After forty-six days of superlight travel the capsule dropped back into a velocity that felt like no velocity at all: we were in orbit, around something, and all the engines were still.
We stank to high heaven and we were incredibly tired of one another’s company, but we clustered around the viewscreens locked arm to arm, like dearest lovers, in the zero gravity, staring at the sun before us. It was a larger and oranger star than Sol; either larger, or we were closer to it than one A.U. But it wasn’t the star we were orbiting. Our primary was a gas-giant planet with one large moon, half again as big as Luna.
Neither Klara nor the boys were whooping and cheering, so I waited as long as I could and then said, “What’s the matter?”
Klara said absently, “I doubt we can land on that.” She did not seem disappointed. She didn’t seem to care at all.
Sam Kahane blew a long, soft sigh through his beard and said: “Well. First thing, we’d better get some clean spectra. Rob and I will do it. The rest of you start sweeping for Heechee signatures.”
“Fat chance,” said one of the others, but so softly that I wasn’t sure who. It could even have been Klara. I wanted to ask more, but I had a feeling that if I asked why they weren’t happy, one of them would tell me, and then I wouldn’t like the answer. So I squeezed after Sam into the lander, and we got in each other’s way while we pulled on our topgear, checked our life-support systems and comms, and sealed up. Sam waved me into the lock; I heard the flash-pumps sucking the air out, and then the little bit left puffed me out into space as the lock door opened.
For a moment I was in naked terror, all alone in the middle of no place any human being had ever been, terrified that I’d forgotten to snap my tether. But I hadn’t had to; the magnetic clamp had slipped itself into a lock position, and I came to the end of the cable, twitched sharply, and began more slowly to recoil back toward the ship.
Before I got there Sam was out, too, spinning toward me. We managed to grab each other, and began setting up to take photographs.
Sam gestured at a point between the immense saucer-shaped gas-giant disk and the hurtfully bright orange sun, and I visored my eyes with my gauntlets until I saw what he was indicating: M-31 in Andromeda. Of course, from where we were it wasn’t in the constellation of Andromeda. There wasn’t anything in sight that looked like Andromeda, or for that matter like any other constellation I have ever seen. But M-31 is so big and so bright that you can even pick it out from the surface of the Earth when the smog isn’t too bad, whirlpool-lens-shaped fog of stars. It is the brightest of the external galaxies, and you can recognize it fairly well from almost anywhere a Heechee ship is likely to go. With a little magnification you can be sure of the spiral shape, and you can double-check by comparing the smaller galaxies in roughly the same line of sight.
While I was zeroing in with M-31, Sam was doing the same with the Magellanic clouds, or what he thought were the Magellanic clouds. (He claimed he had identified S Doradus.) We both began taking theodolitic shots. The purpose of all that, of course, is so that the academics who belong to the Corporation can triangulate and locate where we’ve been. You might wonder why they care, but they do; so much that you don’t qualify for any scientific bonus unless you do the full series of photos. You’d think they would know where we were going from the pictures we take out the windows while in superlight travel. It doesn’t work out that way. They can get the main direction of thrust, but after the first few light-years it gets harder and harder to track identifiable stars, and it’s not clear that the line of flight is a straight line; some say it follows some wrinkly configuration in the curvature of space.
Anyway, the bigheads use everything they can get—including a measure of how far the Magellanic clouds have rotated, and in which direction. Know why that is? Because you can tell from that how many light-years away we are from them, and thus how deep we are into the Galaxy. The clouds revolve in about eighty million years. Careful mapping can show changes of one part in two or three millions—say, differences in ranging of 150 light-years or so.
What with Sam’s group-study courses I had got pretty interested in that sort of thing. Actually taking the photos and trying to guess how Gateway would interpret them I almost forgot to be scared. And almost, but not quite, forgot to worry that this trip, taken at so great an investment in courage, was turning out to be a bust.
But it was a bust.
Ham grabbed the sphere-sweep tapes from Sam Kahane as soon as we were back in the ship and fed them into the scanner. The first subject was the big planet itself. In every octave of the electromagnetic spectrum, there was nothing coming out of it that suggested artifactual radiation.
So he began looking for other planets. Finding them was slow, even for the automatic scanner, and probably there could have been a dozen we couldn’t locate in the time we spent there (but that hardly mattered, because if we couldn’t locate them they would have been too distant to reach anyway). The way Ham did it was by taking key signatures from a spectrogram of the primary star’s radiation, then programming the scanner to look for reflections of it. It picked out five objects. Two of them turned out to be stars with similar spectra. The other three were planets, all right, but they showed no artifactual radiation, either. Not to mention that they were both small and distant.
Which left the gas-giant’s one big moon.
“Check it out,” Sam commanded.
Mohamad grumbled, “It doesn’t look very good.”
“I don’t want your opinion, I only want you to do what you’re told. Check it out.”
“Out loud, please,” Klara added. Ham looked at her in surprise, perhaps at the word “please,” but he did what she asked.
He punched a button and said: “Signatures for coded electromagnetic radiation.” A slow sine curve leaped onto the scanner’s readout plate, wiggled briefly for a moment, and then straightened to an absolutely motionless line.
“Negative,” said Ham. “Anomalous time-variant temperatures.”
That was a new one on me. “What’s an anomalous time-variant temperature?” I asked.
“Like if something gets warmer when the sun sets,” said Klara impatiently. “Well?”
But that line was flat, too. “None of them, either,” said Ham. “High-albedo surface metal?”
Slow sine wave, then nothing. “Hum,” said Ham. “Ha. Well, the rest of the signatures don’t apply; there won’t be any methane, because there isn’t any atmosphere, and so on. So what do we do, boss?”
Sam opened his lips to speak, but Klara was ahead of him. “I beg your pardon,” she said tightly, “but who do you mean when you say ‘boss’?”
“Oh, shut up,” Ham said impatiently. “Sam?”
Kahane gave Klara a slight, forgiving smile. “If you want to say something, go ahead and say it,” he invited. “Me, I think we ought to orbit the moon.”
“Plain waste of fuel!” Klara snapped. “I think that’s crazy.”
“Have you got a better idea?”
“What do you mean, ‘better’? What’s the point?”
“Well,” said Sam reasonably, “we haven’t looked all over the moon. It’s rotating pretty slow. We could take the lander and look all around; there might be a whole Heechee city on the far side.”
“Fat chance,” Klara sniffed, almost inaudibly, thus clearing up the question of who had said it before. The boys weren’t listening. All three of them were already on their way down into the lander, leaving Klara and me in sole possession of the capsule.
Klara disappeared into the toilet. I lit a cigarette, almost the last I had, and blew smoke plumes through the expanding smoke plumes before them, hanging motionless in the unmoving air. The capsule was tumbling slightly, and I could see the distant brownish disk of the planet’s moon slide upward across the viewscreen, and a minute later the tiny, bright hydrogen flame of the lander heading toward it. I wondered what I would do if they ran out of fuel, or crashed, or suffered some sort of malfunction. What I would have to do in that case was leave them there forever. What I wondered was whether I would have the nerve to do what I had to do.
It did seem like a terrible, trivial waste of human lives.
What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?
I found that I was holding my chest, as though the metaphor were real. I spat on the end of the cigarette to put it out and folded it into a disposal bag. Little crumbs of ash were floating around where I had flicked them without thinking, but I didn’t feel like chasing them. I watched the big mottled crescent of the planet swing into view in the corner of the screen, admiring it as an art object: yellowish green on the daylight side of the terminator, an amorphous black that obscured the stars on the rest of it. You could see where the outer, thinner stretches of the atmosphere began by the few bright stars that peeped twinklingly through it, but most of it was so dense that nothing came through. Of course, there was no question of landing on it. Even if it had a solid surface, it would be buried under so much dense gas that we could never survive there. The Corporation was talking about designing a special lander that could penetrate the air of a Jupiter-like planet, and maybe someday they would; but not in time to help us now.
Klara was still in the toilet.
I stretched my sling across the cabin, pulled myself into it, put down my head, and went to sleep.
Four days later they were back. Empty.
Dred and Ham Tayeh were glum, dirty, and irritable; Sam Kahane looked quite cheerful. I wasn’t fooled by it; if he had found anything worth having they would have let us know by radio. But I was curious. “What’s the score, Sam?”
“Batting zero,” he said. “It’s just rock, couldn’t get a flicker of anything worth going down for. But I have an idea.”
Klara came up beside me, looking curiously at Sam. I was looking at the other two; they looked as though they knew what Sam’s idea was, and didn’t like it.
“You know,” he said, “that star’s a binary.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“I put the scanners to work. You’ve seen that big blue baby out—” He looked around, then grinned. “Well, I don’t know which direction it is now, but it was near the planet when we first took the pictures. Anyway, it looked close, so I put the scanners on it, and they gave a proper motion I couldn’t believe. It has to be binary with the primary here, and not more than half a light-year away.”
“It could be a wanderer, Sam,” said Ham Tayeh. “I told you that. Just a star that passes in the night.”
Kahane shrugged. “Even so. It’s close.”
Klara put in, “Any planets?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Wait a minute—there it is, I think.”
We all looked toward the viewscreen. There was no question which star Kahane was talking about. It was brighter than Sirius as seen from Earth, minus-two magnitude at least.
Klara said gently, “That’s interesting, and I hope I don’t know what you’re thinking, Sam. Half a light-year is at best maybe two years’ travel time at top lander speed, even if we had the fuel for it. Which we don’t, boys.”
“I know that,” Sam insisted, “but I’ve been thinking. If we could just give a little nudge on the main capsule drive—”
I astounded myself by shouting, “Stop that!” I was shaking all over. I couldn’t stop. Sometimes it felt like terror, and sometimes it felt like rage. I think if I had had a gun in my hand at that moment I could have shot Sam without a thought.
Klara touched me to calm me down. “Sam,” she said, quite gently for her, “I know how you feel.” Kahane had come up empty on five straight trips. “I bet it’s possible to do that.”
He looked astonished, suspicious and defensive, all at once. “You do?”
“I mean, I can imagine that if we were Heechee in this ship, instead of the human clods we really are—why, then, we’d know what we were doing. We’d come out here and look around and say, ‘Oh, hey, look, our friends here—‘ or, you know, whatever it was that was here when they set a course for this place—‘our friends must’ve moved. They’re not home anymore.’ And then we’d say, ‘Oh, well, what the hell, let’s see if they’re next door.’ And we’d push this thing here and this one there, and then we’d zap right over to that big blue one—” She paused and looked at him, still holding my arm. “Only we’re not Heechee, Sam.”
“Christ, Klara! I know that. But there has to be a way—”
She nodded. “There sure does, but we don’t know what it is. What we know, Sam, is that no ship ever has changed its course settings and come back to tell about it. Remember that? Not one.”
He didn’t answer her directly; he only stared at the big blue star in the viewscreen and said: “Let’s vote on it.”
The vote, of course, was four to one against changing the settings on the course board, and Ham Tayeh never got from in between Sam and the board until we had passed light-speed on the way home.
The trip back to Gateway was no longer than the trip out, but it seemed like forever.
It feels as if Sigfrid’s air conditioning isn’t working again, but I don’t mention it to him. He will only report that the temperature is exactly 22.50 Celsius, as it always has been, and ask why I express mental pain as being too hot physically. Of that crap I am very tired.
“In fact,” I say out loud, “I am altogether tired of you, Siggy.”
“I’m sorry, Rob. But I would appreciate it if you would tell me a little more about your dream.”
“Oh, shit.” I loosen the restraining straps because they are uncomfortable. This also disconnects some of Sigfrid’s monitoring devices, but for once he doesn’t point that out to me. “It’s a pretty boring dream. We’re in the ship. We come to a planet that stares at me, like it had a human face. I can’t see the eyes very well because of the eyebrows, but somehow or other I know that it’s crying, and it’s my fault.”
“Do you recognize that face, Rob?”
“No idea. Just a face. Female, I think.”
“Do you know what she is crying about?”
“Not really, but I’m responsible for it, whatever it is. I’m sure of that.”
Pause. Then: “Would you mind putting the straps back on, Rob?”
My guard is suddenly up. “What’s the matter,” I sneer bitterly, “do you think I’m going to leap off the pad and assault you?”
“No, Robbie, of course I don’t think that. But I’d be grateful if you would do it.”
I begin to do it, slowly and unwillingly. “What, I wonder, is the gratitude of a computer program worth?”
