8

“Good morning,” said somebody, speaking right into the middle of a dream about getting stuck in a sort of quicksand in the middle of the Orion Nebula. “I have brought you some tea.”

I opened an eye. I looked over the edge of the hammock into a nearby pair of coalsack-black eyes set into a sand-colored face. I was fully dressed and hung over; something smelled very bad, and I realized it was me.

“My name,” said the person with the tea, “is Shikitei Baldu. Please drink this tea. It will help rehydrate your tissues.”

I looked a little further and saw that he ended at the waist; he was the legless man with the strap-on wings whom I had seen in the tunnel the day before. “Uh,” I said, and tried a little harder and got as far as, “Good morning.” The Orion Nebula was fading back into the dream, and so was the sensation of having to push through rapidly solidifying gas clouds. The bad smell remained. The room smelled excessively foul, even by Gateway standards, and I realized I had thrown up on the floor. I was only millimeters from doing it again. Bakin, slowly stroking the air with his wings, dexterously dropped a stoppered flask next to me on the hammock at the end of one stroke. Then he propelled himself to the top of my chest of drawers, sat there, and said:

“I believe you have a medical examination this morning at oh eight hundred hours.”

“Do I?” I managed to get the cap off the tea and took a sip. It was very hot, sugarless, and almost tasteless, but it did seem to tip the scales inside my gut in the direction opposite to throwing up again.

“Yes. I think so. It’s customary. And in addition, your P-phone has rung several times.”

I went back to, “Uh?”

“I presume it was your proctor caffing you to remind you. It is now seven-fifteen, Mr.—”

“Broadhead,” I said thickly, and then more carefully: “My name is Rob Broadhead.”

“Yes. I took the liberty of making sure you were awake. Please enjoy your tea, Mr. Broadhead. Enjoy your stay on Gateway.”

He nodded, fell forward off the chest, swooped toward the door, handed himself through it, and was gone. With my head thudding at every change of attitude I got myself out of the hammock, trying to avoid the nastier spots on the floor, and somehow succeeded in getting reasonably clean. I thought of depilating, but I had about twelve days on a beard and decided to let it go for a while; it no longer looked unshaven, exactly, and I just didn’t have the strength.

When I wobbled into the medical examining room I was only about five minutes late. The others in my group were all ahead of me, so I had to wait and go last. They extracted three kinds of blood from me, fingertip, inside of the elbow, and lobe of the ear, I was sure they would all run ninety proof. But it didn’t matter. The medical was only a formality. If you could survive the trip up to Gateway by spacecraft in the first place; you could survive a trip in a Heechee ship. Unless something went wrong. In which case you probably couldn’t survive anyway, no matter how healthy you were.

I had time for a quick cup of coffee off a cart that someone was tending next to a dropshaft (private enterprise on Gateway? I hadn’t known that existed), and then I got to the first session of the class right on the tick. We met in a big room on Level Dog, long and narrow and low-ceilinged. The seats were arranged two on each side with a center aisle, sort of like a schoolroom in a converted bus. Sheri came in late, looking fresh and cheerful, and slipped in beside me; our whole group was there, all seven of us who had come up from Earth together, the family of four from Venus and a couple others I knew to be new fish like me. “You don’t look too bad,” Sheri whispered as the instructor pondered over some papers on his desk.

“Does the hangover show?”

“Actually not. But I assume it’s there. I heard you coming in last night. In fact,” she added thoughtfully, “the whole tunnel heard you.”

I winced. I could still smell myself, but most of it was apparently inside me. None of the others seemed to be edging away, not even Sheri.

The instructor stood up and studied us thoughtfully for a while. “Oh, well,” he said, and looked back at his papers. Then he shook his head. “I won’t take attendance,” he said. “I teach the course in how to run a Heechee ship.” I noticed he had a batch of bracelets; I couldn’t count them, but there were at least half a dozen. I wondered briefly about these people I kept seeing who had been out a lot of times and still weren’t rich. “This is only one of the three courses you get. After this you get survival in unfamiliar environments, and then how to recognize what’s valuable. But this one is in ship-handling, and the way we’re going to start learning it is by doing it. All of you come with me.”

So we all got up and gaggled after him, out of the room, down a tunnel, onto the down-cable of a dropshaft and past the guards—maybe the same ones who had chased me away the night before. This time they just nodded to the instructor and watched us go past. We wound up in a long, wide, low-ceilinged passage with about a dozen squared-off and stained metal cylinders sticking up out of the floor. They looked like charred tree stumps, and it was a moment before I realized what they were.

I gulped.

“They’re ships,” I whispered to Sheri, louder than I intended. A couple of people looked at me curiously. One of them, I noticed, was a girl I had danced with the night before, the one with the dense black eyebrows. She nodded to me and smiled; I saw the bangles on her arm, and wondered what she was doing there—and how she had done at the gambling tables.

The instructor gathered us around him, and said, “As someone just said, these are Heechee ships. The lander part. This is the piece you go down to a planet in, if you’re lucky enough to find a planet. They don’t look very big, but five people can fit into each of those garbage cans you see. Not comfortably, exactly. But they can. Generally speaking, of course, you’ll always leave one person in the main ship, so there’ll be at most four in the lander.”

He led us past the nearest of them, and we all satisfied the impulse to touch, scratch, or pat it. Then he began to lecture:

“There were nine hundred and twenty-four of these ships docked at Gateway when it was first explored. About two hundred, so far, have proved nonoperational. Mostly we don’t know why; they just don’t work. Three hundred and four have actually been sent out on at least one trip. Thirty-three of those are here now, and available for prospecting trips. The others haven’t been tried yet.” He hiked himself up on the stumpy cylinder and sat there while he went on:

“One thing you have to decide is whether you want to take one of the thirty-three tested ones or one of the ones that has never been flown. By human beings, I mean. There you just pay your money and take your choice. It’s a gamble either way. A high proportion of the trips that didn’t come back were in first flights, so there’s obviously some risk there. Well, that figures, doesn’t it? After all, nobody has done any maintenance on them for God knows how long, since the Heechee put them there.

“On the other hand, there’s a risk in the ones that have been out and back safely, too. There’s no such thing as perpetual motion. We think some of the no-returns have been because the ships ran out of fuel. Trouble is, we don’t know what the fuel is, or how much there is, or how to tell when a ship is about to run out.”

He patted the stump. “This, and all the others you see here, were designed for five Heechees in the crews. As far as we can tell. But we send them out with three human beings. It seems the Heechee were more tolerant of each other’s company in confined spaces than people are. There are bigger and smaller ships, but the no-return rate on them has been very bad the last couple of orbits. It’s probably just a string of bad luck, but. . . Anyway, I personally would stick with a Three. You people, you do what you want.

“So you come to your second choice, which is who you go with. Keep your eyes open. Look for companions—What?”

Sheri had been semaphoring her hand until she got his attention. “You said ‘very bad,” she said. “How bad is that?”

The instructor said patiently, “In the last fiscal orbit about three out of ten Fives came back. Those are the biggest ships. In several cases the crews were dead when we got them open, even so.”

“Yeah,” said Sheri, “that’s very bad.”

“No, that’s not bad at all, compared to the one-man ships. Two orbits ago we went a whole orbit and only two Ones came back at all. That’s bad.”

“Why is that?” asked the father of the tunnel-rat family. Their name was Forehand. The instructor looked at him for a moment.

“If you ever find out,” he said, “be sure and tell somebody. Now. As far as selecting a crew is concerned, you’re better off if you can get somebody who’s already been out. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. Prospectors who strike it rich generally quit; the ones that are still hungry may not want to break up their teams. So a lot of you fish are going to have to go out with other virgins. Umm.” He looked around thoughtfully. “Well, let’s get our feet wet. Sort yourselves out into groups of three—don’t worry about who’s in your group, this isn’t where you pick your partners—and climb into one of those open landers. Don’t touch anything. They’re supposed to be in deactive mode, but I have to tell you they don’t always stay deactive. Just go in, climb down to the control cabin and wait for an instructor to join you.”

That was the first I’d heard that there were other instructors. I looked around, trying to work out which were teachers and which were fish, while he said, “Are there any questions?”

Sheri again. “Yeah. What’s your name?”

“Did I forget that again? I’m Jimmy Chou. Pleased to meet you all. Now let’s go.”

Now I know a lot more than my instructor did, including what happened to him half an orbit later—poor old Jimmy Chou, he went out before I did, and came back while I was on my second trip, very dead. Flare burns, they say his eyes were boiled out of his bead. But at that time he knew it all, and it was all very strange and wonderful to me.

So we crawled into the funny elliptical hatch that let you slip between the thrusters and down into the landing capsule, and then down a peg-ladder one step further into the main vehicle itself.

We looked around, three Ali Babas staring at the treasure cave. We heard a scratching above us, and a head poked in. It had shaggy eyebrows and pretty eyes, and it belonged to the girl I had been dancing with the night before. “Having fun?” she inquired. We were clinging together as far from anything that looked movable as we could get, and I doubt we really looked at ease. “Never mind,” she said, “just look around. Get familiar with it. You’ll see a lot of it. That vertical line of wheels with the little spokes sticking out of them? That’s the target selector. That’s the most important thing not to touch for now—maybe ever. That golden spiral thing over next to you there, the blond girl? Anybody want to guess what that’s for?”

You-there-blond-girl, who was one of the Forehand daughters, shrank away from it and shook her head. I shook mine, but Sheri hazarded, “Could it be a hatrack?”

Teacher squinted at it thoughtfully. “Hmm. No, I don’t think so, but I keep hoping one of you fish will know the answer. None of us here do. It gets hot sometimes in flight; nobody knows why. The toilet’s in there. You’re going to have a lot of fun with that. But it does work, after you learn how. You can sling your hammocks and sleep there—or anywhere you want to, actually. That corner, and that recess are pretty dead space. If you’re in a crew that wants some privacy, you can screen them off. A little bit, anyway.”

Sheri said, “Don’t any of you people like to tell your names?” Teacher grinned. “I’m Gelle-Klara Moynlin. You want to know the rest about me? I’ve been out twice and didn’t score, and I’m killing time until the right trip comes along. So I work as assistant instructor.”

“How do you know which is the right trip?” asked the Forehand girl.

“Bright fellow, you. Good question. That’s another of those questions that I like to hear you ask, because it shows you’re thinking, but if there’s an answer I don’t know what it is. Let’s see. You already know this ship is a Three. It’s done six round trips already, but it’s a reasonable bet that it’s got enough reserve fuel for a couple more. I’d rather take it than a One. That’s for long-shot gamblers.”

“Mr. Chou said that,” said the Forehand girl, “but my father says he’s been all through the records since Orbit One, and the Ones aren’t that bad.”

