cupped a breast, not aggressively but because it felt good.

  “And not only that. We don’t know anything about the people who built these things. How do we know this isn’t all a practical joke on their part? Maybe their way of luring fresh meat into Heechee heaven?”

  “We don’t,” I agreed. “Roll over this way.”

  “And the ship they showed us this morning doesn’t hardly look like I thought it was going to be, at all,” she said, doing as I told her and putting a hand on the back of my neck.

  There was a sharp whistle from somewhere, I couldn’t tell where.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know.” It came again, sounding both out in the tunnel and, louder, inside my room. “Oh, it’s the phone.” What I was hearing was my own piezophone and the ones on either side of me, all ringing at once. The whistle stopped and there was a voice:

  “This is Jim Chou. All you fish who want to see what a ship looks like when it comes back afte
r a bad trip, come to Docking Station Four. They’re bringing it in now.”

  I could hear a murmuring from the Forehands’ room next door, and I could feel Sheri’s heart pounding. “We’d better go,” I said.

  “I know. But I don’t think I want to — much.”

  The ship had made it back to Gateway, but not quite all the way. One of the orbiting cruisers had detected it and closed in on it. Now a tug was bringing it in to the Corporation’s own docks, where usually only the rockets from the planets latched in. There was a hatch big enough to hold even a Five. This was a Three, what there was left of it.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” Sheri whispered. “Rob, what do you suppose happened to them?”

  “To the people? They died.” There was not really any doubt of that. The ship was a wreck. The lander stem was gone, just the interstellar vehicle itself, the mushroom cap, was still there, and that was bent out of shape, split open, seared by heat. Split open! Heechee metal, that doesn’t even soften under an electric arc!

  But we hadn’t seen the worst of it.

  We never did see the worst of it, we only heard about it. One man was still inside the ship. All over the inside of the ship. He had been literally spattered around the control room, and his remains had been baked onto the walls. By what? Heat and acceleration, no doubt. Perhaps he had found himself skipping into the upper reaches of a sun, or in tight orbit around a neutron star. The differential in gravity might have shredded ship and crew like that. But we never knew.

  The other two persons in the crew were not there at all. Not that it was easy to tell; but the census of the organs revealed only one jaw, one pelvis, one spine — though in many short pieces. Perhaps the other two had been in the lander?

  “Move it, fish!”

  Sheri caught my arm and pulled me out of the way. Five uniformed crewmen from the cruisers came through, in American and Brazilian blue, Russian beige, Venusian work white and Chinese all-purpose black-and-brown. The American and the Venusian were female; the faces were all different, but the expressions were all the same mixture of discipline and distaste.

  “Let’s go.” Sheri tugged me away. She didn’t want to watch the crewmen poke through the remnants, and neither did I. The whole class, Jimmy Chou, Klara and the other teachers and all, began to straggle back to our rooms. Not quite quick enough. We had been looking through the ports into the lock; when the patrol from the cruisers opened it, we got a whiff of the air inside. I don’t know how to describe it. A little bit like overripe garbage being cooked to swill to pigs. Even in the rank air of Gateway, that was hard to take.

  Teacher dropped off at her own level — down pretty low, in the high-rent district around Easy Level. When she looked up after me as I said goodnight I observed for the first time that she was crying.

  Sheri and I said goodnight to the Forehands at their door, and I turned to her, but she was ahead of me.

  “I think I’ll sleep this one out,” she said. “Sorry, Rob, but, you know, I just don’t feel like it anymore.”

  SAFETY RULES FOR GATEWAY SHIPS

  The mechanism for interstellar travel is known to be contained in the diamond-shaped box which is located under the center keel of 3-man and 5-man ships, and in the sanitary facilities of the 1-man ships.

  No one has successfully opened one of those containers. Each attempt has resulted in explosion of approximately 1-kiloton force. A major research project is attempting to penetrate this box without destroying it, and if you as a limited partner have any information or suggestions in this connection you should contact a Corporation officer at once.

  However, under no circumstances attempt to open the box yourself. Tampering with it in any way, or docking a vessel on which the box has been tampered with, is strictly forbidden. The penalty is forfeiture of all rights and immediate expulsion from Gateway.

  The course-directing equipment also poses a potential danger. Under no circumstances should you attempt to change the setting once you have begun your flight. No vessel in which this has been done has ever returned.

  Chapter 9

  I don’t know why I keep going back to Sigfrid von Shrink. My appointment with him is always on a Wednesday afternoon, and he doesn’t like it if I drink or dope before then. So it blows the whole day. I pay a lot for those days. You don’t know what it costs to live the way I live. My apartment over Washington Square is eighteen thousand dollars a month. My residence taxes to live under the Big Bubble come to another three thousand plus. (It doesn’t cost that much to stay on Gateway!) I’ve got some pretty hefty charge accounts for furs, wine, lingerie, jewelry, flowers. Sigfrid says I try to buy love. All right, I do. What’s wrong with that? I can afford it. And that’s not mentioning what Full Medical costs me.