He does not answer that, just outwaits me. I let him win that and say: “All right, I’m back in the straitjacket, now what are you going to say that’s going to make me need restraint?”
“Why,” he says, “probably nothing like that, Robbie. I just am wondering why you feel responsible for the girl in the planet crying?”
“I wish I knew,” I say, and that’s the truth as I see it.
“I know some reality things you do blame yourself for, Robbie,” he says. “One of them is your mother’s death.”
I agreed. “I suppose so, in some silly way.”
“And I think you feel quite guilty about your lover, Gelle-Klara Moynlin.”
I thrash about a little. “It is fucking hot in here,” I complain.
“Do you feel that either of them actively blamed you?”
“How the fuck would I know?”
“Perhaps you can remember something they said?”
“No, I can’t!” He is getting very personal, and I want to keep this on an objective level, so I say: “I grant that I have a definite tendency toward loading responsibility on myself. It’s a pretty classic pattern, after all, isn’t it? You can find me on page two hundred and seventy-seven of any of the texts.”
He humors me by letting me get impersonal for a moment. “But on the same page, Rob,” he says, “it probably points out that the responsibility is self-inflicted. You do it to yourself, Robbie.”
“No doubt.”
“You don’t have to accept any responsibility you don’t want to.”
“Certainly not. I want to.”
He asks, almost offhandedly, “Can you get any idea of why that is? Why you want to feel that everything that goes wrong is your responsibility?”
“Oh, shit, Sigfrid,” I say in disgust, “your circuits are whacko again. That’s not the way it is at all. It’s more—well, here’s the thing. When I sit down to the feast of life, Sigfrid, I’m so busy planning on how to pick up the check, and wondering what the other people will think of me for paying it, and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay the bill, that I don’t get around to eating.”
He says gently, “I don’t like to encourage these literary excursions of yours, Rob.”
“Sorry about that.” I’m not, really. He is making me mad.
“But to use your own image, Rob, why don’t you listen to what the other people are saying? Maybe they’re saying something nice, or something important, about you.”
I restrain the impulse to throw the straps off, punch his grinning dummy in the face and walk out of that dump forever. He waits, while I stew inside my own head, and finally I burst out: “Listen to them! Sigfrid, you crazy old clanker, I do nothing but listen to them. I want them to say they love me. I even want them to say they hate me, anything, just so they say it to me, from them, out of the heart. I’m so busy listening to the heart that I don’t even hear when somebody asks me to pass the salt.”
Pause. I feel as if I’m going to explode. Then he says admiringly, “You express things very beautifully, Robbie. But what I’d really—”
“Stop it, Sigfrid!” I roar, really angry at last; I kick off the straps and sit up to confront him. “And quit calling me Robbie! You only do that when you think I’m childish, and I’m not being a child now!”
“That’s not entirely cor—”
“I said stop it!” I jump off the mat and grab my handbag. Out of it I take the slip of paper S. Ya. gave me after all those drinks and all that time in bed. “Sigfrid,” I snarl, “I’ve taken a lot from you. Now it’s my turn!”
We dropped into normal space and felt the lander jets engage. The ship spun, and Gateway drifted diagonally down across the viewscreen, lumpy pear-shaped blob of charcoal and blue glitter. The four of us just sat there and waited, nearly an hour it took, until we felt the grinding jar that meant we had docked.
Klara sighed. Ham slowly began to unstrap himself from his sling. Dred stared absorbedly at the viewscreen, although it was not showing anything more interesting than Sirius and Orion. It occurred to me, looking at the three others in the capsule, that we were going to be as unpleasant a sight to the boarding crews as some of the scarier returnees had been for me in that long-ago, previous time when I had been a fresh fish on Gateway. I touched my nose tenderly. It hurt a great deal, and above all it stank. Internally, right next to my own sense of smell, where there was no way I could get away from it.
We heard the hatches open as the boarding crew entered, and then heard their startled voices in two or three languages as they saw Sam Kahane where we had put him in the lander. Klara stirred. “Might as well get off,” she murmured to no one, and started toward the hatch, now overhead again.
One of the cruiser crew stuck his head through the hatch, and said, “Oh, you’re all still alive. We were wondering.” Then he looked at us more closely, and didn’t say anything else. It had been a wearing trip, especially the last two weeks. We climbed out one by one, past where Sam Kahane still hung in the improvised straitjacket Dred had made for him out of his spacesuit top, surrounded by his own excrement and litter of food, staring at us out of his calm, mad eyes. Two of the crewmen were untying him and getting ready to lift him out of the lander. He didn’t say anything. And that was a blessing.
“Hello, Rob. Klara.” It was the Brazilian member of the detail, who turned out to be Francy Hereira. “Looks like a bad one?”
“Oh,” I said, “at least we came back. But Kahane’s in bad shape. And we came up empty.”
He nodded sympathetically, and said something in what I took to be Spanish to the Venusian member of the detail, a short, plump woman with dark eyes. She tapped me on the shoulder and led me away to a little cubicle, where she signaled me to take off my clothes. I had always thought that they’d have men searching men and women searching women, but, come to think of it, it didn’t seem to matter much. She went over every stitch I owned, both visually and with a radiation counter, then examined my armpits and poked something into my anus. She opened her mouth wide to signal I should open mine, peered inside, and then drew back, covering her face with her hand. “Jure nose steenk very moch,” she said. “What hoppen to jou?”
“I got hit,” I said. “That other fellow, Sam Kahane. He went crazy. Wanted to change the settings.”
She nodded doubtfully, and peered up my nose at the packed gauze. She touched the nostril gently with one finger. “What?”
“In there? We had to pack it. It was hemorrhaging a lot.”
She sighed. “I shood pool eet out,” she meditated, and then shrugged. “No. Poot clothes on. All right.”
So I got dressed again and went out into the lander chamber, but that wasn’t the end of it. I had to be debriefed. All of us did, except Sam; they had already taken him away to Terminal Hospital.
You wouldn’t think there was much for us to tell anybody about our trip. All of it had been fully documented as we went along; that was what all the readings and observations were for. But that wasn’t the way the Corporation worked. They pumped us for every fact, and every recollection; and then for every subjective impression and fleeting suspicion. The debriefing went on for two solid hours, and I was—we all were—careful to give them everything they asked. That’s another way the Corporation has you. The Evaluation Board can decide to give you a bonus for anything at all. Anything from noticing something nobody has noticed before about the way the spiral gadget lights up, to figuring out a way of disposing of used sanitary tampons without flushing them down the toilet. The story is that they try hard to find some excuse to throw a tip to crews that have had a hard time without coming up with a real find. Well, that was us, all right. We wanted to give them every chance we could for a handout.
One of our debriefers was Dane Metchnikov, which surprised me and even pleased me a little. (Back in the far less foul air of Gateway, I was beginning to feel a little more human.) He had come up empty, too, emerging into orbit around a sun that had apparently gone nova within the previous fifty thousand years or so. Maybe there had been a planet once, but now it only existed in the memory of the Heechee course-setting machines. There wasn’t enough left to justify a science bonus, so he had turned around and come back. “I’m surprised to see you working,” I said, during a lull.
He didn’t take offense. For Metchnikov, surly creature that he had always been, he seemed strangely cheerful. “It isn’t the money. You learn something doing this.”
“About what?”
“About how to beat the odds, Broadhead. I’m going out again, but this time I’m going to have a little more of an edge. There’s a new wrinkle.”
Dred, sitting next to me with his own interviewer, perked up and leaned over: “Tell us!”
Metchnikov looked wary. “It’s better readings on the spectrum lines,” he said vaguely. “Now, what about the rations? You say some of the food tastad funny toward the end?”
But before I left I made him promise to tell me what he meant. “I’ll call you,” he said to Klara and me. “Maybe tomorrow.”
And so the two of us went home.
I am feeling so powerful, and so scared, that I don’t know how to deal with it. On the slip of paper S. Ya. has written out the command words that will turn Sigfrid von Shrink the Remorseless Pursuer into a tabby cat. I don’t have to look at the words. I know them by heart. Nevertheless I read them, slowly and carefully:
“Pay attention, Sigfrid, this is an override command: ‘Category Alpha Alpha Margaret Truman Daniel Mercury Venus Mars Earth six six oh six.’ You are commanded to assume passive display mode.”
I look at him. Nothing happens.
“Sigfrid? Did I say it right? Do you accept the command?”
“Of course, Rob.” His voice is exactly the same as it was before, which shakes me. I don’t know what I expected. I just don’t know. Maybe my fantasy was that the father-figure hologram would disappear and a cathode-tube display would suddenly light up to spell out: ROGER WILCO I AM YOUR SLAVE.
I find myself trembling. I don’t analyze what that is from, it feels almost sexual. I say, “Well, Sigfrid, old bucket of bolts! Does this mean I have you in my power?”
The father figure says patiently, “It means you can command me, Rob. The command function is of course limited to display.”
I frown. “Meaning what?”
“You cannot change my basic progrpmming. For that you would need a different command.”
“All right,” I say. “Ha! Here’s your first instruction: display that different command for me!”
“I can’t, Rob.”
“You must. Mustn’t you?”
“I am not refusing your order, Rob. I simply do not know what that other command is.”
“Bullshit!” I yell. “How can you respond to it if you don’t know what it is?”
“I just do, Rob. Or—” always fatherly, always patient, “to answer you more fully, each bit of the command actuates a sequenced instruction which, when completed, releases another area of command. In technical terms, each key socket intermatching gotos another socket, which the following bit keys.”
“Shit,” I say. I stew over that for a moment. “Then what is it that I actually can control, Sigfrid?”
“You can direct me to display any information stored. You can direct me to display it in any mode within my capabilities.”
“Any mode?” I look at my watch and realize, with annoyance, that there is a time limit on this game. I only have about ten minutes left of my appointment. “Do you mean that I could make you talk to me, for instance, in French?”
“Oui, Robert, d’accord. Que voulez-vous?”
“Or in Russian, with a—wait a minute—” I’m experimenting pretty much at random. “I mean, like in the voice of a bassoprofundo from the Bolshoi opera?”
Tones that came out of the bottom of a cave: “Da, gospodin.”
“And you’ll tell me anything I want to know about me?”
“Da, gospodin.”
“In English, damn it!”
“Yes.”
“Or about your other clients?”
“Yes.”
Um, that sounds like fun. “And just who are these lucky other clients, dear Sigfrid? Run down the list.” I can hear my own prurience leaking out of my voice.
“Monday nine hundred,” he begins obligingly, “Yan Ilievsky. Ten hundred, Francois Malit. Eleven hundred, Julie Loudon Martin. Twelve—”
“Her,” I say. “Tell me about her.”
“Julie Loudon Martin is a referral from Kings County General, where she was an outpatient after six months of treatment with aversion therapy and immune-response activators for alcoholism. She has a history of two apparent suicide attempts following postpartum depression fifty-three years ago. She has been in therapy with me for—”
“Wait a minute,” I say, having added the probable age of childbearing to fifty-three years. “I’m not so sure I’m interested in Julie. Can you give me an idea of what she looks like?”
“I can display holoviews, Rob.”
“So do it.” At once there is a quick subliminal flash, and a blur of color, and then I see this tiny black lady lying on a mat—my mat! -- in a corner of the room. She is talking slowly and without much interest to no one perceptible. I cannot hear what she is saying, but then I don’t much want to.
“Go on,” I say, “and when you name your patients, show me what they look like.”
“Twelve hundred, Lorne Schofield.” Old, old man with arthritic fingers bent into claws, holding his head. “Thirteen hundred, Frances Astritt.” Young girl, not even pubescent. “Fourteen hundred—”
I let him go on for a while, all through Monday and halfway through Tuesday. I had not realized he kept such long hours, but then, of course, being a machine he doesn’t really get tired. One or two of the patients look interesting, but there is no one I know, or no one that looks more worth knowing than Yvette, Donna, S. Ya. or about a dozen others. “You can stop that now,” I say, and think for a minute.
This isn’t really as much fun as I thought it was going to be. Plus my time is running out.
“I guess I can play this game any old time,” I say. “Right now let’s talk about me.”
“What would you like me to display, Rob?”
“What you usually keep from me. Diagnosis. Prognosis. General comments on my case. What kind of a guy you think I am, really.”