“Your father can have mine,” said Gelle-Klara Moynlin. “It’s not just statistics. Ones are lonesome. Anyway, one person can’t really handle everything if you hit lucky, you need shipmates, one in orbit—most of us keep one man in the ship, feels safer that way; at least somebody might get help if things go rancid. So two of you go down in the lander to look around. Of course, if you do hit lucky you have to split it three ways. If you hit anything big, there’s plenty to go around. And if you don’t hit, one-third of nothing is no less than all of it.”

“Wouldn’t it be even better in a Five, then?” I asked.

Klara looked at me and half-winked; I hadn’t thought she remembered dancing the night before. “Maybe, maybe not. The thing about Fives is that they have almost unlimited target acceptance.”

“Please talk English,” Sheri coaxed.

“Fives will accept a lot of destinations that Threes and Ones won’t. I think it’s because some of those destinations are dangerous. The worst ship I ever saw come back was a Five. All scarred and seared and bent; nobody knows how it made it back at all. Nobody knows where it had been, either, but I heard somebody say it might’ve actually been in the photosphere of a star. The crew couldn’t tell us. They were dead.

“Of course,” she went on meditatively, “an armored Three has almost as much target acceptance as a Five, but you take your chances any way you swing. Now let’s get with it, shall we? You—” she pointed at Sheri, “sit down over there.”

The Forehand girl and I crawled around the mix of human and Heechee furnishings to make room. There wasn’t much. If you cleared everything out of a Three you’d have a room about four meters by three by three, but of course if you cleared everything out it wouldn’t go.

Sheri sat down in front of the column of spoked wheels, wriggling her bottom to try to get a fit. “What kind of behinds did the Heechee have?” she complained.

Teacher said, “Another good question, same no-good answer. If you find out, tell us. The Corporation puts that webbing in the seat. It isn’t original equipment. Okay. Now, that thing you’re looking at is the target selector. Put your hand on one of the wheels. Any one. Just don’t touch any other. Now move it.” She peered down anxiously as Sheri touched the bottom wheel, then thrust with her fingers, then laid the heel of her hand on it, braced herself against the V-shaped arms of the seat, and shoved. Finally it moved, and the lights along the row of wheels began to flicker.

“Wow,” said Sheri, “they must’ve been pretty strong!”

We took turns trying with that one wheel—Klara wouldn’t let us touch any other that day—and when it came my turn I was surprised to find that it took about as much muscle as I could bring to bear to make it move. It didn’t feel rusted stuck; it felt as though it were meant to be hard to turn. And, when you think how much trouble you can get into if you turn a setting by accident in the middle of a flight, it probably was.

Of course, now I know more about that, too, than my teacher did then. Not that I’m so smart, but it has taken, and is still taking, a lot of people a hell of a long time to figure out what goes on just in setting up a target on the course director.

What it is is a vertical row of number generators. The lights that show up display numbers; that’s not easy to see, because they don’t look like numbers. They aren’t positional, or decimal. (Apparently the Heechee expressed numbers as sums of primes and exponents, but all that’s way over my head.) Only the check pilots and the course programmers working for the Corporation really have to be able to read the numbers, and they don’t do it directly, only with a computing translator. The first five digits appear to express the position of the target in space, reading from bottom to top. (Dane Metchnikov says the prime ordering isn’t from bottom to top but from front to back, which says something or other about the Heechee. They were three-D oriented, like primitive man, instead of two-D oriented, like us.) You would think that three numbers would be enough to describe any position anywhere in the universe, wouldn’t you? I mean, if you make a threedimensional representation of the Galaxy you can express any point in it by means of a number for each of the three dimensions. But it took the Heechee five. Does that mean there were five dimensions that were perceptible to the Heechee? Metchnikov says not. . . .

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.

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?”

“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 after 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”

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.

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.

On the way down I caught up with the Forehands. The man, whose name seemed to be Sess, dropped off the down-cable and waited to wish me a polite good morning. “We didn’t see you at breakfast,” his wife mentioned, so I told them where I had been. The younger daughter, Lois, looked faintly envious. Her mother caught the expression and patted her. “Don’t worry, hon. We’ll eat there before we go back to Venus.” To me: “We have to watch our pennies right now. But when we hit, we’ve got some pretty big plans for spending the profits.”

“Don’t we all,” I said, but something was turning over in my head. “Are you really going to go back to Venus?”

“Certainly,” they all said, in one way or another, and acted surprised at the question. Which surprised me. I hadn’t realized that tunnel rats could manage to think of that molten stinkpot as home. Sess Forehand must have read my expression, too. They were a reserved family, but they didn’t miss much. He grinned and said:

“It’s our home, after all. So is Gateway, in a way.”

That was astonishing. “Actually, we’re related to the first man to find Gateway, Sylvester Macklen. You’ve heard of him?”

“How could I not?”

“He was a sort of a cousin. I guess you know the whole story?” I started to say I did, but he obviously was proud of his cousin, and I couldn’t blame him, and so I heard a slightly different version of the familiar legend: “He was in one of the South Pole tunnels, and found a ship. God knows how he got it to the surface, but he did, and he got in and evidently squeezed the go-teat, and it went where it was programmed—here.”

“Doesn’t the Corporation pay a royalty?” I asked. “I mean, if they’re going to pay for discoveries, what discovery would be more worth paying for?”

“Not to us, anyway,” said Louise Forehand, somewhat somberly; money was a hard subject with the Forehands. “Of course, Sylvester didn’t set out to find Gateway. As you know from what we’ve been hearing in class, the ships have automatic return. Wherever you go, you just squeeze the go-teat and you come straight back here. Only that didn’t help Sylvester, because he was here. It was the return leg of a round trip with about a zillion-year stopover.”

“He was smart and strong.” Sess took up the story. “You have to be to explore. So he didn’t panic. But by the time anybody came out here to investigate he was out of life support. He could have lived a little longer. He could have used the lox and H-two from the lander tanks for air and water. I used to wonder why he didn’t.”

“Because he would have starved anyway,” Louise cut in, defending her relative.

“I think so. Anyway, they found his body, with his notes in his hand. He had cut his throat.”

They were nice people, but I had heard all this, and they were making me late for class.

Of course, class wasn’t all that exciting just at that point. We were up to Hammock Slinging (Basic) and Toilet Flushing (Advanced). You may wonder why they didn’t spend more time actually teaching us how to fly the ships. That’s simple. The things flew themselves, as the Forehands, and everybody else, had been telling me. Even the landers were no sweat to operate, although they did require a hand on the controls. Once you were in the lander all you had to do was compare a three-D sort of holographic representation of the immediate area of space with where you wanted to go, and maneuver a point of light in the tank to the point you wanted to reach. The lander went there. It calculated its own trajectories and corrected its own deviations. It took a little muscular coordination to get the hang of twisting that point of light to where you wanted it to go, but it was a forgiving system.

Between the sessions of flushing practice and hammock drill we talked about what we were going to do when we graduated. The launch schedules were kept up to date and displayed on the PV monitor in our class whenever anyone pushed the button. Some of them had names attached to them, and one or two of the names I recognized. Tikki Trumbull was a girl I had danced with and sat next to in the mess hall once or twice. She was an out-pilot, and as she needed crew I thought of joining her. But the wiseheads told me that out-missions were a waste of time.

I should tell you what an out-pilot is. He’s the guy who ferries fresh crews to Gateway Two. There are about a dozen Fives that do that as a regular run. They take four people out (which would be what Tikki wanted people for), and then the pilot comes back alone, or with returning prospectors—if any—and what they’ve found. Usually there’s somebody.

The team who found Gateway Two are the ones we all dreamed about. They made it. Man, did they make it! Gateway Two was another Gateway, nothing more or less, except that it happened to orbit around a star other than our own. There was not much more in the way of treasure on Gateway Two than there was on our own Gateway; the Heechee had swept everything pretty clean, except for the ships themselves. And there weren’t nearly as many ships there, only about a hundred and fifty, compared to almost a thousand on our old original solar Gateway. But a hundred and fifty ships are worth finding all by themselves. Not to mention the fact that they accept some destinations that our local Gateway’s ships don’t appear to.

The ride out to Gateway Two seems to be about four hundred light-years and takes a hundred and nine days each way. Two’s principal star is a bright blue B-type. They think it is Alcyone in the Pleiades, but there is some doubt. Well, actually that’s not Gateway Two’s real star. It doesn’t orbit the big one, but a little cinder of a red dwarf nearby. They say the dwarf is probably a distant binary with the blue B, but they also say it shouldn’t be because of the difference in ages of the two stars. Give them a few more years to argue and they’ll probably know. One wonders why the Heechee would have put their spacelines junction in orbit around so undistinguished a star, but one wonders a lot about the Heechee.

However, all that doesn’t affect the pocketbook of the team who happened to find the place. They get a royalty on everything that any later prospector finds! I don’t know what they’ve made so far, but it has to be in the tens of millions apiece. Maybe the hundreds. And that’s why it doesn’t pay to go with an out-pilot; you don’t really have a much better chance of scoring, and you have to split what you get.

So we went down the list of upcoming launches and hashed them over in the light of our five-day expertise. Which wasn’t much. We appealed to Gelle-Klara Moynlin for advice. After all, she’d been out twice. She studied the list of flights and names, pursing her lips. “Terry Yakamora’s a decent guy,” she said. “I don’t know Parduk, but it might be worth taking a chance on that one. Lay off Dorlean’s flight. There’s a million-dollar bonus, but what they don’t tell you is that they’ve got a bastard control board in it. The Corporation’s experts have put in a computer that’s supposed to override the Heechee target selector, and I wouldn’t trust it. And, of course, I wouldn’t recommend a One in any circumstances.”

Lois Forehand asked, “Which one would you take if it was up to you, Klara?”

She scowled thoughtfully, rubbing that dark left eyebrow with the tips of her fingers. “Maybe Terry. Well, any of them. But I’m not going out again for a while.” I wanted to ask her why, but she turned away from the screen and said, “All right, gang, let’s get back to the drill. Remember, up for pee; down, close, wait ten and up for poo.”

I celebrated completing the week on ship-handling by offering to buy Dane Metchnikov a drink. That wasn’t my first intention. My first intention had been to buy Sheri a drink and drink it in bed, but she was off somewhere. So I worked the buttons on the piezophone and got Metchnikov.

He sounded surprised at my offer. “Thanks,” he said, and then considered. “Tell you what. Give me a hand carrying some stuff, and then I’ll buy you a drink.”

So I went down to his place, which was only one level below Babe; his room was not much better than my own, and bare, except for a couple of full carry-alls. He looked at me almost friendly. “You’re a prospector now,” he grunted.

“Not really. I’ve got two more courses.”

“Well, this is the last you see of me, anyway. I’m shipping out with Terry Yakamora tomorrow.”

I was surprised. “Didn’t you just get back, like ten days ago?”

“You can’t make any money hanging around here. All I was waiting for was the right crew. You want to come to my farewell party? Terry’s place. Twenty hundred.”