  Sigfrid, though, comes free. I’m covered by the Full Medical for psychiatric therapy, any variety I like; I could have group grope or internal massage for the same price, namely nothing. I kid him about that sometimes. “Even considering that you’re just a bag of rusty bolts,” I say, “you’re not much good. But your price is right.”

  He asks, “Does that make you feel that you yourself are more valuable, if you say that I’m not?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Then why do you insist on reminding yourself that I’m a machine? Or that I don’t cost anything? Or that I cannot transcend my programming?”

  “I guess you just piss me off, Sigfrid.” I know that won’t satisfy him, so I explain it. “You ruined my morning. This friend, S. Ya. Lavorovna, stayed over last night. She’s something.” So I tell Sigfrid a little bit about what S. Ya. is like, including what she is like walking away from me in stretch pants with that long dirtygold hair hanging down to her waist.

  “She sounds very nice,” Sigfrid comments.

  “Bet your bolts. Only thing is, she wakes up slow in the morning. Just when she was getting lively again I had to leave my summer place, up over Tappan Sea, and come down here.”

  “Do you love her, Rob?”

  The answer is no, so I want him to think it’s yes. I say, “No.”

  “I think that’s an honest answer, Rob,” he says, approvingly, and disappointingly. “Is that why you’re angry with me?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just in a bad mood, I guess.”

  “Can you think of any reasons why?”

  He waits me out, so after a while I say, “Well, I took a licking at roulette last night.”

  “More than you can afford?”

  “Christ! No.” But it’s annoying, all the same. There are other things, too. It’s getting toward that chilly time of year. My place over Tappan Sea isn’t under the Bubble, so sitting out on the porch with S. Ya. for brunch wasn’t such a good idea. I don’t want to mention this to Sigfrid. He would say something wholly rational like, well, why didn’t I have my lunch served indoors? And I would just have to tell him all over again that when I was a kid it was my dream to own a summer place over Tappan Sea and have brunch on the porch, looking out over it. They’d just dammed the Hudson then, when I was about maybe twelve. I used to dream a lot about Making It Big and living in the style of The Rich Folks. Well, he’s heard all that.

  Sigfrid clears his throat. “Thank you, Rob,” he says, to let me know that the hour is over. “Will I see you next week?”

  “Don’t you always?” I say, smiling. “How the time flies. Actually I wanted to leave a little early today.”

  “Did you, Rob?”

  “I have another date with S. Ya.,” I explain. “She’s coming back up to the summer place with me tonight. Frankly, what she’s going to do is better therapy than what you do.”

  He says, “Is that all you want out of a relationship, Robbie?”

  “You mean, just sex?” The answer in this case is no, but I don’t want him to know just what it is I do want out of my relationship with S. Ya. Lavorovna. I say, “She’s a little different from most of my girlfriends, Sigfrid. She has about as much clout as I do, for one thing. Has a damn good
job. I admire her.”

  Well, I don’t, particularly. Or rather, I don’t care much about whether I admire her or not. S. Ya. has one trait that impresses me even more than possessing the sweetest rear view that God ever laid on a human female. Her damn good job is in information handling. She went to the Akademogorsk University, she was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Machine Intelligence, and she teaches graduate students in the AI department at NYU. She knows more about Sigfrid than Sigfrid knows about himself, and that suggests interesting possibilities to me.

  Chapter 10

  Along about my fifth day on Gateway I got up early and splurged, breakfast out in the Heecheetown Arms, surrounded by tourists, bloody-eyed gamblers from the casino across the spindle, and liberty sailors from the cruisers. It felt luxurious, and cost luxurious, too. It was worth it because of the tourists. I could feel their eyes on me. I knew they were talking about me, particularly a smooth-faced but old African type, Dahomeyan or Ghanaian, I think, with his very young, very plump, very jeweled wife. Or whatever. As far as they could tell, I was a swashbuckling hero. True, I didn’t have any bangles on my arm, but some of the veterans didn’t wear them, either.

  I basked. I considered ordering real eggs and bacon, but that was a little more than even my euphoria would let me go for, so I settled for orange juice (it turned out to be real, to my surprise) and a brioche and several cups of black Danish coffee. All I was really missing was a pretty girl across the armboard of the chair. There were two nice-looking women who seemed to be the liberty crew from the Chinese cruiser, neither of them unwilling to exchange a few radio messages by the glance of the eyes, but I decided to keep them as open prospects for some future date and paid my check (that was painful enough) and left for class.