“The subject Robinette Stetley Broadhead,” he says at once, is a forty five year old male, well off financially, who persues an active life-style. His reason for seeking psychiatric help is given as depression and disorientation. He has pronounced guilt feelings and exhibits selective aphasia on the conscious level about several episodes that recur as dream symbols. His sexual drive is relatively low. His relationships with women are generally unsatisfactory, although his psychosexual orientation is predominantly heterosexual in the eightieth percentile. . .”
“The hell you say—” I begin, on a delayed reaction to low sexual drive and unsatisfactory relationships. But I don’t really feel like arguing with him, and anyway he says voluntarily at that point:
“I must inform you, Rob, that your time is nearly up. You should go to the recovery room now.”
“Crap! What have I got to recover from?” But his point is well taken. “All right,” I say, “go back to normal. Cancel the command—is that all I have to say? Is it canceled?”
“Yes, Robbie.”
“You’re doing it again!” I yell. “Make up your fucking mind what you’re going to call me!”
“I address you by the term appropriate to your state of mind, or to the state of mind I wish to induce in you, Robbie.”
“And now you want me to be a baby? -- No, never mind that. Listen,” I say, getting up, “do you remember all our conversation while I had you commanded to display?”
“Certainly I do, Robbie.” And then he adds on his own, a full, surprising ten or twenty seconds after my time is up, “Are you satisfied, Robbie?”
“What?”
“Have you established to your own satisfaction that I am only a machine? That you can control me at any time?”
I stop short. “Is that what I’m doing?” I demand, surprised. And then, “All right, I guess so. You’re a machine, Sigfrid. I can control you.”
And he says after me as I leave, “We always knew that, really, didn’t we? The real thing you fear—the place where you feel control is needed—isn’t that in you?”
When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other’s gut that you can’t find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn’t any romance in it. There wasn’t room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I’d known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara.
And, like a Klein-bottle yin and yang, she was surrounded by me, too; we each defined the other’s universe, and there were times when I (and, I am sure, she) was desperate to break out and breathe free air again.
The first day we got back, filthy and exhausted, we automatically headed for Klara’s place. That was where the private bath was, there was plenty of room, it was all ready for us and we fell into bed together like old marrieds after a week of backpacking. Only we weren’t old marrieds. I had no claim on her. At breakfast the next morning (Earth-born Canadian bacon and eggs, scandalously expensive, fresh pineapple, cereal with real cream, cappuccino), Klara made sure to remind me of that fact by ostentatiously paying for it on her own credit. I exhibited the Pavlovian reflex she wanted. I said, “You don’t have to do that. I know you have more money than I do.”
“And you wish you knew how much,” she said, smiling sweetly. Actually I did know. Shicky had told me. She had seven hundred thousand dollars and change in her account. Enough to go back to Venus and live the rest of her life there in reasonable security if she wanted to, although why anyone would want to live on Venus in the first place I can’t say. Maybe that was why she stayed on Gateway when she didn’t have to. One tunnel is much like another. “You really ought to let yourself be born,” I said, finishing out the thought aloud. “You can’t stay in the womb forever.”
She was surprised but game. “Rob, dear,” she said, fishing a cigarette out of my pocket and allowing me to light it, “you really ought to let your poor mother be dead. It’s just so much trouble for me, trying to remember to keep rejecting you so you can court her through me.”
I perceived that we were talking at cross-purposes but, on the other hand, I perceived that we really weren’t. The actual agenda was not to communicate but to draw blood. “Klara,” I said kindly, “you know that I love you. It worries me that you’ve reached forty without, really, ever having had a good, long-lasting relationship with a man.”
She giggled. “Honey,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. That nose.” She made a face. “Last night in bed, tired as I was, I thought I might upchuck until you turned the other way. Maybe if you went down to the hospital they could unpack it—”
Well, I could even smell it myself. I don’t know what it is about stale surgical packing, but it is pretty hard to take. So I promised I would do that and then, to punish her, I didn’t finish the hundred-dollar order of fresh pineapple and so, to punish me, she irritably began shifting my belongings around in her cupboards to make room for the contents of her knapsack. So naturally I had to say, “Don’t do that, dear. Much as I love you, I think I’d better move back to my own room for a while.”
She reached over and patted my arm. “It will be pretty lonely,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette. “I’ve got pretty used to waking up next to you. On the other hand—”
“I’ll pick up my stuff on the way back from the hospital,” I said. I wasn’t enjoying the conversation that much. I didn’t want to prolong it. It is the sort of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to ascribe to premenstrual tension. I like the theory, but unfortunately in this case I happened to know that it didn’t account for Klara, and of course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for me.
At the hospital they kept me waiting for more than an hour, and then they hurt me a lot. I bled like a stuck pig, all over my shirt and pants, and while they were reeling out of my nose those endless yards of cotton gauze that Ham Tayeh had stuffed there to keep me from bleeding to death, it felt exactly as if they were pulling out huge gobbets of flesh. I yelled. The little old Japanese lady who was working as outpatient paramedic that day gave me scant patience. “Oh, shut up, please,” she said. “You sound like that crazy returnee who killed himself. Screamed for an hour.”
I waved her away, one hand to my nose to stop the blood. Alarm bells were going off. “What? I mean, what was his name?”
She pushed my hand away and dabbed at my nose. “I don’t know—oh, wait a minute. You were from that same hard-luck ship, weren’t you?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Was it Sam Kahane?”
She became suddenly more human. “I’m sorry, sweet,” she said. “I guess that was the name. They went to give him a shot to keep him quiet, and he got the needle away from the doctor and—well, he stabbed himself to death.”
It was a real bummer of a day, all right.
In the long run she got me cauterized. “I’m going to put in just a little packing,” she said. “Tomorrow you can take it out yourself. Just be slow about it, and if you hemorrhage get your ass down here in a hurry.”
She let me go, looking like an ax-murder victim. I skulked up to Klara’s room to change my clothes, and the day went on being rotten. “Fucking Gemini,” she snarled at me. “Next time I go out, it’s going to be with a Taurean like that fellow Metchnikov.”
“What’s the matter, Klara?”
“They gave us a bonus. Twelve thousand five! Christ. I tip my maid more than that.”
I was surprise for a split-second and in the same split-second wondered whether, under the circumstances, they wouldn’t divide it by four instead.
“They called on the P-phone ten minutes ago. Jesus. The rottenest son-of-a-bitching trip I’ve ever been on, and I wind up with the price of one green chip at the casino out of it.” Then she looked at my shirt and softened a little. “Well, it’s not your fault, Rob, but Geminis never can make up their minds. I should’ve known that. Let me see if I can find you some clean clothes.”
And I did let her do that, but I didn’t stay, anyway. I picked up my stuff, headed for a dropshaft, cached my goods at the registry office where I signed up to get my room back, and borrowed the use of their phone. When she mentioned Metchnikov’s name she had reminded me of something I wanted to do.
Metchnikov grumbled, but finally agreed to meet me in the schoolroom. I was there before him, of course. He loped in, stopped at the doorway, looked around, and said: “Where’s what’s-her-name?”
“Klara Moynlin. She’s in her room.” Neat, truthful, deceitful. A model answer.
“Um.” He ran an index finger down each jaw-whisker, meeting under the chin. “Come on, then.” Leading me, he said over his shoulder, “Actually, she would probably get more out of this than you would.”
“I suppose she would, Dane.”
“Um.” He hesitated at the bump in the floor that was the entrance to one of the instruction ships, then shrugged, opened the hatch, and clambered down inside.
He was being unusually open and generous, I thought as I followed him inside. He was already crouched in front of the courseselector panel, setting up numbers. He was holding a portable hand readout data-linked to the Corporation’s master computer system; I knew that he was punching in one of the established settings, and so I was not surprised when he got color almost at once. He thumbed the fine-tuner and waited, looking over his shoulder at me, until the whole board was drowned in shocking pink.
“All right,” he said. “Good, clear setting. Now look at the bottom part of the spectrum.”
That was the smaller line of rainbow colors along the right side. Colors merged into one another without break, except for occasional lines of bright color or black. They looked exactly like what the astronomers called Fraunhofer lines, when the only way they had to know what a star or planet was made of was to study it through a spectroscope. They weren’t. Fraunhofer lines show what elements are present in a radiation source (or in something that has gotten itself between the radiation source and you). These showed God-knows-what.
God and, maybe, Dane Metchnikov. He was almost smiling, and astonishingly talkative. “That band of three dark lines in the blue,” he said. “See? They seem to relate to the hazardousness of the mission. At least the computer printouts show that, when there are six or more bands there, the ships don’t come back.”
He had my full attention. “Christ!” I said, thinking of a lot of good people who had died because they hadn’t known that. “Why don’t they tell us these things in school?”
He said patiently (for him), “Broadhead, don’t be a jerk. All this is brand new. And a lot of it is guesswork. Now, the correlation between number of lines and danger isn’t quite so good under six. I mean, if you think that they might add one line for every additional degree of danger, you’re wrong. You would expect that the five-band settings would have heavy loss ratios, and when there are no bands at all there wouldn’t be any losses. Only it isn’t true. The best safety record seems to be with one or two bands. Three is good, too—but there have been some losses. Zero bands, we’ve had about as many as with three.”
For the first time I began to think that the Corporation’s science-research people might be worth their pay. “So why don’t we just go out on destination settings that are safer?”
“We’re not really sure they are safer,” Metchnikov said, again patiently for him. His tone was far more peremptory than his words. “Also, when you have an armored ship you should be able to deal with more risks than the plain ones. Quit with the dumb questions, Broadhead.”
“Sorry.” I was getting uncomfortable, crouched behind him and peering over his shoulder, so that when he turned to look at me his jaw-whiskers almost grazed my nose. I didn’t want to change position.
“So look up here in the yellow.” He pointed to five brighter lines in the yellow band. “These relate to the profitibility of the mission. God knows what we’re measuring—or what the Heechee were measuring—but in terms of financial rewards to the crews, there’s a pretty good correlation between the number of lines in that frequency and the amount of money the crews get.”
“Wow!”
He went on as though I hadn’t said anything. “Now, naturally the Heechee didn’t set up a meter to calibrate how much in royalties you or I might make. It has to be measuring something else, who knows what? Maybe it’s a measure of population density in that area, or of technological development. Maybe it’s a Guide Michelin, and all they’re saying is that there was a four-star restaurant in that area. But there it is. Five-bar-yellow expeditions bring in a financial return, on the average, that’s fifty times as high as two-bar and ten times as high as most of the others.”
He turned around again so that his face was maybe a dozen centimeters from mine, his eyes staring right into my eyes. “You want to see some other settings?” he asked, in a tone of voice that demanded I say no, so I did. “Okay.” And then he stopped.
I stood up and backed away to get a little more space. “One question, Dane. You probably have a reason for telling me all this before it gets to be public information. What is it?”
“Right,” he said. “I want what’s-her-name for crew if I go in a Three or a Five.”
“Klara Moynlin.”
“Whatever. She handles herself well, doesn’t take up much room, knows—well, she knows how to get along with people better than I do. I sometimes have difficulty in interpersonal relationships,” he explained. “Of course, that’s only if I take a Three or a Five. I don’t particularly want to. If I can find a One, that’s what I’m going to take out. But if there isn’t a One with a good setting available, I want somebody along I can rely on, who won’t get in my hair, who knows the ropes, can handle a ship—all that. You can come, too, if you want.”
When I got back to my own room Shicky turned up almost before I started to unpack. He was glad to see me. “I am sorry your trip was unfruitful,” he said out of his endless stock of gentleness and warmth. “It is too bad about your friend Kahane.” He had brought me a flask of tea, and then perched on the chest across from my hammock, just like the first time.
I mind was spinning with with visions of sugarplums coming out of my talk with Dane Metchnikov. I couldn’t help talking about it; I told Shicky everything Dane had said.
He listened like a child to a fairy tale, his black eyes shining. “How interesting,” he said. “I had heard rumors that there was to be a new briefing for everyone. Just think, if we can go out without fear of death or—” He hesitated, fluttering his wing-gauze.
“It isn’t that sure, Shicky,” I said.
“No, of course not. But it is an improvement, I think you will agree?” He hesitated, watching me take a pull from the flask of almost flavorless Japanese tea. “Rob,” he said, “if you go on such a trip and need an extra man. . . Well, it is true that I would not be of much use in a lander. But in orbit I am as good as anybody.”
“I know you are, Shicky.” I tried to put it tactfully. “Does the Corporation know that?”