“That sounds fine,” I said. “Can I bring Sheri?”

“Oh, sure, she’s coming anyway, I think. Buy you the drink there, if you don’t mind. Give me a hand and we’ll get this stuff stored.”

He had accumulated a surprising amount of goods. I wondered how he had managed to stash them all away in a room as tiny as my own: three fabric carriers all stuffed full, holodisks and a viewer, book tapes and a few actual books. I took the carriers. On Earth they would have weighed more than I could handle, probably fifty or sixty kilos, but of course on Gateway lifting them was no problem; it was only tugging them through the corridors and jockeying them down the shafts that was tricky. I had the mass, but Metchnikov had the problems, since what he was carrying was in odd shapes and varying degrees of fragility. It was about an hour’s haul, actually. We wound up in a part of the asteroid I’d never seen before, where an elderly Pakistani woman counted the pieces, gave Metchnikov a receipt and began dragging them away down a thickly vine-grown corridor.

“Whew,” he grunted. “Well, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” We started back toward a dropshaft, and making conversation, I assume out of some recognition that he owed me a social favor and should practice some social skills, he said:

“So how was the course?”

“You mean apart from the fact that I’ve just finished it and still don’t have any idea how to fly those goddamned ships?”

“Well, of course you don’t,” he said, irritably. “The course isn’t going to teach you that. It just gives you the general idea. The way you learn, you do it. Only hard part’s the lander, of course. Anyway, you’ve got your issue of tapes?”

“Oh, yes.” There were six cassettes of them. Each of us had been given a set when we completed the first week’s course. They had everything that had been said, plus a lot of stuff about different kinds of controls that the Corporation might, or might not, fit on a Heechee board and so on.

“So play them over,” he said. “If you’ve got any sense you’ll take them with you when you ship out. Got plenty of time to play them then. Mostly the ships fly themselves anyway.”

“They’d better,” I said, doubting it. “So long.” He waved and dropped onto the down-cable without looking back. Apparently I had agreed to take the drink he owed me at the party. Where it wouldn’t cost him anything.

I thought of looking for Sheri again, and decided against it. I was in a part of Gateway I didn’t know, and of course I’d left my map back in my room. I drifted along, more or less at random, past star-points where some of the tunnels smelled musty and dusty and there weren’t many people, then through an inhabited section that seemed to be mostly Eastern European. I didn’t recognize the languages, but there were little notes and wall signs hanging from the everywhere-growing ivy that were in alphabets that looked Cyrillic or even stranger. I came to a dropshaft, thought for a moment, and then caught hold of the up-cable. The easy way not to be lost on Gateway is to go up until you get to the spindle, where “up” ends.

But this time I found myself passing Central Park and, on impulse, dropped off the up-cable to sit by a tree for a while.

Central Park isn’t really a park. It’s a large tunnel, not far from the center of rotation of the asteroid, which has been devoted to vegetation. I found orange trees there (which explained the juice), and grape vines; and ferns and mosses, but no grass. I am not sure why. Probably it has something to do with planting only varieties that are sensitive to the available light, mostly the blue gleam from the Heechee metal all around, and perhaps they couldn’t find a grass that could use it efficiently for its photochemistry. The principal reason for having Central Park in the first place was to suck up CO2 and give back oxygen; that was before they spread planting all over the tunnels. But it also killed smells, or anyway it was supposed to, a little, and it grew a certain amount of food. The whole thing was maybe eighty meters long and twice as tall as I was. It was broad enough to have room for some winding paths. The stuff they grew in looked a lot like good old genuine Earthside dirt. What it was, really, was a humus made out of the sewage sludge from the couple of thousand people who had used Gateway toilets, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at it, or by smelling it, either.

The first tree big enough to sit by was no good for that purpose; it was a mulberry, and under it were spread out sheets of fine netting to catch the dropping fruit. I walked past it, and down the path there were a woman and a child.

A child! I hadn’t known there were any children on Gateway. She was a little bit of a thing, maybe a year and a half, playing with a ball so big, and so lazy in the light gravity, that it was like a balloon.

“Hello, Rob.”

That was the other surprise; the woman who greeted me was Gelle-Klara Moynlin. I said without thinking, “I didn’t know you had a little girl.”

“I don’t. This is Kathy Francis, and her mother lets me borrow her sometimes. Kathy, this is Rob Broadhead.”

“Hello, Rob,” the little thing called, studying me from three meters away. “Are you a friend of Klara’s?”

“I hope so. She’s my teacher. Do you want to play catch?”

Kathy finished her study of me and said precisely, each word separate from the one before it and as clearly formed as an adult’s, “I don’t know how to play catch, but I will get six mulberries for you. That’s all you can have.”

“Thank you.” I slumped down next to Klara, who was hugging her knees and watching the child. “She’s cute.”

“Well, I guess so. It’s hard to judge, when there aren’t very many other children around.”

“She’s not a prospector, is she?”

I wasn’t exactly joking, but Klara laughed warmly. “Her parents are permanent-party. Well, most of the time. Right now her mother’s off prospecting; they do that sometimes, a lot of them. You can spend just so much time trying to figure out what the Heechee were up to before you want to try your own solutions to the puzzles.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

She shushed me. Kathy came back, with three of my mulberries in each open hand, so as not to crush them. She had a funny way of walking, which didn’t seem to use much of the thigh and calf muscles; she sort of pushed herself up on the ball of each foot in turn, and let herself float to the next step. After I figured that out I tried it for myself, and it turned out to be a pretty efficient way of walking in near-zero gravity, but my reflexes kept lousing it up. I suppose you have to be born on Gateway to come by it naturally.

Klara in the park was a lot more relaxed and feminine than Klara the teacher. The eyebrows that had looked masculine and angry became outdoorsy and friendly. She still smelled very nice.

It was pretty pleasant, chatting with her, while Kathy stepped daintily around us, playing with her ball. We compared places we’d been, and didn’t find any in common. The one thing we did find in common was that I was born almost the same day as her two-year-younger brother.

“Did you like your brother?” I asked, a gambit played for the hell of it.

“Well, sure. He was the baby. But he was an Aries, born under Mercury and the Moon. Made him fickle and moody, of course. I think he would have had a complicated life.”

I was less interested in asking her about what happened to him than in asking if she really believed in that garbage, but that didn’t seem tactful, and anyway she went on talking. “I’m a Sagittarius, myself. And you—oh, of course. You must be the same as Davie.”

“I guess so,” I said, being polite. “I, uh, don’t go much for astrology.”

“Not astrology, genethlialogy. One’s superstition, the other’s science.”

She laughed. “I can see you’re a scoffer. Doesn’t matter. If you believe, all right; if you don’t—well, you don’t have to believe in the law of gravity to get mashed when you fall off a two-hundred story building.”

Kathy, who had sat down beside us, inquired politely, “Are you having an argument?”

“Not really, honey.” Klara stroked her head.

“That’s good, Klara, because I have to go to the bathroom now and I don’t think I can, here.”

“It’s time to go anyway. Nice to see you, Rob. Watch out for melancholy, hear?” And they went away hand in hand, Klara trying to copy the little girl’s odd walk. Looking very nice. . . for a flake.

That night I took Sheri to Dane Metchnikov’s going-away party. Klara was there, looking even nicer in a bare-midriff pants suit. “I didn’t know you knew Dane Metchnikov,” I said.

“Which one is he? I mean, Terry’s the one who invited me. Coming inside?”

The party had spilled out into the tunnel. I peered through the door and was surprised to find how much room there was inside; Terry Yakamora had two full rooms, both more than twice the size of mine. The bath was private and really did contain a bath, or at least a showerhead. “Nice place,” I said admiringly, and then discovered from something another guest said that Klara lived right down the tunnel. That changed my opinion of Klara: if she could afford the high-rent district, why was she still on Gateway? Why wasn’t she back home spending her money and having fun? Or contrariwise, if she was still on Gateway, why was she fooling around keeping barely even with the head tax by working as an assistant instructor, instead of going out for another killing? But I didn’t get a chance to ask her. She did most of her dancing that night with Terry Yakamora and the others in the outgoing crew.

I lost track of Sheri until she came over to me after a slow, almost unmoving fox-trot, bringing her partner. He was a very young man—a boy, actually; he looked about nineteen. He looked familiar: dark skin, almost white hair, a wisp of a jaw-beard that drew an arc from sideburn to sideburn by way of the underside of his chin. He hadn’t come up from Earth with me. He wasn’t in our class. But I’d seen him somewhere.

Sheri introduced us. “Rob, you know Francesco Hereira?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He’s from the Brazilian cruiser.” Then I remembered. He was one of the inspectors who had gone in to fish through the baked gobbets of flesh on the shipwreck we’d seen a few days earlier. He was a torpedoman, according to his cuff stripes. They give the cruiser crews temporary duty as guards on Gateway, and sometimes they give them liberty there, too. He’d come in in the regular rotation about the time we arrived. Somebody put on a tape for a hora just then, and after we were through dancing, a little out of breath, Hereira and I found ourselves leaning against the wall side by side, trying to stay out of the way of the rest of the party. I told him I had just remembered seeing him at the wreck.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Broadhead. I recall.”

“Tough job,” I said, for something to say. “Isn’t it?”

He had been drinking enough to answer me, I guess. “Well, Mr. Broadhead,” he said analytically, “the technical description of that part of my job is ‘search and registry.’ It is not always tough. For instance, in a short time you will no doubt go out, and when you come back I, or someone else in my job, will poke into your holes, Mr. Broadhead. I will turn out your pockets, and weigh and measure and photograph everything in your ship. That is to make sure you do not smuggle anything of value out of your vessel and off Gateway without paying the Corporation its due share. Then I register what I have found; if it is nothing, I write ‘nil’ on the form, and another crewman from another cruiser chosen at random does the same thing exactly. So you will have two of us prying into you.”

It didn’t sound like a lot of fun for me, but not as bad as I had thought at first. I said so.

He flashed small, very white teeth. “When the prospector to be searched is Sheri or Gelle-Klara over there, no, not bad at all. One can quite enjoy it. But I have not much interest in searching males, Mr. Broadhead. Especially when they are dead. Have you ever been in the presence of five human bodies that have been dead, but not embalmed, for three months? That was what it was like on the first ship I inspected. I do not think anything will be that bad ever again.”

Then Sheri came up and demanded him for another dance, and the party went on.

There were a lot of parties. It turned out there always had been, it was just that we new fish hadn’t been part of the network, but as we got nearer graduating we got to know more people. There were farewell parties. There were welcome-back parties, but not nearly as many of those. Even when crews did come back, there was not always any reason to celebrate. Sometimes they had been gone so long they had lost touch with all their friends. Sometimes, when they had hit fairly lucky, they didn’t want anything but to get off Gateway on the way home. And sometimes, of course, they couldn’t have a party because parties aren’t permitted in the intensive care rooms at Terminal Hospital.