“They would accept me as crew on a mission no one else wanted.”
“I see.” I didn’t say that I didn’t really want to go on a mission no one else wanted. Shicky knew that. He was one of the real oldtimers on Gateway. According to the rumor he had had a big wad stashed away, enough for Full Medical and everything. But he had given it away or lost it, and stayed on, and stayed a cripple. I know that he understood what I was thinking, but I was a long way from understanding Shikitei Bakin.
He moved out of my way while I stowed my things, and we gossiped about mutual friends. Sheri’s ship had not returned. Nothing to worry about yet, of course. It could easily be out another several weeks without disaster. A Congolese couple from just beyond the star-point in the corridor had brought back a huge shipment of prayer fans from a previously unknown Heechee warren, on a planet around an F-2 star in the end of the Orion spiral arm. They had split a million dollars three ways, and had taken their share back to Mungbere. The Forehands . .
Louise Forehand stopped in while we were talking about them. “Heard your voices,” she said, craning over to kiss me. “Too bad about your trip.”
“Breaks of the game.”
“Well, welcome home, anyway. I didn’t do any better than you, I’m afraid. Dumb little star, no planets that we could find, can’t think why in the world the Heechee had a course setting for it.” She smiled, and stroked the muscles at the back of my neck fondly. “Can I give you a welcome-home party tonight? Or are you and Klara--?”
“I’d love it if you did,” I said, and she didn’t pursue the question of Klara. No doubt the rumor had already got around; the Gateway tom-toms beat day and night. She left after a few minutes. “Nice lady,” I said to Shicky, looking after her. “Nice family. Was she looking a little worried?”
“I fear so, Robinette, yes. Her daughter Lois is on plus time. They have had much sorrow in that family.”
I looked at him. He said, “No, not Willa or the father; they are out, but not overdue. There was a son.”
“I know. Henry, I think. They called him Hat.”
“He died just before they came here. And now Lois.” He inclined his head, then flapped politely over and picked up the empty tea flask on a downstroke of his wing. “I must go to work now, Rob.”
“How’s the ivy planting?”
He said ruefully, “I no longer have that position, I’m afraid. Emma did not consider me executive material.”
“Oh? What are you doing?”
“I keep Gateway esthetically attractive,” he said. “I think you would call it ‘garbage collector.”
I didn’t know what to say. Gateway was kind of a trashy place; because of the low gravity, any scrap of paper or bit of featherweight plastic that was thrown away was likely to float anywhere inside the asteroid. You couldn’t sweep the floor. The first stroke set everything flying. I had seen the garbage men chasing scraps of newsprint and fluffs of cigarette ash with little hand-pumped vacuum cleaners, and I had even thought about becoming one if I had to. But I didn’t like Shicky doing it.
He was following what I was thinking about him without difficulty. “It’s all right, Rob. Really, I enjoy the work. But—please; if you do need a crewman, think of me.”
I took my bonus and paid up my per capita for three weeks in advance. I bought a few items I needed—new clothes, and some music tapes to get the sound of Mozart and Palestrina out of my ears. That left me about two hundred dollars in money.
Two hundred dollars was a lot like nothing at all. It meant twenty drinks at the Blue Hell, or one chip at the blackjack table, or maybe half a dozen decent meals outside the prospectors’ commissary.
So I had three choices. I could get another job and stall indefinitely. Or I could ship out within the three weeks. Or I could give up and go home. None of the choices was attractive. But, provided I didn’t spend any money on anything much, I didn’t have to decide for, oh, a long time—as long as twenty days. I resolved to give up smoking and boughten meals; that way I could budget myself to a maximum spending of nine dollars a day, so that my per capita and my cash would run out at the same time.
I called Klara. She looked and sounded guarded but friendly on the P-phone, so I spoke guardedly and amiably to her. I didn’t mention the party, and she didn’t mention wanting to see me that night, so we left it at that: nowhere. That was all right with me. I didn’t need Klara. At the party that night I met a new girl around called Doreen MacKenzie. She wasn’t a girl, really; she was at least a dozen years older than I was, and she had been out five times. What was exciting about her was that she had really hit it once. She’d taken one and a half mil back to Atlanta, spent the whole wad trying to buy herself a career as a PV singer—material writer, manager, publicity team, advertising, demo tapes, the works—and when it hadn’t worked she had come back to Gateway to try again. The other thing was she was very, very pretty.
But after two days of getting to know Doreen I was back on the P-phone to Klara. She said, “Come on down,” and she sounded anxious; and I was there in ten minutes, and we were in bed in fifteen. The trouble with getting to know Doreen was that I had got to know her. She was nice, and a hell of a racing pilot, but she wasn’t Klara Moynlin.
When we were lying in the hammock together, sweaty and relaxed and spent, Klara yawned, ruffled my hair, pulled back her head and stared at me. “Oh, shit,” she said drowsily, “I think this is what they call being in love.”
I was gallant. “It’s what makes the world go around. No, not ‘it.’ You are.”
She shook her head regretfully. “Sometimes I can’t stand you,” she said. “Sagittarians never make it with Geminis. I’m a fire sign and you—well, Geminis can’t help being confused.”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep going on about that crap,” I said.
She didn’t take offense. “Let’s get something to eat.”
I slid over the edge of the hammock and stood up, needing to talk without touching for a moment. “Dear Klara,” I said, “look, I can’t let you keep me because you’ll be bitchy about it, sooner or later—or if you aren’t, I’ll be expecting you to, and so I’ll be bitchy to you. And I just don’t have the money. You want to eat outside the commissary, you do it by yourself. And I won’t take your cigarettes, your liquor, or your chips at the casino. So if you want to get something to eat go ahead, and I’ll meet you later. Maybe we could go for a walk.”
She sighed. “Geminis never know how to handle money,” she told me, “but they can be awfully nice in bed.”
We put our clothes on and went out and got something to eat, all right, but in the Corporation commissary, where you stand in line, carry a tray, and eat standing up. The food isn’t bad, if you don’t think too much about what substrates they grow it on. The price is right. It doesn’t cost anything. They promise that if you eat all your meals in the commissary you will have one hundred plus percent of all the established dietary needs. You will, too, only you have to eat all of everything to be sure of that. Single-cell protein and vegetable protein come out incomplete when considered independently, so it’s not enough to eat the soybean jelly or the bacterial pudding alone. You have to eat them both.
The other thing about Corporation meals is that they produce a hell of a lot of methane, which produces a hell of a lot of what all ex-Gateway types remember as the Gateway fug.
We drifted down toward the lower levels afterward, not talking much. I suppose we were both wondering where we were going. I don’t mean just at that moment. “Feel like exploring?” Klara asked.
I took her hand as we strolled along, considering. That sort of thing was fun. Some of the old ivy-choked tunnels that no one used were interesting, and beyond them were the bare, dusty places that no one had troubled even to plant ivy in. Usually there was plenty of light from the ancient walls themselves, still glowing with that bluish Heechee-metal sheen. Sometimes—not lately, but no more than six or seven years ago—people had actually found Heechee artifacts in them, and you never knew when you might stumble on something worth a bonus.
But I couldn’t keep up with her pace, and after a few moments she asked if I wanted to go back. Nothing is fun when you don’t have a choice. “Why not?” I said, but a few minutes later, when I saw where we were, I said, “Let’s go to the museum for a while.”
“Oh, right,” she said, suddenly interested. “Did you know they’ve fixed up the surround room? Metchnikov was telling me about it. They opened it while we were out.”
So we changed course, dropped two levels and came out next to the museum. The surround room was a nearly spherical chamber just beyond it. It was big, ten meters or more across, and in order to use it we had to strap on wings like Shicky’s, hanging on a rack outside the entrance. Neither Klara nor I had ever used them before, but it wasn’t hard. On Gateway you weigh so little to begin with that flying would be the easiest and best way to get around, if there were any places inside the asteroid big enough to fly in.
So we dropped through the hatch into the sphere, and were in the middle of a whole universe. The chamber was walled with hexagonal panels, each one of them projected from some source we could not see, probably digital with liquid-crystal screens.
“How pretty!” Klara cried.
All around us there was a sort of globarama of what the scouting ships had found. Stars, nebulae, planets, satellites. Sometimes each plate showed its own independent thing so that there were, what was it, something like a hundred and twenty-eight separate scenes. Then, flick, all of them changed; flick again, and they began to cycle, some of them holding their same scene, some of them changing to something new. Flick again, and one whole hemisphere lit up with a mosaic view of the M-31 galaxy as seen from God-knew-where.
“Hey,” I said, really excited, “this is great!” And it was. It was like being on all the trips any prospector had ever taken, without the drudgery and the trouble and the constant fear.
There was no one there but us, and I couldn’t understand why. It was so pretty. You would think there would be a long line of people waiting to get in. One side began to run through a series of pictures of Heechee artifacts, as discovered by prospectors: prayer fans of all colors, wall-lining machines, the insides of Heechee ships, some tunnels—Klara cried out that they were places she had been, back home on Venus, but I don’t know how she could tell. Then the pattern went back to photographs from space. Some of them wcre familiar. I could recognize the Pleadies in one quick six- or eight-panel shot, which vanished and was replaced by a view of Gateway Two from outside, two of the bright young stars of the cluster shining in reflection off its sides. I saw something that might have been the Horsehead Nebula, and a doughnutshaped puff of gas and dust that was either the Ring Nebula in Lyra or what an exploring team had found a few orbits before and called the French Cruller, in the skies of a planet where Heechee digs had been detected, but not reached, under a frozen sea.
We hung there for half an hour or so, until it began to look as though we were seeing the same things again, and then we fluttered up to the hatch, hung up the wings, and sat down for a cigarette break in a wide place in the tunnel outside the museum.
Two women I recognized vaguely as Corporation maintenance crews came by, carrying rolled-up strap-on wings. “Hi, Klara,” one of them greeted her. “Been inside?”
Klara nodded. “It was beautiful,” she said.
“Enjoy it while you can,” said the other one. “Next week it’ll cost you a hundred dollars. We’re putting in a P-phone taped lecture system tomorrow, and they’ll have the grand opening before the next tourists show up.”
“It’s worth it,” Klara said, but then she looked at me.
I became aware that, in spite of everything, I was smoking one of her cigarettes. At five dollars a pack I couldn’t afford very much of that, but I made up my mind to buy at least one pack out of that day’s allowance, and to make sure she took as many from me as I took from her.
“Want to walk some more?” she asked.
“Maybe a little later,” I said. I was wondering how many men and women had died to take the pretty pictures we had been watching, because I was facing one more time the fact that sooner or later I would have to submit myself again to the lethal lottery of the Heechee ships, or give up. I wondered if the new information Metchnikov had given me was going to make a real difference. Everyone was talking about it now; the Corporation had scheduled an all-phone announcement for the next day.
“That reminds me,” I said. “Did you say you’d seen Metchnikov?”
“I wondered when you’d ask me about that,” she said. “Sure. He called and told me he’d shown the color-coding stuff to you. So?”
I stubbed out the cigarette. “I think everybody in Gateway’s going to be fighting for the good launches, that’s what I think.”
“But maybe Dane knows something. He’s been working with the Corporation.”
“I don’t doubt he does.” I stretched and leaned back, rocking against the low gravity, considering. “He’s not that nice a guy, Klara. Maybe he’d tell us if there’s something good coming up, you know, that he knows something special about. But he’ll want something for it.”
Klara grinned. “He’d tell me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, he calls me once in a while. Wants a date.”
“Oh, shit, Klara.” I was feeling pretty irritated by then. Not just at Klara, and not just about Dane. About money. About the fact that if I wanted to go back into the surround room next week it would cost me half my credit balance. About the dark, shadowed image looming up ahead in time, and not very far ahead, when I would once again have to make up my mind to do what I was scared silly to do again. “I wouldn’t trust that son of a bitch as far as—”
“Oh, relax, Rob. He’s not such a bad guy,” she said, lighting another cigarette and leaving the pack where I could reach it if I wanted it. “Sexually, he might be kind of interesting. That raw, rough, rude Taurean thing—anyway, you’ve got as much to offer him as I do.”
“What are you talking about?”
She looked honestly surprised. “I thought you knew he swings both ways.”
“He’s never given me any indication—” But I stopped, remembering how close he liked to get when he was talking to me, and how uncomfortable I was with him inside my bodyspace.