It wasn’t all parties; we had to study. By the end of the course we were supposed to be fully expert in ship-handling, survival techniques and the appraisal of trade goods. Well, I wasn’t. Sheri was even worse off than I. She took to the ship-handling all right, and she had a shrewd eye for detail that would help her a lot in appraising the worth of anything she might find on a prospecting trip. But she didn’t seem able to get the survival course through her head.

Studying with her for the final examinations was misery:

“Okay,” I’d tell her, “this one’s a type-F star with a planet with point-eight surface G, a partial pressure of oxygen of 130 millibars, mean temperature at the equator plus forty Celsius. So what do you wear to the party?”

She said accusingly, “You’re giving me an easy one. That’s practically Earth.”

“So what’s the answer, Sheri?”

She scratched reflectively under her breast. Then she shook her head impatiently. “Nothing. I mean, I wear an airsuit on the way down, but once I get to the surface I could walk around in a bikini.”

“Shithead! You’d be maybe dead in twelve hours. Earth-normal conditions means there’s a good chance of an Earth normal-type biology. Which means pathogens that could eat you up.”

“So all right—” she hunched her shoulders, “so I’d keep the suit until, uh, I tested for pathogens.”

“And how do you do that?”

“I use the fucking kit, stupid!” She added hastily, before I could say anything, “I mean I take the, let’s see, the Basic Metabolism disks out of the freezer and activate them. I stay in orbit for twenty-four hours until they’re ripe, then when I’m down on the surface I expose them and take readings with my, uh, with my C-44.”

“C-33. There’s no such thing as a C-44.”

“So all right. Oh, and also I pack a set of antigen boosters, so if there’s a marginal problem with some sort of microorganism I can give myself a booster shot and get temporary immunity.”

“I guess that’s all right, so far,” I said doubtfully. In practice, of course, she wouldn’t need to remember all that. She would read the directions on the packages, or play her course tapes, or better still, she would be out with somebody who had been out before and would know the ropes. But there was also the chance that something unforeseen would go wrong and she would be on her own resources, not to mention the fact that she had a final test to take and pass. “What else, Sheri?”

“The usual, Rob! Do I have to run through the whole list? All right. Radio-relay; spare powerpack; the geology kit; ten-day food ration—and no, I don’t eat anything I find on the planet at all, not even if there’s a McDonald’s hamburger stand right next to the ship. And an extra lipstick and some sanitary napkins.”

I waited. She smiled prettily, outwaiting me.

“What about weapons?”

“Weapons?”

“Yes, God damn it! If it’s nearly Earth normal, what are the chances of life being there?”

“Oh, yes. Let’s see. Well, of course, if I need them I take them. But, wait a minute, first I sniff for methane in the atmosphere with the spectrometer reading from orbit. If there’s no methane signature there’s no life, so I don’t have to worry.”

“There’s no mammalian life, and you do have to worry. What about insects? Reptiles? Dluglatches?”

“Dluglatches?”

“A word I just made up to describe a kind of life we’ve never heard of that doesn’t generate methane in its gut but eats people.”

“Oh, sure. All right, I’ll take a sidearm and twenty rounds of soft-nosed ammo. Give me another one.”

And so we went on. When we first started rehearsing each other what we usually said at a point like that was either, “Well, I won’t have to worry, because you’ll be there with me anyway,” or “Kiss me, you fool.” But we’d kind of stopped saying that.

In spite of it all, we graduated. All of us.

We gave ourselves a graduation party, Sheri and me, and all four of the Forehands, and the others who had come up from Earth with us and the six or seven who had appeared from one place or another. We didn’t invite any outsiders, but our teachers weren’t outsiders. They all showed up to wish us well. Klara came in late, drank a quick drink, kissed us all, male and female, even the Finnish kid with the language block who’d had to take all his instruction on tapes. He was going to have a problem. They have instruction tapes for every language you ever heard of, and if they don’t happen to have your exact dialect they run a set through the translating computer from the nearest analogue. That’s enough to get you through the course, but after that the problem starts. You can’t reasonably expect to be accepted by a crew that can’t talk to you. His block kept him from learning any other language, and there was not a living soul on Gateway who spoke Finnish.

We took over the tunnel three doors in each direction past our own, Sheri’s, the Forehands’ and mine. We danced and sang until it was late enough for some of us to begin to drop off, and then we dialed in the list of open launches on the PV screen. Full of beer and weed, we cut cards for first pick and I won.

Something happened inside my head. I didn’t sober up, really. That wasn’t it. I was still feeling cheerful and sort of warm all over and open to all personality signals that were coming in. But a part of my mind opened up and a pair of clear-seeing eyes peered out at the future and made a judgment. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’ll pass my chance right now. Sess, you’re number two; you take your pick.”

“Thirty-one-oh-nine,” he said promptly; all the Forehands had made up their minds in family meeting, long since. “Thanks, Rob.”

I gave him a carefree, drunken wave. He didn’t really owe me anything. That was a One, and I wouldn’t have taken a One for any price. For that matter, there wasn’t anything on the board I liked. I grinned at Klara and winked; she looked serious for a minute, then winked back, but still looked serious. I knew she realized what I had come to understand: all these launches were rejects. The best ones had been snapped up as soon as they were announced by returnees and permanent-party.

Sheri had drawn fifth pick, and when it came her turn she looked directly at me. “I’m going to take that Three if I can fill it up. What about it, Rob? Are you going to come or not?”

I chuckled. “Sheri,” I said, sweetly reasonable, “there’s not a returnee that wants it. It’s an armored job. You don’t know where the hell it might be going. And there’s far too much green in the guidance panel to suit me.” (Nobody really knew what the colors meant, of course, but there was a superstition in the school that a lot of green meant a superdangerous mission.)

“It’s the only open Three, and there’s a bonus.”

“Not me, honey. Ask Klara; she’s been around a long time and I respect her judgment.”

“I’m asking you, Rob.”

“No. I’ll wait for something better.”

“I’m not waiting, Rob. I already talked to Willa Forehand, and she’s agreeable. If worse comes to worst we’ll fill it out with—anybody at all,” she said, looking at the Finnish kid, smiling drunkenly to himself as he stared at the launch board. “But—you and I did say we were going out together.”

I shook my head.

“So stay here and rot,” she flared. “Your girlfriend’s just as scared as you are!”

Those sober eyes inside my skull looked at Klara, and the frozen, unmoving expression on her face; and, wonderingly, I realized Sheri was right. Klara was like me. We were both afraid to go.

11

I say to Sigfrid, “This isn’t going to be a very productive session, I’m afraid. I’m just plain exhausted. Sexually, if you know what I mean.”

“I certainly do know what you mean, Rob.”

“So I don’t have much to talk about.”

“Do you remember any dreams?”

I squirm on the couch. As it happens, I do remember one or two. I say, “No.” Sigfrid is always after me to tell him my dreams. I don’t like it.

When he first suggested it I told him I didn’t dream very often. He said patiently, “I think you know, Rob, that everyone dreams. You may not remember the dreams in the waking state. But you can, if you try.”

“No, I can’t. You can. You’re a machine.”

“I know I’m a machine, Rob, but we’re talking about you. Will you try an experiment?”

“Maybe.”

“It isn’t hard. Keep a pencil and a piece of paper beside your bed. As soon as you wake up, write down what you remember.”

“But I don’t ever remember anything at all about my dreams.”

“I think it’s worth a try, Rob.”

Well, I did. And, you know, I actually did begin to remember my dreams. Little tiny fragments, at first. And I’d write them down, and sometimes I would tell them to Sigfrid and they would make him as happy as anything. He just loved dreams.

Me, I didn’t see much use in it. . . . Well, not at first. But then something happened that made a Christian out of me.

One morning I woke up out of a dream that was so unpleasant and so real that for a few moments I wasn’t sure it wasn’t actual fact, and so awful that I didn’t dare let myself believe it was only a dream. It shook me so much that I began to write it down, as fast as I could, every bit I could remember. Then there was a P-phone call. I answered it; and, do you know, in just the minute I was on the phone, I forgot the whole thing! Couldn’t remember one bit of it. Until I looked at what I had written down, and then it all came back to me.

Well, when I saw Sigfrid a day or two later, I’d forgotten it again! As though it had never happened. But I had saved the piece of paper, and I had to read it to him. That was one of the times when I thought he was most pleased with himself and with me, too. He worried over that dream for the whole hour. He found symbols and meanings in every bit of it. I don’t remember what they were, but I remember that for me it wasn’t any fun at all.

As a matter of fact, do you know what’s really funny? I threw away the paper on the way out of his office. And now I couldn’t tell you what that dream was to save my life.

“I see you don’t want to talk about dreams,” says Sigfrid. “Is there anything you do want to talk about?”

“Not really.”

He doesn’t answer that for a moment, and I know he is just biding his time to outwait me so that I will say something, I don’t know, something foolish. So I say, “Can I ask you a question, Sigfrid?”

“Can’t you always, Rob?” Sometimes I think he’s actually trying to smile. I mean, really smile. His voice sounds like it.

“Well, what I want to know is, what do you do with all the things I tell you?”

“I’m not sure I understand the question, Robbie. If you’re asking what the information storage program is, the answer is quite technical.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” I hesitate, trying to make sure what the question is, and wondering why I want to ask it. I guess it all goes back to Sylvia, who was a lapsed Catholic. I really envied her her church, and let her know I thought she was dumb to have left it, because I envied her the confession. The inside of my head was littered with all these doubts and fears that I couldn’t get rid of. I would have loved to unload them on the parish priest. I could see that you could make quite a nice hierarchical flow pattern, with all the shit from inside my own head flushing into the confessional, where the parish priest flushes it onto the diocesan monsignor (or whoever; I don’t really know much about the Church), and it all winds up with the Pope, who is the settling tank for all the world’s sludge of pain and misery and guilt, until he passes it on by transmitting it directly to God. (I mean, assuming the existence of a God, or at least assuming that there is an address called “God” to which you can send the shit.)

Anyway, the point is that I sort of had a vision of the same system in psychotherapy: local drains going into branch sewers going into community trunk lines treeing out of flesh-and-blood psychiatrists, if you see what I mean. If Sigfrid were a real person, he wouldn’t be able to hold all the misery that’s poured into him. To begin with, he would have his own problems. He would have mine, because that’s how I would get rid of them, by unloading them onto him. He would also have those of all the other unloaders who share the hot couch; and he would unload all that, because he had to, onto the next man up, who shrank him, and so on and so on until they got to—who? The ghost of Sigmund Freud?

But Sigfrid isn’t real. He’s a machine. He can’t feel pain. So where does all that pain and slime go?

I try to explain all that to him, ending with: “Don’t you see, Sigfrid? If I give you my pain and you give it to someone else, it has to end somewhere. It doesn’t feel real to me that it just winds up as magnetic bubbles in a piece of quartz that nobody ever feels.”

“I don’t think it’s profitable to discuss the nature of pain with you, Rob.”

“Is it profitable to discuss whether you’re real or not?”

He almost sighs. “Rob,” he says, “I don’t think it’s profitable to discuss the nature of reality with you, either. I know I’m a machine. You know I’m a machine. What is the purpose in our being here? Are we here to help me?”

“I sometimes wonder,” I say, sulking.

“I don’t think you actually wonder about that. I think you know that you are here to help you, and the way to do it is by trying to make something happen inside you. What I do with the information may be interesting to your curiosity, and it may also provide you with an excuse to spend these sessions on intellectual conversation instead of therapy—”

“Touche, Sigfrid,” I interrupt.

“Yes. But it is what you do with it that makes the difference in how you feel, and whether you function somewhat better or somewhat worse in situations that are important to you. Please concern yourself with the inside of your own head, Rob, not mine.”

I say admiringly, “You sure are one fucking intelligent machine, Sigfrid.”

He says, “I have the impression that what you’re actually saying there is, ‘I hate your fucking guts, Sigfrid.’”

I have never heard him say anything like that before, and it takes me aback, until I remember that as a matter of fact I have said exactly that to him, not once but quite a few times. And that it’s true.

I do hate his guts.

He is trying to help me, and I hate him for it very much. I think about sweet, sexy S. Ya. and how willing she is to do anything I ask her, pretty nearly. I want, a lot, to make Sigfrid hurt.

12

I came back to my room one morning and found the P-phone whining faintly, like a distant, angry mosquito. I punched the message code and found that the assistant personnel director required my presence in her office at ten hundred hours that morning. Well, it was later than that already. I had formed the habit of spending a lot of time, and most nights, with Klara. Her pad was a lot more comfortable than mine. So I didn’t get the message until nearly eleven, and my tardiness in getting to the Corporation personnel offices didn’t help the assistant director’s mood.

She was a very fat woman named Emma Fother. She brushed off my excuses and accused, “You graduated your courses seventeen days ago. You haven’t done a thing since.”

“I’m waiting for the right mission,” I said.

“How long are you going to wait? Your per capita’s paid up for three more days, then what?”

“Well,” I said, almost truthfully, “I was going to come in to see you about that today anyway. I’d like a job here on Gateway.”

“Pshaw.” (I’d never heard anyone say that before, but that’s how it sounded.) “Is that why you came to Gateway, to clean sewers?”

I was pretty sure that was a bluff, because there weren’t that many sewers; there wasn’t enough gravity flow to support them. “The right mission could come along any day.”

“Oh, sure, Rob. You know, people like you worry me. Do you have any idea how important our work here is?”

“Well, I think so—”

“There’s a whole universe out there for us to find and bring home! Gateway’s the only way we can reach it. A person like you, who grew up on the plankton farms—”

“Actually it was the Wyoming food mines.”

“Whatever! You know how desperately the human race needs what we can give them. New technology. New power sources. Food! New worlds to live in.” She shook her head and punched through the sorter on her desk, looking both angry and worried. I supposed that she was check-rated on how many of us idlers and parasites she managed to get to go out, the way we were supposed to, which accounted for her hostility—assuming you could account for her desire to stay on Gateway in the first place. She abandoned the sorter and got up to open a file against the wall. “Suppose I do find you a job,” she said over her shoulder. “The only skill you have that’s any use here is prospecting, and you’re not using that.”

“I’ll take any—almost anything,” I said.

She looked at me quizzically and then returned to her desk. She was astonishingly graceful, considering she had to mass a hundred kilos. Maybe a fat woman’s fantasy of not sagging accounted for her desire to hold this job and stay on Gateway. “You’ll be doing the lowest kind of unskilled labor,” she warned. “We don’t pay much for that. One-eighty a day.”

“I’ll take it!”

“Your per capita has to come out of it. Take that away and maybe twenty dollars a day for toke money, and what do you have left?”

“I could always do odd jobs if I needed more.”

She sighed. “You’re just postponing the day, Rob. I don’t know. Mr. Hsien, the director, keeps a very close watch on job applications. I’ll find it very hard to justify hiring you. And what are you going to do if you get sick and can’t work? Who’ll pay your tax?”

“I’ll go back, I guess.”

“And waste all your training?” She shook her head. “You disgust me, Rob.”

But she punched me out a work ticket that instructed me to report to the crew chief on Level Grand, Sector North, for assignment in plant maintenance.

I didn’t like that interview with Emma Fother, but I had been warned I wouldn’t. When I talked it over with Klara that evening, she told me actually I’d got off light.

“You’re lucky you drew Emma. Old Hsien sometimes keeps people hanging until their tax money’s all gone.”

“Then what?” I got up and sat on the edge of her cot, feeling for my footgloves. “Out the airlock?”

“Don’t make fun, it could conceivably come to that. Hsien’s an old Mao type, very hard on social wastrels.”

“You’re a fine one to talk!”

She grinned, rolled over, and rubbed her nose against my back. “The difference between you and me, Rob,” she said, “is that I have a couple of bucks stashed away from my first mission. It didn’t pay big, but it paid somewhat. Also I’ve been out, and they need people like me for teaching people like you.”

I leaned back against her hip, half turned and put my hand on her, more reminiscently than aggressively. There were certain subjects we didn’t talk much about, but—”Klara?”

“What’s it like, on a mission?”

She rubbed her chin against my forearm for a moment, looking at the holoview of Venus against the wall. “. . . Scary,” she said.

I waited, but she didn’t say any more about it, and that much I already knew. I was scared right there on Gateway. I didn’t have to launch myself on the Heechee Mystery Bus Trip to know what being scared was like, I could feel it already.

“You don’t really have a choice, dear Rob,” she said, almost tenderly, for her.

I felt a sudden rush of anger. “No, I don’t! You’ve exactly described my whole life, Klara. I’ve never had a choice—except once, when I won the lottery and decided to come here. And I’m not sure I made the right decision then.”

She yawned, and rubbed against my arm for a moment. “If we’re through with sex,” she decided, “I want something to eat before I go to sleep. Come on up to the Blue Hell with me and I’ll treat.”

Plant Maintenance was, actually, the maintenance of plants: specifically, the ivy plants that help keep Gateway livable. I reported for duty and, surprise—in fact, nice surprise—my crew boss turned out to be my legless neighbor, Shikitei Bakin.

He greeted me with what seemed like real pleasure. “How nice of you to join us, Robinette,” he said. “I expected you would ship out at once.”

“I will, Shicky, pretty soon. When I see the right launch listed on the board, I’ll know it.”

“Of course.” He left it at that, and introduced me to the other plant maintainers. I didn’t get them straight, except that the girl had had some sort of connection with Professor Hegramet, the hotshot Heecheeologist back home, and the two men had each had a couple of missions already. I didn’t really need to get them straight. We all understood the essential fact about each other without discussion. None of us was quite ready to put our names on the launch roster.

I wasn’t even quite ready to let myself think out why.

Plant Maintenance would have been a good place for thought, though. Shicky put me to work right away, fastening brackets to the Heechee-metal walls with tacky-gunk. That was some kind of specially designed adhesive. It would hold to both the Heechee metal and the ribbed foil of plant boxes, and it did not contain any solvent that would evaporate and contaminate the air. It was supposed to be very expensive. If you got it on you, you just learned to live with it, at least until the skin it was on died and flaked off. If you tried to get it off any other way, you drew blood.

When the day’s quota of brackets were up, we all trooped down to the sewage plant, where we picked up boxes filled with sludge and covered with cellulose film. We settled them onto the brackets, twisted the self-locking nuts to hold them in place, and fitted them with watering tanks. The boxes probably would have weighed a hundred kilos each on Earth, but on Gateway that simply wasn’t a consideration; even the foil they were made of was enough to support them rigidly against the brackets. Then, when we were all done, Shicky himself filled the trays with seedlings, while we went on to the next batch of brackets. It was funny to watch him. He carried trays of the infant ivy plants on straps around his neck, like a cigarette girl’s stock. He held himself at tray level with one hand, and poked seedlings through the film into the sludge with the other.

It was a low-pressure job, it served a useful function (I guess) and it passed the time. Shicky didn’t make us work any too hard. He had set a quota in his mind for a day’s work. As long as we got sixty brackets installed and filled he didn’t care if we goofed off, provided we were inconspicuous about it. Klara would come by to pass the time of day now and then, sometimes with the little girl, and we had plenty of other visitors. And when times were slack and there wasn’t anybody interesting to talk to, one at a time we could wander off for an hour or so. I explored a lot of Gateway I hadn’t seen before, and each day decision was postponed.

We all talked about going out. Almost every day we could hear the thud and vibration as some lander cut itself loose from its dock, pushing the whole ship out to where the Heechee main drive could go into operation. Almost as often we felt the different kind of smaller, quicker shock when some ship returned. In the evenings we went to someone’s parties. My whole class was gone by now, almost. Sheri had shipped out on a Five—I didn’t see her to ask her why she changed her plans and wasn’t sure I really wanted to know; the ship she went on had an otherwise all-male crew. They were German-speaking, but I guess Sheri figured she could get by pretty well without talking much. The last one was Willa Forehand. Klara and I went to Willa’s farewell party and then down to the docks to watch her launch the next morning. I was supposed to be working, but I didn’t think Shicky would mind. Unfortunately, Mr. Hsien was there, too, and I could see that he recognized me.

“Oh, shit,” I said to Klara.

She giggled and took my hand, and we ducked out of the launch area. We strolled away until we came to an up-shaft and lifted to the next level. We sat down on the edge of Lake Superior. “Rob, old stud,” she said, “I doubt he’ll fire you for screwing off one time. Chew you out, probably.”

I shrugged and tossed a chip of filter-pebble into the upcurving lake, which stretched a good two hundred meters up and around the shell of Gateway in front of us. I was feeling tacky, and wondering whether I was reaching the point when the bad vibes about risking nasty death in space were being overtaken by the bad vibes about cowering on Gateway. It’s a funny thing about fear. I didn’t feel it. I knew that the only reason I was staying on was that I was afraid, but it didn’t feel as though I were afraid, only reasonably prudent.

“I think,” I said, watching myself going into the sentence without being sure how it was going to come out, “that I’m going to do it. Want to come along?”

Klara sat up and shook herself. She took a moment before she said, “Maybe. What’ve you got in mind?”

I had nothing in mind. I was only a spectator, watching myself talk myself into something that made my toes curl. But I said, as though I had planned it out for days, “I think it might be a good idea to take a rerun.”

“No deal!” She looked almost angry. “If I go, I go where the real money is.”

That was also where the real danger was, of course. Although even reruns have turned out bad often enough.