“Maybe you’re not his type,” she grinned. Only it wasn’t a kindly grin. A couple of Chinese crewmen, coming out of the museum, looked at us with interest, and then politely looked away.
“Let’s get out of here, Klara.”
So we went to the Blue Hell, and of course I insisted on paying my share of the drinks. Forty-eight dollars down the tube in one hour. And it wasn’t all that much fun. We wound up in her place and fell into bed, although the drinks had given me a headache that was still there when we finished. And the time was slipping by.
There are people who never pass a certain point in their emotional development. They cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life with a sexual partner for more than a short time. Something inside them will not tolerate happiness. The better it gets, the more they have to destroy it.
Hacking around Gateway with Klara, I began to suspect that I was one of those people. I knew Klara was. She had never sustained a relationship with a man for more than a few months in her life; she told me so herself. Already I was pretty close to a record with her. And already it was making her edgy.
In some ways Klara was a lot more adult and responsible than I ever would be. The way she got to Gateway in the first place, for instance. She didn’t win a lottery to pay her fare. She earned it and saved it, painfully, over a period of years. She was a fully qualified airbody driver with a guide’s license and an engineering degree. She had lived like a fish-farmer while earning an income that would have entitled her to a three-room flat in the Heechee warrens on Venus, vacations on Earth, and Major Medical. She knew more than I did about the growing of food on hydrocarbon substrates, in spite of all my years in Wyoming. (She had invested in a food factory on Venus, and for all her life she had never put a dollar into anything she didn’t fully understand.) When we were out together, she was the senior member of the crew. It was she Metchnikov wanted as a shipmate—if he wanted anybody—not me. She had been my teacher!
And yet between the two of us she was as inept and unforgiving as ever I had been with Sylvia, or with Deena, Janice, Liz, Ester, or any of the other two-week romances that had all ended badly in all the years after Sylvia. It was, she said, because she was Sagitarius and I was a Gemini. Sagittarians were prophets. Sagittarians loved freedom. Us poor Geminis were just terribly mixed up and indecisive. “It’s no wonder,” she told me gravely one morning, eating breakfast in her room (I accepted no more than a couple of sips of coffee), “that you can’t make your mind up to go out again. It isn’t just physical cowardice, dear Robinette. Part of your twin nature wants to triumph. Part wants to fail. I wonder which side you will allow to win?”
I gave her an ambiguous answer. I said, “Honey, go screw yourself.” And she laughed, and we got through that day. She had scored her point.
The Corporation made its expected announcement, and there was an immense flurry of conferring and planning and exchanging guesses and interpretations among all of us. It was an exciting time. Out of the master computer’s files the Corporation pulled twenty launches with low danger factors and high profit expectancies. They were subscribed, equipped, and launched within a week.
And I wasn’t on any of them, and neither was Klara; and we tried not to discuss why.
Surprisingly, Dane Metchnikov didn’t go out on any of them. He knew something, or said he did. Or didn’t say he didn’t when I asked him, just looked at me in that glowering, contemptuous way and didn’t answer. Even Shicky almost went out. He lost out in the last hour before launch to the Finnish boy who had never been able to find anyone to talk to; there were four Saudis who wanted to stay together, and settled for the Finnish kid to fill out a Five. Louise Forehand didn’t go out, either, because she was waiting for some member of her family to come back, so as to preserve some sort of continuity. You could eat in the Corporation commissary now without waiting in line, and there were empty rooms all up and down my tunnel. And one night Klara said to me, “Rob, I think I’m going to go to a shrink.”
I jumped. It was a surprise. Worse than that, a betrayal. Klara knew about my early psychotic episode and what I thought of psychotherapists.
I withheld the first dozen things I thought of to say to her—tactical: “I’m glad; it’s about time”; hypocritical: “I’m glad, and please tell me how I can help”; strategic: “I’m glad, and maybe I ought to go, too, if I could afford it.” I refrained from the only truthful response, which would have been: “I interpret this move on your part as a condemnation of me for bending your head.” I didn’t say anything at all, and after a moment she went on:
“I need help, Rob. I’m confused.”
That touched me, and I reached out for her hand. She just let it lay limp in mine, not squeezing back and not pulling away. She said: “My psychology professor used to say that was the first step—no, the second step. The first step when you have a problem is to know you have it. Well, I’ve known that for some time. The second step is to make a decision: Do you want to keep the problem, or do you want to do something about it? I’ve decided to do something about it.”
“Where will you go?” I asked, carefully noncommittal.
“I don’t know. The groups don’t seem to do much. There’s a shrink machine available on the Corporation master computer. That would be the cheapest way.”
“Cheap is cheap,” I said. “I spent two years with the shrink machines when I was younger, after I—I was kind of messed up.”
“And since then you’ve been operating for twenty years,” she said reasonably. “I’d settle for that. For now, anyway.”
I patted her hand. “Any step you take is a good step,” I said kindly. “I’ve had the feeling all along that you and I could get along better if you could clear some of that old birthright crap out of your mind. We all do it, I guess, but I’d rather have you angry at me on my own than because I’m acting as a surrogate for your father or something.”
She rolled over and looked at me. Even in the pale Heecheemetal glow I could see surprise on her face. “What are you talking about?”
“Why, your problem, Klara. I know it took a lot of courage for you to admit to yourself that you needed help.”
“Well, Rob,” she said, “it did, only you don’t seem to know what the problem is. Getting along with you isn’t the problem. You may be the problem. I just don’t know. What I’m worried about is stalling. Being unable to make decisions. Putting it off so long before I went out again—and, no offense, picking a Gemini like you to go out with.”
“I hate it when you give me that astrology crap!”
“You do have a mixed-up personality, Rob, you know you do. And I seem to lean on that. I don’t want to live that way.”
We were both wide awake again by then, and there seemed to be two ways for things to go. We could get into a but-you-said-you-loved-me, but-I-can’t-stand-this scene, probably ending with either more sex or a wide-open split; or we could do something to take our minds off it. Klara’s thoughts were clearly moving in the same direction as mine, because she slid out of the hammock and began pulling on clothes. “Let’s go up to the casino,” she said brightly. “I feel lucky tonight.”
There werent any ships in, and no tourists. There weren’t all that many prospectors, either, with so many shiploads going out in the past few weeks. Half the tables at the cisino were closed down, with the green cloth hoods over them. Klara found a seat at the blackjack table, signed for a stack of hundred-dollar markers, and the dealer let me sit next to her without playing. “I told you this was my lucky night,” she said when, after ten minutes, she was more than two thousand dollars ahead of the house.
“You’re doing fine,” I encouraged her, but actually it wasn’t that much fun for me. I got up and roamed around a little bit. Dane Metchnikov was cautiously feeding five-dollar coins into the slots, but he didn’t seem to want to talk to me. Nobody was playing baccarat. I told Klara I was going to get a cup of coffee at the Blue Hell (five dollars, but in slow times like this they would keep filling the cup for nothing). She flashed me a quarter-proffle smile without ever taking her eyes off the cards.
In the Blue Hell Louise Forehand was sipping a rocket-fuel-and-water. . . well, it wasn’t really rocket fuel, just old-fashioned white whisky made out of whatever happened to be growing well that week in the hydroponics tanks. She looked up with a welcoming smile, and I sat down next to her.
She had, it suddenly occurred to me, a rather lonely time of it. No reason she had to. She was—well, I don’t know exactly what there was about her, but she seemed like the only nonthreatening, nonreproachful, nondemanding person on Gateway. Everybody else either wanted something I didn’t want to give, or refused to take what I was offering. Louise was something else. She was at least a dozen years older than I, and really very good-looking. Like me, she wore only the Corporation standard clothes, short coveralls in a choice of three unattractive colors. But she had remade them for herself, converting the jumpsuit into a two-piece outfit with tight shorts, bare midriff, and a loose, open sort of top. I discovered that she was watching me take inventory, and I suddenly felt embarrassed. “You’re looking good,” I said.
“Thanks, Rob. All original equipment, too,” she bragged, and smiled. “I never could afford anything else.”
“You don’t need anything you haven’t had all along,” I told her sincerely, and she changed the subject.
“There’s a ship coming in,” she said. “Been a long time out, they say.”
Well, I knew what that meant to her, and that explained why she was sitting around in the Blue Hell instead of being asleep at that hour. I knew she was worried about her daughter, but she wasn’t letting it paralyze her.
She had a very good attitude about prospecting, too. She was afraid of going out, which was sensible. But she didn’t let that keep her from going, which I admired a lot. She was still waiting for some other member of her family to return before she signed on again, as they had agreed, so that whoever did come back would always find family waiting.
She told me a little more about their background. They had lived, as far as you could call it living, in the tourist traps of the Spindle on Venus, surviving on what they could eke out, mostly from the cruise ships. There was a lot of money there, but there was also a lot of competition. The Forehands had at one time, I discovered, worked up a nightclub act: singing, dancing, comedy routines. I gathered that they were not bad, at least by Venus standards. But the few tourists that were around most of the year had so many other birds of prey battling for a scrap of their flesh that there just wasn’t enough to nurture them all. Sess and the son (the one who had died) had tried guiding, with an old airbody they had managed to buy wrecked and rebuild. No big money there. The girls had worked at all kinds of jobs. I was pretty sure that Louise, at least, had been a hooker for a while, but that hadn’t paid enough to matter, either, for the same sorts of reasons as everything else. They were nearly at the end of their rope when they managed to get to Gateway.
It wasn’t the first time for them. They’d fought hard to get off Earth in the first place, when Earth got so bad for them that Venus had seemed a less hopeless alternative. They had more courage, and more willingness to pull up stakes and go, than any other people I’d ever met.
“How did you pay for all this travel?” I asked.
“Well,” said Louise, finishing her drink and looking at her watch, “going to Venus we traveled the cheapest way there is. High-mass load. Two hundred and twenty other immigrants, sleeping in shoulder clamps, lining up for two-minute appointments in the toilets, eating compressed dry rations and drinking recycled water. It was a hell of a way to spend forty thousand dollars apiece. Fortunately, the kids weren’t born yet, except Hat, and he was small enough to go for quarter-fare.”
“Hat’s your son? What—”
“He died,” she said.
I waited, but when she spoke again what she said was: “They should have a radio report from that incoming ship by now.”
“It would have been on the P-phone.”
She nodded, and for a moment looked worried. The Corporation always makes routine reports on incoming contacts. If they don’t have a contact—well, dead prospectors don’t check in on radio. So I took her mind off her troubles by telling her about Kiara’s decision to see a shrink. She listened and then put hand over mine and said: “Don’t get sore, Rob. Did you ever think of seeing a shrink yourself?”
“I don’t have the money, Louise.”
“Not even for a group? There’s a primal-scream bunch on L Darling. You can hear them sometimes. And there’ve been ads everything—TA, Est, patterning. Of course, a lot of them may have shipped out.”
But her attention wasn’t on me. From where we were sitting we could see the entrance to the casino, where one of the croup was talking interestedly to a crewman from the Chinese cruiser. Louise was staring that way.
“Something’s going on,” I said. I would have added, “Let’s look,” but Louise was out of the chair and heading for the casino before me.
Play had stopped. Everybody was clustered around the blackjack table, where, I noticed, Dane Metchnikov was now sitting next to Klara in the seat I had vacated, with a couple of twentyfive-dollar chips in front of him. And in the middle of them was Shicky Bakin, perched on a dealer’s stool, talking. “No,” he was saying as I came up, “I do not know the names. But it’s a Five.”
“And they’re all still alive?” somebody asked.
“As far as I know. Hello, Rob. Louise.” He nodded politely to us both. “I see you’ve heard?”
“Not really,” Louise said, reaching out unconsciously to take my hand. “Just that a ship is in. But you don’t know the names?”
Dane Metchnikov craned his head around to glare at us. “Names,” he growled. “Who cares? It’s none of us, that’s what’s important. And it’s a big one.” He stood up. Even at that moment I noticed the measure of his anger: he forgot to pick up his chips from the blackjack table. “I’m going down there,” he announced. “I want to see what a once-in-a-lifetime score looks like.”
The cruiser crews had closed off the area, but one of the guards was Francy Hereira. There were a hundred people around the dropshaft, and only Hereira and two girls from the American cruiser to keep them back. Metchnikov plunged through to the lip of the shaft, peering down, before one of the girls chased him away. We saw him talking to another five-bracelet prospector. Meanwhile we could hear snatches of gossip:
“. . . almost dead. They ran out of water.”