The thing about reruns is that you start out with the knowledge that somebody has already flown that trip and made it back, and, not only that, made a find that’s worth following up on. Some of them are pretty rich. There’s Peggy’s World, where the heater coils and the fur come from. There’s Eta Carina Seven, which is probably full of good stuff if you could only get at it. The trouble is, it has had an ice age since the Heechees were last on it. The storms are terrible. Out of five landers, one returned with a full crew, undamaged. One didn’t return at all.

Generally speaking, Gateway doesn’t particularly want you to do a rerun. They will make a cash offer instead of a percentage where the pickings are fairly easy, as on Peggy. What they pay for is not so much trade goods as maps. So you go out there and you spend your time making orbital runs, trying to find the geological anomalies that indicate Heechee digs may be present. You may not land at all. The pay is worth having, but not lavish. You’d have to make at least twenty runs to build up a lifetime stake, if you take the Corporation’s one-pay deal. And if you decide to go on your own, prospecting, you have to pay a share of your profits to the discovery crew, and a cut on what’s left of your share to the Corporation. You wind up with a fraction of what you might get on a virgin find, even if you don’t have a colony already established on the scene to contend with.

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.

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, like 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.

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.

“I wonder,” said Klara, smiling to show that it was only an abstract point she was putting to us, “if that might not be what happened to some of the nonreturn missions.”

“It is an absolute statistical certainty,” said Francy, smiling back to show that he agreed to the rules of the game. He had been practicing his English, which was pretty good to start with, and now he was almost accent-free. He also possessed German, Russian, and fair amounts of the other romance languages to go with his Portuguese, as we had discovered when we tried some of our language-tape conversation on each other and found he understood us better than we understood ourselves. “Nevertheless, people go.”

Klara and I were silent for a moment, and then she laughed. “Some do,” she said.

I cut in quickly, “It sounds as if you want to go yourself, Francy.”

“Have you ever doubted it?”

“Well, yes, actually I have. I mean, you’re in the Brazilian Navy. You can’t just take off, can you?”

He corrected me: “I can take off at any time. I simply cannot go back to Brazil after that.”

“And it’s worth that to you?”

“It’s worth anything,” he told me.

“Even—” I pressed, “if there’s the risk of not coming back, or of getting messed up like the return today?” That had been a Five that had landed on a planet with some sort of plant life like poison ivy. It had been a bad one, we had heard.

“Yes, of course,” he said.

Klara was getting restless. “I think,” she said, “I want to go to sleep now.”

There was some extra message in the tone of her voice. I looked at her and said, “I’ll walk you back to your room.”

“That’s not necessary, Rob.”

“I’ll do it anyhow,” I said, ignoring the message. “Good night, Francy. See you next week.”

Klara was already halfway to the downshaft, and I had to hurry to catch up to her. I caught the cable and called down to her, “If you really want me to, I’ll go back to my own place.”

She didn’t look up, but she didn’t say that was what she wanted, either, so I got off at her level and followed her to her rooms. Kathy was sound asleep in the outer room, Hywa drowsing over a holodisk in our bedroom. Klara sent the maid home and went in to make sure the child was comfortable. I sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for her.

“Maybe I’m premenstrual,” Klara said when she came back. “I’m sorry. I just feel edgy.”

“I’ll go if you want me to.”

“Jesus, Rob, quit saying that!” Then she sat down next to me and leaned against me so that I would put my arm around her. “Kathy’s so sweet,” she said after a moment, almost wistfully.

“You’d like to have one of your own, wouldn’t you?”

“I will have one of my own.” She leaned back, pulling me with her. “I wish I knew when, that’s all. I need a lot more money than I have to give a kid a decent life. And younger.”

We lay there for a moment, and then I said into her hair, “That’s what I want, too, Klara.”

She sighed. “Do you think I don’t know that?” Then she tensed and sat up. “Who’s that?”

Somebody was scrabbling at the door. It wasn’t locked; we never did that. But nobody ever came in without being invited, either, and this time someone did.

“Sterling!” Klara said, surprised. She remembered her manners: “Rob, this is Sterling Francis, Kathy’s father. Rob Broadhead.”

“Hello,” he said. He was much older than I’d thought that little girl’s father would be, at least fifty, and looking very much older and more weary than seemed natural. “Klara,” he said, “I’m taking Kathy back home on the next ship. I think I’ll take her tonight, if you don’t mind. I don’t want her to hear from somebody else.”

Klara reached out for my hand without looking at me. “Hear what?”

“About her mother.” Francis rubbed his eyes, then said, “Oh, didn’t you know? Jan’s dead. Her ship came back a few hours ago. All four of them in the lander got into some kind of fungus; they swelled up and died. I saw her body. She looks—” He stopped. “The one I’m really sorry for,” he said, “is Annalee. She stayed in orbit while the others went down, and she brought Jan’s body back. I guess she was kind of crazy. Why bother? It was too late to matter to Jan. . . . Well, anyway. She could only bring two of them, that was all the room in the freezer, and of course her rations—” He stopped again, and this time he didn’t seem able to talk anymore.

So I sat on the edge of the bed while Klara helped him wake the child and bundle her up to take her back to his own rooms. While they were out, I dialed a couple of displays on the PV, and studied them very carefully. By the time Klara came back I had turned off the PV and was sitting cross-legged on the bed, thinking hard.

“Christ,” she said glumly. “If this night isn’t a bummer.” She sat down at the far corner of the bed. “I’m not sleepy after all,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go up and win a few bucks at the roulette table.”

“Let’s not,” I said. I’d sat next to her for three hours the night before, while she first won ten thousand dollars and then lost twenty. “I have a better idea. Let’s ship out.”

She turned full around to look at me, so quickly that she floated up off the bed for a moment. “What?”

“Let’s ship out.”

She closed her eyes for a moment and, without opening them, said, “When?”

“Launch 29-40. It’s a Five, and there’s a good crew: Sam Kahane and his buddies. They’re all recovered now, and they need two more to fill the ship.”

She stroked her eyelids with her fingertips, then opened them and looked at me. “Well, Rob,” she said, “you do have interesting suggestions.” There were shades over the Heechee-metal walls to cut down the light for sleeping, and I had drawn them; but even in the filtered dimness I could see how she looked. Frightened. Still, what she said was: “They’re not bad guys. How do you get along with gays?”

“I leave them alone, they leave me alone. Especially if I’ve got you.”

“Um,” she said, and then she crawled over to me, wrapped her arms around me, pulled me down and buried her head in my neck. “Why not?” she said, so softly that I was not at first sure I had heard her.

When I was sure, the fear hit me. There had always been the chance she would say no. I would have been off the hook. I could feel myself shaking, but I managed to say, “Then we’ll file for it in the morning?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, her voice muffled. I could feel her trembling as much as I was. “Get on the phone, Rob. We’ll file for it now. Before we change our minds.”

The next day I quit my job, packed my belongings into the suitcases I had brought them in, and turned them over for safekeeping to Shicky, who looked wistful. Klara quit the school and fired her maid—who looked seriously worried—but didn’t bother about packing. She had quite a lot of money left, Klara did. She prepaid the rent on both her rooms and left everything just the way it was.

We had a farewell party, of course. We went through it without my remembering a single person who was there.

And then, all of a sudden, we were squeezing into the lander, climbing down into the capsule while Sam Kahane methodically checked the settings. We locked ourselves into our cocoons. We started the automatic sequencers.

And then there was a lurch, and a falling, floating sensation before the thrusters cut in, and we were on our way.

13

“Good morning, Rob,” says Sigfrid, and I stop in the door of the room, suddenly and subliminally worried.

“What’s the matter?”

“There’s nothing the matter, Rob. Come in.”

“You’ve changed things around,” I say accusingly.

“That’s right, Robbie. Do you like the way the room looks?”

I study it. The throw pillows are gone from the floor. The nonobjective paintings are off the wall. Now he’s got a series of holopictures of space scenes, and mountains and seas. The funniest thing of all is Sigfrid himself: he is speaking to me out of a dummy that’s sitting back in a corner of the room, holding a pencil in its hands, looking up at me from behind dark glasses.

“You’ve turned out very camp,” I say. “What’s the reason for all this?”

His voice sounds as though he were smiling benevolently, although there is no change in the expression on the face of the dummy. “I just thought you’d enjoy a change, Rob.”

I take a few steps into the room and stop again. “You took the mat away!”

“Don’t need it, Rob. As you see, there’s a new couch. That’s very traditional, isn’t it?”

He coaxes, “Why don’t you just lie down on it? See how it feels.”

“Um.” But I stretch out on it cautiously. How it feels is strange; and I don’t like it, probably because this particular room represents something serious to me and changing it around makes me nervous. “The mat had straps,” I complain.

“So does the couch, Rob. You can pull them out of the sides. Just feel around . . . there. Isn’t that better?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“I think,” he says softly, “that you should let me decide whether for therapeutic reasons some sort of change is in order, Bob.”

I sit up. “And that’s another thing, Sigfrid! Make up your flicking mind what you’re going to call me. My name isn’t Rob, or Robbie, or Bob. It’s Robinette.”

“I know that, Robbie—”

“You’re doing it again!”

A pause, then, silkily, “I think you should allow me the choice of the form of address I prefer, Robbie.”

“Um.” I have an endless supply of tbose noncommittal nonwords. In fact, I would like to conduct the whole session without revealing any more than that. What I want is for Sigfrid to reveal. I want to know why he calls me by different names at different times. I want to know what he finds significant in what I say. I want to know what he really thinks of me. . . if a clanking piece of tin and plastic can think, I mean.

Of course, what I know and Sigfrid doesn’t is that my good friend S. Ya. has practically promised to let me play a little joke on him. I am looking forward to that a lot.

“Is there anything you’d like to tell me, Rob?”

“No.”

He waits. I am feeling somewhat hostile and noncommunicative. I think part of it is because I am so much looking forward to the time when I can play a little trick on Sigfrid, but the other part is because he has changed around the auditing room. That’s the kind of thing they used to do to me when I had my psychotic episode in Wyoming. Sometimes i’d come in for a session and they’d have a hologram of my mother, for Christ’s sake. It looked exactly like her, but it didn’t smell like her or feel like her; in fact, you couldn’t feel it at all, it was only light. Sometimes they’d have me come in there in the dark and something warm and cuddly would take me in its arms and whisper to me. I didn’t like that. I was crazy, but I wasn’t that crazy.

Sigfrid is still waiting, but I know that he won’t wait forever. Pretty soon he’s going to start asking me questions, probably about my dreams.

“Have you had any dreams since I last saw you, Rob?”

I yawn. The whole subject is very boring. “I don’t think so. Nothing important, I’m sure.”

“I’d like to hear what they were. Even a fragment.”

“You’re a pest, Sigfrid, do you know that?”

“I’m sorry you feel I’m a pest, Rob.”

“Well. . . I don’t think I can remember even a fragment.”

“Try, please.”

“Oh, cripes. Well.” I get comfortable on the couch. The only dream I can think of is absolutely trivial, and I know there’s nothing in it that relates to anything traumatic or pivotal, but if I told him that he would get angry. So I say obediently, “I was in a car of a long railroad train. There were a number of cars hooked up together, and you could go from one to the other. They were full of people I knew. There was a woman, a sort of motherly type who coughed a lot, and another woman who—well, she looked rather strange. At first I thought she was a man. She was dressed in a sort of utility coverall, so you couldn’t tell from that whether she was male or female, and she had very masculine, bushy eyebrows. But I was sure she was a woman.”

“Did you talk to either of these women, Rob?”

“Please don’t interrupt, Sigfrid, you make me lose my train of thought.”

“I’m sorry, Rob.”

I go on with the dream: “I left them—no, I didn’t talk to them. I went back into the next car. That was the last one on the train. It was coupled to the rest of the train with a sort of—let’s see, I don’t know how to describe it. It was like one of those expanding gatefold things, made out of metal, you know? And it stretched.”

I stop for a moment, mostly out of boredom. I feel like apologizing for having such a dumb, irrelevant dream. “You say the metal connector stretched, Rob?” Sigfrid prompts me.

“That’s right, it stretched. So of course the car I was in kept dropping back, farther and farther behind the others. All I could see was the taillight, which was sort of in the shape of her face, looking at me. She—” I lose the thread of what I am saying. I try to get back on the track: “I guess I felt as though it was going to be difficult to get back to her, as if she—I’m sorry, Sigfrid, I don’t remember clearly what happened around there. Then I woke up. And,” I finish virtuously, “I wrote it all down as soon as I could, just the way you tell me to.”

“I appreciate that, Rob,” Sigfrid says gravely. He waits for me to go on.

I shift restlessly. “This couch isn’t nearly as comfortable as the mat,” I complain.

“I’m sorry about that, Rob. You said you recognized them?”

“Who?”

“The two women on the train, that you were getting farther and farther away from.”

“Oh. No, I see what you mean. I recognized them in the dream. Really I have no idea who they were.”

“Did they look like anyone you knew?”

“Not a bit. I wondered about that myself.”

Sigfrid says, after a moment, which I happen to know is his way of giving me a chance to change my mind about an answer he doesn’t like, “You mentioned one of the women was a motherly type who coughed—”

“Yes. But I didn’t recognize her. I think in a way she did look familiar, but, you know, the way people in a dream do.”

He says patiently, “Can you think of any woman you’ve ever known who was motherly and coughed a lot?”

I laugh out loud at that. “Dear friend Sigfrid! I assure you the women I know are not at all the motherly type! And they are all on at least Major Medical. They’re not likely to cough.”

“I see. Are you sure, Robbie?”

“Don’t be a pain in the ass, Sigfrid,” I say, angry because the crappy couch is hard to get comfortable on, and also because I need to go to the bathroom, and this situation looks to be prolonging itself indefinitely.

“I see.” And after a moment he picks up on something else, as I know he is going to: he’s a pigeon, Sigfrid is, pecking at everything I throw out before him, one piece at a time. “How about the other woman, the one with the bushy eyebrows?”

“What about her?”

“Did you ever know any girl who had bushy eyesbrows?”

“Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, I’ve gone to bed with five hundred girls! Some of them had every kind of eyebrows you ever heard of.”

“No particular one?”

“Not that I can think of offhand.”

“Not offhand, Rob. Please make an effort to remember.”

It is easier to do what he wants than to argue with him about it, so I make the effort. “All right, let’s see. Ida Mae? No. Sue-Ann? No. S. Ya.? No. Gretchen? No—well, to tell you the truth, Sigfrid, Gretchen was so blond I couldn’t really tell you if she had eyebrows at all.”

“Those are girls you’ve known recently, aren’t they, Rob? Perhaps someone longer ago?”

“You mean way back?” I reflect deeply as far back as I can go, all the way to the food mines and Sylvia. I laugh out loud. “You know something, Sigfrid? It’s funny, but I can hardly remember what Sylvia looked like—oh, wait a minute. No. Now I remember. She used to pluck her eyebrows almost altogether away, and then pencil them in. The reason I know is one time when we were in bed together we drew pictures on each other with her eyebrow pencil.”

I can almost hear him sigh. “The cars,” he says, pecking at another bright bit. “How would you describe them?”

“Like any railroad train. Long. Narrow. Moving pretty fast through the tunnel.”

“Long and narrow, moving through a tunnel, Rob?”

I lose my patience at that. He is so fucking transparent! “Come on, Sigfrid! You don’t get away with any corny penis symbols with me.”

“I’m not trying to get away with anything, Rob.”

“Well, you’re being an asshole about this whole dream, I swear you are. There’s nothing in it. The train was just a train. I don’t know who the women were. And listen, while we’re on the subject, I really hate this goddamned couch. For the kind of money my insurance is paying you, you can do a lot better than this!”

He has really got me angry now. He keeps trying to get back to the dream, but I am determined to get a fair shake from him for the insurance company’s money, and by the time I leave he has promised to redecorate before my next visit.

As I go out that day I feel pretty pleased with myself. He is really doing me a lot of good. I suppose it is because I am getting the courage to stand up to him, and perhaps all this nonsense has been helpful to me in that way, or in some way, even if it is true that some of his ideas are pretty crazy.

14

I struggled out of my sling to get out of the way of Klara’s knee and bumped into Sam Kahane’s elbow. “Sorry,” he said, not even looking around to see who he was sorry about. His hand was still on the go-teat, although we were ten minutes on our way. He was studying the flickering colors on the Heechee instrument board, and the only time he looked away was when he glanced at the viewsereen overhead.

I sat up, feeling very queasy. It had taken me weeks to get used to Gateway’s virtual absence of gravity. The fluctuating G forces in the capsule were something else. They were very light, but they didn’t stay the same for more than a minute at a time, and my inner ear was complaining.

I squeezed out of the way into the kitchen area, with one eye on the door to the toilet. Ham Tayeh was still in there. If he didn’t get out pretty soon my situation was going to become critical. Klara laughed, reached out from her sling, and put an arm around me. “Poor Robbie,” she said. “And we’re just beginning.”

I swallowed a pill and recklessly lit a cigarette and concentrated on not throwing up. I don’t know how much it was actually motion sickness. A lot of it was fear. There is something very fright-citing about knowing that there is nothing between you and instant, ugly death except a thin skin of metal made by some peculiar strangers half a million years ago. And about knowing that you’re committed to go somewhere over which you no longer have any control, which may turn out to be extremely unpleasant.

I crawled back into my sling, stubbed out the cigarette, closed my eyes, and concentrated on making the time pass.

There was going to be a lot of it to pass. The average trip lasts maybe forty-five days each way. It doesn’t matter as much as you might think, how far you are going. Ten light-years or ten thousand: it matters some, but not linearly. They tell me that the ships are continually accelerating and accelerating the rate of acceleration the whole time. That delta isn’t linear, either, or even exponential, in any way that anybody can figure out. You hit the speed of light very quickly, in less than an hour. Then it seems to take quite a while before you exceed it by very much. Then they really pick up speed.

You can tell all this (they say) by watching the stars displayed on the overhead Heechee navigation screen (they say). Inside the first hour the stars all begin to change color and swim around. When you pass c you know it because they’ve all clustered in the center of the screen, which is in front of the ship as it ifies.

Actually the stars haven’t moved. You’re catching up with the light emitted by sources behind you, or to one side. The photons that are hitting the front viewer were emitted a day, or a week, or a hundred years ago. After a day or two they stop even looking like stars. There’s just a sort of mottled gray surface. It looks a little like a holofilm held up to the light, but you can make a virtual image out of a holofllm with a flashlight and nobody has ever made anything but pebbly gray out of what’s on the Heechee screens.

By the time I finally got into the toilet, the emergency didn’t seem as emergent; and when I came out Klara was alone in the capsule, checking star images with the theodolitic camera. She turned to regard me, then nodded. “You’re looking a little less green,” she said approvingly.

“I’ll live; Where are the boys?”

“Where would they be? They’re down in the lander. Dred thinks maybe we should split things up so you and I get the lander to ourselves part of the time while they’re up here, then we come up here and they take it.”

“Hmm.” That sounded pretty nice; actually, I’d been wondering how we were going to work out anything like privacy. “Okay. What do you want me to do now?”

She reached over and gave me an absentminded kiss. “Just stay out of the way. Know what? We look like we’re going almost toward straight Galactic North.”

I received that information with the weighty consideration of ignorance. Then I said, “Is that good?”

She grinned. “How can you tell?” I lay back and watched her. If she was as frightened as I was, and I had little doubt she was, she certainly was not letting it show.

I began wondering what was toward Galactic North—and, more important, how long it would take us to get there.

The shortest trip to another star system on record was eighteen days. That was Barnard’s Star, and it was a bust, nothing there. The longest, or anyway the longest anybody knows of so far—who knows how many ships containing dead prospectors are still on their way back from, maybe, M-31 in Andromeda? -- was a hundred and seventy-five days each way. They did come back dead. Hard to tell where they were. The pictures they took didn’t show much, and the prospectors themselves, of course, were no longer in condition to say.

When you start out it’s pretty scary even for a veteran. You know you’re accelerating. You don’t know how long the acceleration will last. When you hit turnaround you can tell. First thing, you know formally because that golden coil in every Heechee ship flickers a little bit. (No one knows why.) But you know that you’re turning around even without looking, because the little pseudo-grav that had been dragging you toward the back of the ship now starts dragging you toward the front. Bottom becomes top.

Why didn’t the Heechee just turn their ships around in midflight, so as to use the same propulsive thrust for both acceleration and deceleration? I wouldn’t know. You’d have to be a Heechee to know that.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that all their viewing equipment seems to be in front. Maybe it’s because the front part of the ship is always heavily armored, even in the lightweight ships against, I guess, the impact of stray molecules of gas or dust. But some of the bigger ships, a few Threes and almost all the Fives, are armored all over. They don’t turn around either.

So, anyway, when the coil flickers and you feel the turnaround, you know you’ve done one-quarter of your actual travel time. Not necessarily a quarter of your total out-time, of course. How long you stay at your destination is another matter entirely. You make up your own mind about that. But you’ve gone half of the automatically controlled trip out.

So you multiply the number of days elapsed so far by four, and if that number is less than the number of days your life-support capability is good for, then you know that at least you don’t have to starve to death. The difference between the two numbers is how long you can hang around at destination.

Your basic ration, food, water, air replenishment, is for two hundred fifty days. You can stretch it to three hundred without much trouble (you just come back skinny, and maybe with a few deficiency diseases). So if you get up to sixty or sixty-five days on the outbound leg without turnaround, then you know you may be having a problem, and you begin eating lighter. If you get up to eighty or ninety, then your problem solves itself, because you don’t have any options anymore, you’re going to die before you get back. You could try changing the course settings. But that’s just another way of dying, as far as can be told from what the survivors say.