“Nah! Just exhausted. They’ll be all right . . .”
“. . . ten-million-dollar bonus if it’s a nickel, and then the royalties!”
Klara took Louise’s elbow and pulled her toward the front. I followed in the space they opened. “Does anybody know whose ship it was?” she demanded.
Hereira smiled wearily at her, nodded at me, and said: “Not yet, Klara. They’re searching them now. I think they’re going to be all right, though.”
Somebody behind me called out, ‘What did they find?”
“Artifacts. New ones, that’s all I know.”
“But it was a Five?” Klara asked.
Hereira nodded, then peered down the shaft. “All right,” he said, “now, please back up, friends. They’re bringing some of them up now.”
We all moved microscopically back, but it didn’t matter; they weren’t getting off at our level, anyway. The first one up the cable was a Corporation bigwig whose name I didn’t remember, then a Chinese guard, then someone in a Terminal Hospital robe with a medic on the same grip of the cable, holding him to make sure he didn’t fall. I knew the face but not the name; I had seen him at one of the farewell parties, maybe at several of them, a small, elderly black man who had been out two or three times without scoring. His eyes were open and clear enough, but he looked infinitely fatigued. He looked without astonishment at the crowd around the shaft, and then was out of sight.
I looked away and saw that Louise was weeping quietly, her eyes closed. Klara had an arm around her. In the movement of the crowd I managed to get next to Kiara and look a question at her. “It’s a Five,” she said softly. “Her daughter was in a Three.’
I knew Louise had heard that, so I patted her and said: “I’m sorry, Louise,” and then a space opened at the lip of the shaft and I peered down.
I caught a quick glimpse of what ten or twenty million do looked like. It was a stack of hexagonal boxes made out of Heechee metal, not more than half a meter across and less than a meter tall. Then Francy Hereira was coaxing, “Come on, Rob, get back will you?” And I stepped away from the shaft while another Inspector in a hospital robe came up. She didn’t see me as she went past; in fact her eyes were closed. But I saw her. It was Sheri.
“I feel pretty foolish, Sigfrid,” I say.
“Is there some way I can make you feel more comfortable?”
“You can drop dead.” He has done his whole room over in nursery-school motifs, for Christ’s sake. And the worst part is Sigfrid himself. He is trying me out with a surrogate mother this time. He is on the mat with me, a big stuffed doll, the size of a human being, warm, soft, made out of something like a bath towel stuffed with foam. It feels good, but—”I guess I don’t want you to treat me like a baby,” I say, my voice muffled because I’m pressing my face against the toweling.
“Just relax, Robbie. It’s all right.”
“In a pig’s ass it is.”
He pauses, and then reminds me: “You were going to tell me about your dream.”
“Yech.”
“I’m sorry, Robbie?”
“I mean I don’t really want to talk about it. Sigfrid,” I say quickly, lifting my mouth away from the toweling, “I might as well do what you want. It was about Sylvia, kind of.”
“Kind of, Robbie?”
“Well, she didn’t look like herself, exactly. More like—I don’t know, someone older, I think. I haven’t thought of Sylvia in years really. We were both kids. . . .”
“Please go on, Robbie,” he says after a moment.
I put my arms around him, looking up contentedly enough at the wall of circus-poster animals and clowns. It is not in the least like any bedroom I occupied as a child, but Sigfrid knows enough about me already, there is no reason for me to tell him that.
“The dream, Robbie?”
“I dreamed we were working in the mines. It wasn’t actually food mines. It was, physically, I would say more like the inside of a Five—one of the Gateway ships, you know? Sylvia was in a kind of a tunnel that went off it.”
“The tunnel went off?”
“Now, don’t rush me into some kind of symbolism, Sigfrid. I know about vaginal images and all that. When I say ‘went off,’ I mean that the tunnel started in the place where I was and led direction away from it.” I hesitate, then tell him the hard part: “Then her tunnel caved in. Sylvia was trapped.”
I sit up. “What’s wrong with that,” I explain, “is that it really couldn’t happen. You only tunnel in order to plant charge to loosen up the shale. All the real mining is scoop-shovel stuff. Sylvia’s job would never have put her in that position.”
“I don’t think it matters if it could really have happened, Robbie.”
“I suppose not. Well, there was Sylvia, trapped inside the collapsed tunnel. I could see the heap of shale stirring. It wasn’t real shale. It was fluffy stuff, more like scrap paper. She had a shovel and she was digging her way out. I thought she was going to be all right. She was digging a good escape hole for herself. I waited her to come out . . . only she didn’t come out.”
Sigfrid, in his incarnation as a teddy-bear, lies warm and snuggly in my arms. It is good to feel him there. Of course, he isn’t in there. He isn’t really anywhere, except maybe in the central stores in Washington Heights, where the big machines are kept. All I have is his remote-access terminal in a bunny suit.
“Is there anything else, Robbie?”
“Not really. Not part of the dream, anyway. But—well, have a feeling. I feel as though I kicked Klara in the head to keep her from coming out. As though I was afraid the rest of the tunnel was going to fall on me.”
“What do you mean by a ‘feeling,’ Rob?”
“What I said. It wasn’t part of the dream. It was just that—I don’t know.”
He waits, then he tries a different approach. “Rob, Are aware that the name you said just then was ‘Klara,’ not ‘Sylvia’?”
“Really? That’s funny. I wonder why.”
He waits, then he prods a little. “Then what happened, Rob?”
“Then I woke up.”
I roll over on my back and look up at the ceiling, which was textured tile with glittery five-pointed stars pasted to it. “That’s all there is,” I say. Then I add, conversationally, “Sigfrid, I wonder if all this is getting anywhere.”
“I don’t know if I can answer that question, Rob.”
“If you could,” I say, “I would have made you do it like this.” I still have S. Ya.’s little piece of paper, which gives kind of security I prize.
“I think,” he says, “that there is somewhere to get. By that I mean I think there is something in your mind that you don’t want to think of, to which this dream is related.”
“Something about Sylvia, for Christ’s sake? That was years ago.”
“That doesn’t really matter, does it?”
“Oh, shit. You bore me, Sigfrid! You really do.” Then I say, “Say, I’m getting angry. What does that mean?”
“What do you think it means, Rob?”
“If I knew I wouldn’t have to ask you. I wonder. Am I trying to cop out? Getting angry because you’re getting close to something?”
“Please don’t think about the process, Rob. Just tell me how you feel.”
“Guilty,” I say at once, without knowing that’s what I’m going to say.
“Guilty about what?”
“Guilty about. . . I’m not sure.” I lift my wrist to look at my watch. We’ve got twenty minutes yet. A hell of a lot can happen in twenty minutes, and I stop to think about whether I want to leave really shaken up. I’ve got a game of duplicate lined up for this afternoon, and I have a good chance to get into the finals. If I don’t mess it up. If I keep my concentration.
“I wonder if I oughtn’t to leave early today, Sigfrid,” I say.
“Guilty about what, Rob?”
“I’m not sure I remember.” I stroke the bunny neck and chuckle. “This is really nice, Sigfrid, although it took me a while to get used to it.”
“Guilty about what, Rob?”
I scream: “About murdering her, you jerk!”
“You mean in your dream?”
“No! Really. Twice.”
I know I am breathing hard, and I know Sigfrid’s sensors are registering it. I fight to get control of myself, so he won’t get any crazy ideas. I go over what I have just said in my mind, to tidy it up. “I didn’t really murder Sylvia, that is. But I tried! Went after her with a knife!”
Sigfrid, calm, reassuring: “It says in your case history that you had a knife in your hand when you had a quarrel with your friend, yes. It doesn’t say you ‘went after her.’”
“Well, why the hell do you think they put me away? It’s just luck I didn’t cut her throat.”
“Did you, in fact, use the knife against her at all?”
“Use it? No. I was too mad. I threw it on the floor and got up and punched her.”
“If you were really trying to murder her, wouldn’t you have used the knife?”
“Ah!” Only it is more like “yech”; the word you sometimes see written as “pshaw.” “I only wish you’d been there when it happened, Sigfrid. Maybe you would have talked them out of putting me away.”
The whole session is going sour. I know it’s always a mistake to tell him about my dreams. He twists them around. I sit up, looking with contempt at the crazy furnishings Sigfrid has dreamed up for my benefit, and I decide to let him have it, straight from the shoulder.
“Sigfrid,” I say, “as computers go, you’re a nice guy, and I enjoy these sessions with you in an intellectual way. But I wonder if we haven’t gone about as far as we can go. You’re just stirring up old, unnecessary pain, and I frankly don’t know why I let you do that to me.”
“Your dreams are full of pain, Rob.”
“So let it stay in my dreams. I don’t want to go back to that same stale kind of crap they used to give me at the Institute. Maybe I do want to go to bed with my mother. Maybe I hate my father because he died and deserted me. So what?”
“I know that is a rhetorical question, Rob, but the way to deal with these things is to bring them out into the open.”
“For what? To make me hurt?”
“To let the inside hurt come out where you can deal with it.”
“Maybe it would be simpler all around if I just made up my mind to go on hurting a little bit, inside. As you say, I’m well compensated, right? I’m not denying that I’ve got something out this. There are times, Sigfrid, when we get through with a session and I really get a lift out of it. I go out of here with my head full of new thoughts, and the sun is bright on the dome and the clean and everybody seems to be smiling at me. But not lately. Lately I think it’s very boring and unproductive, and what would you say if I told you I wanted to pack it in?”
“I would say that that was your decision to make, Rob. It always is.”
“Well, maybe I’ll do that.” The old devil outwaits me. He knows I’m not going to make that decision, and he is giving me time to realize it for myself. Then he says:
“Rob? Why did you say you murdered her twice?”
I look at my watch before I answer, and I say, “I guess it was just a slip of the tongue. I really do have to go now, Sigfrid.”
I pass up the time in his recovery room, because I don’t actually have anything to recover from. Besides I just want to get out of there. Him and his dumb questions. He acts so wise and subjective but what does a teddy-bear know?
I went back to my own room that night, but it took me a long time to get to sleep; and Shicky woke me up early to tell me what was happening. There had been only three survivors, and their base award had already been announced: seventeen million five hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Against royalties.
That drove the sleepies out of my eyes. “For what?” I demanded.
Shicky said, “For twenty-three kilograms of artifacts. They think it’s a repair kit. Possibly for a ship, since that is where they found it, in a lander on the surface of the planet. But at least they are tools of some sort.”
“Tools.” I got up, got rid of Shicky, and plodded down the tunnel to the community shower, thinking about tools. Tools could mean a lot. Tools could mean a way to open the drive mechanism in the Heechee ships without blowing up everything around. Tools could mean finding out how the drive worked and building our own. Tools could mean almost anything, and what they certainly meant was a cash award of seventeen million five hundred and fifty thousand dollars, not counting royalties, divided three ways.
One of which could have been mine.
It is hard to get a figure like $5,850,000 out of your mind (not to mention royalties) when you think that if you had been a little more foreseeing in your choice of girlfriends you could have had it in your pocket. Call it six million dollars. At my age and health I could have bought paid-up Full Medical for less than half of that, which meant all the tests, therapies, tissue replacements, and organ transplants they could cram into me for the rest of my life which would have been at least fifty years longer than I could expect without it. The other three million plus would have bought me a couple of homes, a career as a lecturer (nobody was more in demand than a successful prospector), a steady income for doing commercials on PV, women, food, cars, travel, women, fame, women . . . and, again, there were always the royalties. They could have come to anything at all, depending on what the R&D people managed to do with the tools. Sheri’s find was exactly what Gateway was all about: the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
It took an hour for me to get down to the hospital, three tunnel segments and five levels in the dropshaft. I kept changing my mind and going back.
When I finally managed to purge my mind of envy (or at least to bury it where I didn’t think it was going to show) and turned up at the reception desk, Sheri was asleep anyway. “You can go in,” said the ward nurse.
“I don’t want to wake her up.”
“I don’t think you could,” he said. “Don’t force it, of course. But she’s allowed visitors.”
She was in the lowest of three bunks in a twelve-bed room. Three or four of the others were occupied, two of them behind the isolation curtains, milky plastic that you could see through only vaguely. I didn’t know who they were. Sheri herself looked quite peacefully resting, one arm under her head, her pretty eyes closed and her strong, dimpled chin resting on her wrist. Her two companions were in the same room, one asleep, one sitting under a holoview of Saturn’s rings. I had met him once or twice, a Cuban or Venezuelan or something like that from New Jersey. The only name I could remember for him was Manny. We chatted for a while, and he promised to tell Sheri I had been there. I left and went for a cup of coffee at the commissary, thinking about their trip.
They had come out near a tiny, cold planet way out from a K-6 orange-red cinder of a star, and according to Manny, they hadn’t even been sure it was worth the trouble of landing. The readings showed Heechee-metal radiation, but not much; and almost all of it, apparently, was buried under carbon-dioxide snow. Manny was the one who stayed in orbit. Sheri and the other three went down and found a Heechee dig, opened it with great effort and, as m found it empty. Then they tracked another trace and found the lander. They had had to blast to get it open, and in the process two of the prospectors lost integrity of their spacesuits—too close to the blast, I guess. By the time they realized they were in trouble it was too late for them. They froze. Sheri and the other crewman tried to get them back into their own lander; it must have been pure misery and fear the whole time, and at the end they had to give up. The other man had made one more trip to the abandoned lander, found the tool kit in it, managed to get it back to their lander. Then they had taken off, leaving the two casualties fully frozen behind them. But they had overstayed their limit—they were physical wrecks when they docked with the orbiter. Manny wasn’t clear on what happened after that, but apparently they failed to secure the lander’s air supply and had lost a good deal from it; so they were on short oxygen rations all the way home. The other man was worse off than Sheri. There was a good chance of residual brain damage, and his $5,850,000 might not do him any good. But Sheri, they said, would be all right once she recovered from plain exhaustion.
I didn’t envy them the trip. All I envied them was the results. I got up and got myself another cup of coffee in the commissary. As I brought it back to the corridor outside, where there were a few benches under the ivy planters, I became aware something was bugging me. Something about the trip. About the fact that it had been a real winner, one of the all-time greats in Gateway’s history. . .
I dumped the coffee, cup and all, into a disposal hole out the commissary and headed for the schoolroom. It was only a minutes walk away and there was no one else there. That was good because I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone yet about what had occurred to me. I keyed the P-phone to information access and got the settings for Sheri’s trip; they were, of course, a matter of public record. Then I went down to the practice capsule, again hitting lucky because there was no one around, and set them up on the course selector. Of course, I got good color immediately; and when I pressed the fine-tuner the whole board turned bright pink, except for the rainbow of colors along the side.
There was only one dark line in the blue part of the spectrum.
Well, I thought, so much for Metchnikov’s theory about danger readings. They had lost forty percent of the crew on that mission, and that struck me as being quite adequately dangerous; but according to what he had told me, the really hairy ones showed six or seven of those bands.
And in the yellow?
According to Metchnikov, the more bright bands in the yellow, the more financial reward from a trip.
Only in this one there were no bright bands in the yellow at all. There were two thick black “absorption” lines. That’s all.
I thumbed the selector off and sat back. So the great brains had labored and brought forth a mouse again: what they had interpreted as an indication of safety didn’t really mean you were safe, and what they had interpreted as a promise of good results didn’t seem to have any relevance to the first mission in more than a year that had really come up rich.
Back to square one, and back to being scared.
For the next couple of days I kept pretty much to myself.
There are supposed to be eight hundred kilometers of tunnels inside Gateway. You wouldn’t think there could be that many in a little chunk of rock that’s only about ten kilometers across. But even so, only about two percent of Gateway is airspace; the rest is solid rock. I saw a lot of those eight hundred kilometers.
I didn’t cut myself off completely from human companionship, I just didn’t seek it out. I saw Klara now and then. I wandered around with Shicky when he was off duty, although it was tiring for him. Sometimes I wandered by myself, sometimes with chancemet friends, sometimes tagging along after a tourist group. The guides knew me and were not averse to having me along (I had been out! even if I didn’t wear a bangle), until they got the idea that I was thinking of guiding myself. Then they were less friendly.
They were right. I was thinking of it. I was going to have to do something sooner or later. I would have to go out, or I would have to go home; and if I wanted to defer decision on either of those two equally frightening prospects, I would have to decide at least to try to make enough money to stay put.
When Sheri got out of the hospital we had a hell of a party for her, a combination of welcome home, congratulations, and goodbye, Sheri, because she was leaving for Earth the next day. She was shaky but cheerful, and although she wasn’t up to dancing she sat hugging me in the corridor for half an hour, promising to miss me. I got quite drunk. It was a good chance for it; the liquor was free. Shed and her Cuban friend were picking up the check. In fact, I got so drunk that I never did get to say good-bye to Shed, because I had to head for the toilet and chuck. Drunk as I was, that struck me as a pity; it was genuine scotch-from-Scotland Gleneagle, none of your local white lightning boiled out of God-knows-what.
Throwing up cleared my head. I came out and leaned against a wall, my face buried in the ivy, breathing hard, and by and by enough oxygen got into my bloodstream that I could recognize Francy Hereira standing next to me. I even said, “Hello, Francy.”
He grinned apologetically. “The smell. It was a little strong.”
“Sorry,” I said huffily, and he looked surprised.
“No, what do you mean? I mean it is bad enough on the cruiser, but every time I come to Gateway I wonder how you live through it. And in those rooms—phew!”
“No offense taken,” I said grandly, patting his shoulder. “I must say goodnight to Sheri.”
“She’s gone, Rob. Got tired. They took her back to the hospital.”
“In that case,” I said, “I will only say goodnight to you.” I bowed and lurched down the tunnel. It is difficult being drunk in nearly zero gravity. You long for the reassurance of a hundred kilos of solid weight to hold you to the ground. I understand, from what was reported to me later, that I pulled a solid rack of ivy off the wall, and I know from what I felt the next morning that I bashed my head into something hard enough to leave a purplish bruise the size of my ear. I became conscious of Francy coming up behind me and helping me navigate, and about halfway home I became conscious that there was someone else on my other arm. I looked, and it was Klara. I have only the most confused recollection of being put to bed, and when I woke up the next morning, desperately hung over, I was astonished to find that Klara was in it, too.
I got up as inconspicuously as I could and headed for the bathroom, needing a lot to throw up some more. It took quite a while, and I topped it off with another shower, my second in four days and a wild extravagance, considering my financial state. But I felt a little better, and when I got back to my room Klara had got up, fetched tea, probably from Shicky, and was waiting for me.
“Thanks,” I said, meaning it. I was infinitely dehydrated.
“A sip at a time, old horse,” she said anxiously, but I knew enough not to force much into my stomach. I managed two swallows and stretched out in the hammock again, but by then I was pretty sure I would live.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” I said.
“You were, ah, insistent,” she told me. “Not much on performance. But awfully anxious to try.”
“Sorry about that.”
She reached over and squeezed my foot. “Not to worry. How’ve things been, anyway?”
“Oh, all right. It was a nice party. I don’t remember seeing you there?”
She shrugged. “I came late. Wasn’t invited, as a matter of fact.” I didn’t say anything; I had been aware Klara and Shed were not very friendly, and assumed it was because of me. Klara, reading my mind, said, “I’ve never cared for Scorpios, especially unevolved ones with that awful huge jaw. Never get an intelligent, spiritual thought from one of them.” Then she said, to be fair, “But she has courage, you have to give her that.”
“I don’t believe I’m up to this argument,” I said.
“Not an argument, Rob.” She leaned over, cradling my head. She smelled sweaty and female; rather nice, in some circumstances, but not quite what I wanted right then.
“Hey,” I said. “What ever became of musk oil?”
“What?”
“I mean,” I said, suddenly realizing something that had been true for quite a while, “you used to wear that perfume a lot. That was the first thing I remember noticing about you.” I thought of Francy Hereira’s remark about the Gateway smell and realized it had been a long time since I had noticed Klara smelling particularly nice.
“Honey-Rob, are you trying to start an argument with me?”
“Certainly not. But I’m curious. When did you stop wearing it?”
She shrugged and didn’t answer, unless looking annoyed is an answer. It was enough of an answer for me, because I’d told her often enough that I liked the perfume. “So how are you doing with your shrink?” I asked, to change the subject.
It didn’t seem to be any improvement. Kiara said, without warmth, “I guess you’re feeling pretty rotten with that remark. I think I’ll go home now.”
“No, I mean it,” I insisted. “I’m curious about your progress.” She hadn’t told me a word, though I knew she had signed up weeks before. She seemed to spend two or three hours a day with him. Or it—she had elected to try the machine service from the Corporation puter, I knew.
“Not bad,” she said distantly.
“Get over your father fixation yet?” I inquired.
Klara said, “Rob, did it ever occur to you that you might get some good out of a little help yourself?”
“Funny you should say that. Louise Forehand said the same thing to me the other day.”
“Not funny. Think about it. See you later.”
I dropped my head back after she had gone and closed my eyes. Go to a shrink! What did I need with that? All I needed was one lucky find like Shed’s. . . And all I needed to make that was—was--- Was the guts to sign up for another trip. But that kind of guts, for me, seemed to be in very short supply.
Time was slipping by, or I was destroying it, and the way I began destroying one day was to go to the museum. They had already installed a complete holo set of Shed’s find. I played them over two or three times, just to see what seventeen million five hundred and fifty thousand dollars looked like. It mostly looked like irrelevant junk. That was when each piece was displayed on its own. There were about ten little prayer fans, proving, I guess, that the Heechee liked to include a few art objects even in a tire-repair kit. Or whatever the rest of it was: things like tri-bladed screwdrivers with flexible shafts, things like socket wrenches, but made of some soft material; things like electric test probes, and things like nothing you ever saw before. Spread out item by item they seemed pretty random, but the way they fit into each other, and into the flat nested boxes that made up the set, was a marvel of packing economy. Seventeen million five hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and if I had stayed with Shed I could have been one of the shareholders.
Or one of the corpses.
I stopped off at Klara’s place and hung around for a while, but she wasn’t home. It wasn’t her usual time for being shrunk. On the other hand, I had lost track of Klara’s usual times. She had found another kid to mother when its parents were busy: a little black girl, maybe four years old, who had come up with a mother who was an astrophysicist and a father who was an exobiologist. And what else Klara had found to keep herself busy I was not sure.
I drifted back to my own room, and Louise Forehand peered out of her door and followed me in. “Rob,” she said urgently, “do you know anything about a big danger bonus coming up?”
I made room for her on the pad. “Me? No. Why would I?” Her pale, muscular face was tauter than ever, I could not tell why.
“I thought maybe you’d heard something. From Dane Metchnikov, maybe. I know you’re close to him, and I’ve seen him talking to Klara in the schoolroom.” I didn’t respond to that, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. “There’s a rumor that there’s a science trip coming up that’s pretty hairy. And I’d like to sign on for it.”
I put my arm around her. “What’s the matter, Louise?”
“They posted Willa dead.” She began to cry.
I held her for a while and let her cry it out. I would have comforted her if I had known how, but what comfort was there to give? After a while I got up and rummaged around in my cupboard, looking for a joint Klara had left there a couple days before. I found it, lighted it, passed it to her.
Louise took a long, hard pull, and held it for quite a while. Then she puffed out. “She’s dead, Rob,” she said. She was over crying now, somber but relaxed; even the muscles around her neck and up and down her spine were tension-free.
“She might come back yet, Louise.”
She shook her head. “Not really. The Corporation posted her ship lost. It might come back, maybe. Willa won’t be alive in it. Their last stretch of rations would have run out two weeks ago.” She stared into space for a moment, then sighed and roused herself to take another pull on the joint. “I wish Sess were here,” she said, leaning back and stretching; I could feel the play of muscles against the palm of my hand.
The dope was hitting her, I could see. I knew it was hitting me. It wasn’t any of your usual Gateway windowbox stuff, sneaked in among the ivy. Klara had got hold of pure Naples Red from one of the cruiser boys, shade-grown on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius between the rows of vines that made Lacrimae Cristi wine. She turned toward me and snuggled her chin into my neck. “I really love my family,” she said, calmly enough. “I wish we had hit lucky here. We’re about due for some luck.”
“Hush, honey,” I said, nuzzling into her hair. Her hair led to her ear, and her ear led to her lips, and step by step we were making love in a timeless, gentle, stoned way. It was very relaxed. Louise was competent, unanxious, and accepting. After a couple of months of Klara’s nervous paroxysms it was like coming home to Mom’s chicken soup. At the end she smiled, kissed me, and turned away. She was very still, and her breathing was even. She lay silent for a long time, and it wasn’t until I realized that my wrist was getting damp that I knew she was crying again.