Presumably the Heechee could change course when they wanted to, but how they did it is one of those great unanswered questions about the Heechee, like why did they tidy everything up before they left? Or what did they look like? Or where did they go?

There used to be a jokey kind of book they sold at the fairs when I was a kid. It was called Everything We Know About the Heechee. It had a hundred and twenty-eight pages, and they were all blank.

If Sam and Dred and Mohamad were gay, and I had no reason to doubt it, they didn’t show much of it in the first few days. They followed their own interests. Reading. Listening to music tapes with earphones. Playing chess and, when they could talk Klara and me into it, Chinese poker. We didn’t play for money, we played for shift time. (After a couple of days Klara said it was more like winning to lose, because if you lost you had more to occupy your time.) They were quite benignly tolerant of Klara and me, the oppressed heterosexual minority in the dominantly homosexual culture that occupied our ship, and gave us the lander an exact fifty percent of the time even though we comprised only forty percent of the population.

We got along. It was good that we did. We were living in each other’s shadow and stink every minute.

The inside of a Heechee ship, even a Five, is not much bigger than an apartment kitchen. The lander gives you a little extra space—add on the equivalent of a fair-sized closet—but on the outleg at least that’s usually filled with supplies and equipment. And from that total available cubage, say forty-two or forty-three cubic meters, subtract what else goes into it besides me and thee and the other prospectors.

When you’re in tau space, you have a steady low thrust of acceleration. It isn’t really acceleration, it is only a reluctance of the atoms of your body to exceed c, and it can as well be described as friction as gravity. But it feels like a little gravity. You feel as though you weighed about two kilos.

This means you need something to rest in when you are resting, and so each person in your crew has a personal folding sling that opens out and wraps around you to sleep in, or folds to become a sort of a chair. Add to that each person’s own personal space: cupboards for tapes and disks and clothing (you don’t wear much of that); for toilet articles; for pictures of the near and dear (if any); for whatever you have elected to bring, up to your total allowance of weight and bulk (75 kilograms, % of a cubic meter); and you have a certain amount of crowding already.

Add onto that the original Heechee equipment of the ship. Three-quarters of that you will never use. Most of it you wouldn’t know how to use if you had to; what you do with it, most of all, is leave it alone. But you can’t remove it. Heechee machinery is integrally designed. If you amputate a piece of it, it dies.

Perhaps if we knew how to heal the wound we could take out some of the junk and the ship would operate anyway. But we don’t, and so it stays: the great diamond-shaped golden box that explodes if you try to open it; the flimsy spiral of golden tubing that, from time to time, glows, and even more often, becomes unneighborly hot (no one knows why, exactly) and so on. It all stays there, and you bump against it all the time.

Add on to that the human equipment. The spacesuits: one apiece, fitted to your form and figure. The photographic equipment. The toilet and bath installations. The food-preparing section. The waste disposers. The test kits, the weapons, the drills, the sample boxes, the entire rig that you take down to the surface of the planet with you, if you happen to be lucky enough to reach a planet you can land on.

What you have left is not very much. It is a little like living for weeks on end under the hood of a very large truck, with the engine going, and with four other people competing for space.

After the first two days I developed an unreasoning prejudice against Ham Tayeh. He was too big. He took more than his fair share.

To be truthful, Ham wasn’t even as tall as I was, though he weighed more. But I didn’t mind the amount of space I took up. I only minded when other people got in the way of it. Sam Kahane was a better size, no more than a hundred and sixty centimeters, with stiff black beard and coarse crinkled hair all up his abdomen over his cache-sexe to his chest, and all up and down his back as well. I didn’t think of Sam as violating my living space until I found a long, black beard hair in my food. Ham at least was almost hairless, with a soft golden skin that made him look like a Jordanian harem eunuch. (Did the Jordanian kings have eunuchs in their harems? Did they have harems? Ham didn’t seem to know much about that; his parents had lived in New Jersey for three generations.)

I even found myself contrasting Klara with Sheri, who was at least two sizes smaller. (Not usually. Usually Klara was just right.) And Dred Frauenglass, who came with Sam’s set, was a gentle, thin young man who didn’t talk much and seemed to take up less room than anyone else.

I was the virgin in the group, and everybody took turns showing me how to do what little we had to do. You have to make the routine photographic and spectrometer readings. Keep a tape of readouts from the Heechee control panel, where there are constant minute variations in hue and intensity from the colored lights. (They still keep studying them, hoping to understand what they mean.) Snap and analyze the spectra of the tau-space stars in the viewscreen. And all that put together takes, oh, maybe, two manhours a day. The household tasks of preparing meals and cleaning up take about another two.

So you have used up some four man-hours out of each day for the five of you, in which you have collectively something like eighty man-hours to use up.

I’m lying. That’s not really what you do with your time. What you do with your time is wait for turnaround.

Three days, four days, a week; and I became conscious that there was a building tension that I didn’t share. Two weeks, and I knew what it was, because I was feeling it, too. We were all waiting for it to happen. When we went to sleep our last look was at the golden spiral to see if miraculously it had flickered alight. When we woke up our first thought was whether the ceiling had become the floor. By the third week we were all definitely edgy. Ham showed it the most, plump, golden-skinned Ham with the jolly genie’s face:

“Let’s play some poker, Rob.”

“No, thanks.”

“Come on, Rob. We need a fourth.” (In Chinese poker you deal out the whole deck, thirteen cards to each player. You can’t play it any other way.)

“I don’t want to.”

And suddenly furious: “Piss on you! You’re not worth a snake’s fart as crew, now you won’t even play cards!”

And then he would sit cutting the cards moodily for half an hour at a time, as though it were a skill he needed to perfect for his life’s sake. And, come right down to it, it almost was. Because figure it out for yourself. Suppose you’re in a Five and you pass seventy-five days without turnaround. Right away you know that you’re in trouble: the rations won’t support five people for more than three hundred days.

But they might support four.

Or three. Or two. Or one.

At that point it has become clear that at least one person is not going to come back from the trip alive, and what most crews do is start cutting the cards. Loser politely cuts his throat. If loser is not polite, the other four give him etiquette lessons.

A lot of ships that went out as Fives have come back as Threes. A few come back as Ones.

So we made the time pass, not easily and certainly not fast.

Sex was a sovereign anodyne for a while, and Klara and I spent hours on end wrapped in each other’s arms, drowsing off for a while and waking to wake the other to sex again. I suppose the boys did much the same; it was not long before the lander began to smell like the locker room in a boys’ gym. Then we began seeking solitude, all five of us. Well, there wasn’t enough solitude on the ship to split five ways, but we did what we could; by common consent we began letting one of us have the lander to himself (or herself) for an hour or two at a time. While I was there Klara was tolerated in the capsule. While Klara was there I usually played cards with the boys. While one of them was there the other two kept us company. I have no idea what the others did with their solo time; what I did with mine was mostly stare into space. I mean that literally: I looked out the lander ports at absolute blackness. There was nothing to see, but it was better than seeing what I had grown infinitely tired of seeing inside the ship.

Then, after a while, we began developing our own routines. I played my tapes, Dred watched his pornodisks, Ham unrolled a flexible piano keyboard and played electronic music into earplugs (even so, some of it leaked out if you listened hard, and I got terribly, terribly sick of Bach, Palestrina and Mozart). Sam Kahane gently organized us into classes, and we spent a lot of time humoring him, discussing the nature of neutron stars, black holes and Seyfert galaxies, when we were not reviewing test procedures before landing on a new world. The good thing about that was that we managed not to hate each other for half an hour at a time. The rest of the time—well, yes, usually we hated each other. I could not stand Ham Tayeh’s constant shuffling of the cards. Dred developed an unreasoning hostility toward my occasional cigarette. Sam’s armpits were a horror, even in the festering reek of the inside of the capsule, against which the worst of Gateway’s air would have seemed a rose garden. And Klara—well, Klara had this bad habit. She liked asparagus. She had brought four kilos of dehydrated foods with her, just for variety and for something to do; and although she shared them with me, and sometimes with the others, she insisted on eating asparagus now and then all by herself. Asparagus makes your urine smell funny. It is not a romantic thing to know when your darling has been eating asparagus by the change in air quality in the common toilet.

And yet—she was my darling, all right, she really was. We had not just been screwing in those endless hours in the lander; we had been talking. I have never known the inside of anyone’s head a fraction as well as I came to know Klara’s. I had to love her. I could not help it, and I could not stop. Ever.

On the twenty-third day I was playing with Ham’s electronic piano when I suddenly felt seasick. The fluctuating gray force, that I had come hardly to notice, was abruptly intensifying.

I looked up and met Klara’s eyes. She was timorously, almost weepily smiling. She pointed, and all up through the sinuous curves of the spiral of glass, golden sparks were chasing themselves like bright minnows in a stream.

We grabbed each other and held on, laughing, as space swooped around us and bottom became top. We had reached turnaround. And we had margin to spare.

15

Sigfrid’s office is of course under the Bubble, like anybody else’s. It can’t be too hot or too cold. But sometimes it feels that way. I say to him, “Christ, it’s hot in here. Your air conditioner is malfunctioning.”

“I don’t have an air conditioner, Robbie,” he says patiently. “Getting back to your mother—”

“Screw my mother,” I say. “Screw yours, too.”

There is a pause. I know what his circuits are thinking, and I feel I will regret that impetuous remark. So I add quickly, “I mean, I’m really uncomfortable, Sigfrid. It’s hot in here.”

“You are hot in here,” he corrects me.

“What?”

“My sensors indicate that your temperature goes up almost a degree whenever we talk about certain subjects: your mother, the woman Gelle-Klara Moynlin, your first trip, your third trip, Dane Metchnikov and excretion.”

“Well, that’s great,” I yell, suddenly angry. “You’re telling me you spy on me?”

“You know that I monitor your external signs, Robbie,” he says reprovingly. “There is no harm in that. It is no more significant than a friend observing that you blush or stammer, or drum your fingers.”

“So you say.”

“I do say that, Rob. I tell you this because I think you should know that these subjects are charged with some emotional overload for you. Would you like to talk about why that might be?”

“No! What I’d like to talk about is you, Sigfrid! What other little secrets are you holding out on me? Do you count my erections? Bug my bed? Tap my phone?”

“No, Rob. I don’t do any of those things.”

“I certainly hope that’s the truth, Sigfrid. I have my ways of knowing when you lie.”

Pause. “I don’t think I understand what you are saying, Rob.”

“You don’t have to,” I sneer. “You’re just a machine.” It’s enough that I understand. It is very important to me to have that little secret from Sigfrid. In my pocket is the slip of paper that S. Ya. Lavorovna gave me one night, full of pot, wine, and great sex. One day soon I will take it out of my pocket, and then we will see which of us is the boss. I really enjoy this contest with Sigfrid. It gets me angry. When I am angry I forget that very large place where I hurt, and go on hurting, and don’t know how to stop.