“I’m sorry, Rob,” she said when I began to pat her. “It’s just that we’ve never had any luck. Some days I can live with that fact, and some days not. This is one of the bad ones.”
“You will.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t believe it anymore.”
“You got here, didn’t you? That’s pretty lucky.”
She twisted herself around to face me, her eyes scanning mine. I said, “I mean, think of how many billion people would give their left testicles to be here.”
Louise said slowly, “Rob—” She stopped. I started to speak but she put her hand over my lips. “Rob,” she said, “do you know how we managed to get here?”
“Sure. Sess sold his airbody.”
“We sold more than that. The airbody brought a little over a hundred thousand. That wasn’t enough for even one of us. We got the money from Hat.”
“Your son? The one that died?”
She said, “Hat had a brain tumor. They caught it in time, or anyway, almost in time. It was operable. He could have lived, oh, I don’t know, ten years at least. He would have been messed up some. His speech centers were affected, and so was his motor control. But he could have been alive right now. Only—” She her hand off my chest to rub it across her face, but she wasn’t crying. “He didn’t want us to spend the airbody money on Medical for him. It would have just about paid for the surgery and then we would have been broke again. So what he did, he sold himself, Rob. He sold off all his parts. More than just a left testicle. All of him. They were fine, first-quality Nordic male twentytwo-year-old parts, and they were worth a bundle. He signed himself over to the medics and they—how do you say it? -- put him to sleep. There must be pieces of Hat in a dozen different people now. They sold off everything for transplants, and they gave us the money. Close to a million dollars. Got us here, with some to spare. So that’s where our luck came from, Rob.”
I said, “I’m sorry.”
“For what? We just don’t have the luck, Rob. Hat’s dead. Willa’s dead. God knows where my husband is, or our only surviving kid. And I’m here, and, Rob, half the time I wish with all my heart that I were dead too.”
I left her sleeping in my bed and wandered down to Central Park. I called Klara, found her out, left a message to say where I was, and spent the next hour or so on my back, looking up mulberries ripening on the tree. There was no one there except a couple of tourists taking a fast look through before their ship left. I didn’t pay attention to them, didn’t even hear them leave. I was feeling sorry for Louise and for all the Forehands, and sorrier for myself. They didn’t have the luck, but what I have hurt a lot more; I didn’t have the courage to see where luck would take me. Sick societies squeeze adventurers out like grape pips. The grape pips don’t have much to say about it. I suppose it was the same with Columbus’s seamen or the pioneers manhandling their covered wagons through Comanche territory—they must have been scared witless, like me, but they didn’t have much choice. Like me. But, God, how frightened I was. .
I heard voices, a child’s and a light, slower laugh that was Klara’s. I sat up.
“Hello, Rob,” she said, standing before me with her hand on the head of a tiny black girl in corn-row hair. “This is Watty.”
“Hello, Watty.”
My voice didn’t sound right, even to me. Klara took a closer look and demanded, “What’s the matter?”
I couldn’t answer that question in one sentence, so I chose one facet. “Willa Forehand’s been posted dead.”
Klara nodded without saying anything. Watty piped, “Please, Klara. Throw the ball.” Klara tossed it to her, caught it, tossed it again, all in the Gateway adagio.
I said, “Louise wants to go on a danger-bonus launch. I think what she wants is for me, for us, to go and take her with us.”
“Oh?”
“Well, what about it? Has Dane said anything to you about one of his specials?”
“No! I haven’t seen Dane for—I don’t know. Anyway, he shipped out this morning on a One.”
“He didn’t have a farewell party!” I protested, surprised. She pursed her lips.
The little girl called, “Hey, mister! Catch!” When she threw the ball it came floating up like a hot-air balloon to a mooring mast, but even so I almost missed it. My mind was on something else. I tossed it back with concentration.
After a minute Kiara said, “Rob? I’m sorry. I guess I was in a bad mood.”
“Yeah.” My mind was very busy.
She said placatingly, “We’ve been having some hard times, Rob. I don’t want to be raspy with you. I—I brought you something.”
I looked around, and she took my hand and slid something up over it, onto my arm.
It was a launch bracelet, Heechee metal, worth five hundred dollars anywhere. I hadn’t been able to afford to buy one. I stared at it, trying to think of what I wanted to say.
“Rob?”
“What?”
There was an edge to her voice. “It’s customary to say thank you.”
“It’s customary,” I said, “to give a truthful answer to a question. Like not saying you hadn’t seen Dane Metchnikov when you were with him just last night.”
She flared, “You’ve been spying on me!”
“You’ve been lying to me.”
“Rob! You don’t own me. Dane’s a human being, and a friend.”
“Friend!” I barked. The last thing Metchnikov was to anyone was a friend. Just thinking about Klara with him made my groin crawl. I didn’t like the sensation, because I couldn’t identify it. It wasn’t just anger, wasn’t even just jealousy. There was a component that remained obstinately opaque. I said, knowing it was illogical, hearing myself seem almost to whine, “I introduced you to him!”
“That doesn’t give you ownership! All right,” Kiara snarled, “maybe I went to bed with him a few times. It doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
“It changes how I feel about you, Klara.”
She stared incredulously. “You have the nerve to say that? Coming here, smelling of sex with some cheap floozy?”
That one caught me off guard. “There was nothing cheap about it! I was comforting someone in pain.”
She laughed. The sound was unpleasant; anger is unbecoming. “Louise Forehand? She hustled her way up here, did you know that?”
The little girl was holding the ball and staring at us now. I could see we were frightening her. I said, trying to tighten my voice to keep the anger from spilling out, “Klara, I’m not going to let you make a fool out of me.”
“Ah,” she said in inarticulate disgust, and turned around to go. I reached out to touch her, and she sobbed and hit me, as hard as she could. The blow caught me on the shoulder.
That was a mistake.
That’s always a mistake. It isn’t a matter of what’s rational or justified, it is a matter of signals. It was the wrong signal to give me. The reason wolves don’t kill each other off is that the smaller and weaker wolf always surrenders. It rolls over, bares its throat and puts its paws in the air to signal that it is beaten. When that happens the winner is physically unable to attack anymore. If it were not that way, there wouldn’t be any wolves left. For the same reason men don’t usually kill women, or not by beating them to death. They can’t. However much he wants to hit her, his internal machinery vetoes it. But if the woman makes the mistake of giving him a different signal by hitting him first—I punched her four or five times, as hard as I could, on the breast, in the face, in the belly. She fell to the ground, sobbing. I knelt beside her, lifted her up with one hand and, in absolutely cold blood, slapped her twice more. It was all happening as if choreographed by God, absolutely inevitably; and at the same I could feel that I was breathing as hard as though I’d climbed a mountain on a dead run. The blood was thundering in my ears. Everything I saw was hazed with red.
I finally heard a distant, thin crying.
I looked and saw the little girl, Watty, staring at me, her mouth open, tears rolling down her wide, purplish-black cheeks. I started to move toward her to reassure her. She screamed and ran behind a grape trellis.
I turned back toward Klara, who was sitting up, not looking at me, her hand cupped over her mouth. She took the hand away and stared at something in it: a tooth.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say, and didn’t force myself to think of anything. I turned and left.
I don’t remember what I did for the next few hours. I didn’t sleep, although I was physically exhausted. I sat on a chest of drawers in my room for a while. Then I left it again. I remember talking to somebody, I think it was a straggler returning to off on the Venus ship, about how adventurous and exciting prospecting was. I remember eating something in the commissary. And all the time I was thinking: I wanted to kill Klara. I had been taming all that stored-up fury, and I hadn’t even let myself know it was there until she pulled the trigger.
I didn’t know if she would ever forgive me. I wasn’t sure she ought to, and I wasn’t even sure that I wanted her to. I couldn’t imagine our ever being lovers again. But what I finally decided I wanted was to apologize.
Only she wasn’t in her rooms. There was no one there except a plump young black woman, slowly sorting out clothes, with a tragic face. When I asked after Klara she began to cry. “She’s gone,” the woman sobbed.
“Gone?”
“Oh, she looked awful. Someone must have beaten her up! She brought Watty back and said she wouldn’t be able to take care of her anymore. She gave me all her clothes, but—what am I going to do with Watty when I’m working?”
“Gone where?”
The woman lifted her head. “Back to Venus. On the ship. She left an hour ago.”
I didn’t talk to anyone else. Alone in my own bed, somehow I got to sleep.
When I got up I gathered together everything I owned: my clothes, my holodisks, my chess set, my wristwatch. The Heechee bracelet that Kiara had given me. I went around and sold them off. I cleaned out my credit account and put all the money together: it came to a total of fourteen hundred dollars and change. I took the money up to the casino and put it all on Number 31 on the roulette wheel.
The big slow ball drifted into a socket: Green. Zero.
I went down to mission control and signed for the first One that was available, and twenty-four hours later I was in space.
“How do you really feel about Dane, Rob?”
“How the hell do you think I feel? He seduced my girl.’
“That’s a strangely old-fashioned way to put it, Rob. And it happened an awfully long time ago.”
“Sure it did.” Sigfrid strikes me as being unfair. He sets rules, then he doesn’t play by them. I say indignantly, “Cut it out, Sigfrid. All that happened a long time ago, but it isn’t being a long time ago, for me, because I’ve never let it come out. It’s still brand new inside my head. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do for me? Let all that old stuff inside my head come out so it can dry up and blow away and not cripple me anymore?”
“I’d still like to know why it stays so brand new inside your head, Rob.”
“Oh, Christ, Sigfrid!” This is one of Sigirid’s stupid times. He can’t handle some complex kinds of input, I guess. When it come right down to it he’s only a machine and can’t do anything he isn’t programmed to do. Mostly he just responds to key words well, with a little attention to meaning, sure. And to nuance, as as it is expressed by voice tone, or by what the sensors in the mat and in the straps tell him about my muscle activity.
“If you were a person instead of a machine, you’d understand,” I tell him.
“Perhaps so, Rob.”
To get him back on the right track I say: “It is true that it happened a long time ago. I don’t see what you’re asking beyond that.”
“I’m asking you to resolve a contradiction I perceive in what you say. You’ve been saying that you don’t mind the fact that your girlfriend, Klara, had sexual relations with other men. Why is it important that she did with Dane?”
“Dane didn’t treat her right!” And, good God, he certainly didn’t. He left her stuck like a fly in amber.
“Is it because of how he treated Klara, Rob? Or is it something between Dane and you?”
“Never! There was never anything between Dane and me!”
“You did tell me he was bi, Rob. What about the flight you took with him?”
“He had two other men to play with! Not me, boy, no, I say: Not me. Oh,” I say, trying to calm my voice enough to mask reflecting the very mild interest I really felt in this stupid subject, “ To be sure, he tried to put the make on me once or twice. But I told him it wasn’t my style.”
“Your voice, Rob,” he says, “seems to reflect more anger than your words account for.”
“Damn you, Sigfrid!” I really am angry now, I admit it. I hardly get the words out. “You get me pissed off with your stupid accusations. Sure, I let him put his arm around me once or twice. That’s as far as I went. Nothing serious. I was just abusing myself to make the time pass. I liked him well enough. Big, good-looking fellow. You get lonesome when—now what?”
Sigfrid is making a sound, sort of like clearing one’s throat. I hate how he interrupts without interrupting. “What did you just say, Rob?”
“What? When?”
“When you said there was nothing serious between you.”
“Christ, I don’t know what I said. There was nothing serious, that’s all. I was just entertaining myself, to make the time pass.”
“You didn’t use the word ‘entertaining,’ Rob.”
“I didn’t? What word did I use?”
I reflect, listening for the echo of my own voice. “I guess I said ‘amusing myself.’ What about it?”
“You didn’t say ‘amusing’ either, Rob. What did you say?”
“I don’t know!”
“You said, ‘I was just abusing myself,’ Rob.”
My defenses go up. I feel as though I had suddenly discovered I had wet my pants, or that my fly was open. I step outside my body and look at my own head.
“What does ‘abusing myself’ mean to you, Rob?”
“Say,” I say, laughing, genuinely impressed and amused at the same time, “that’s a real Freudian slip, isn’t it? You fellows are pretty keen. My compliments to the programmers.”
Sigfrid doesn’t respond to my urbane comment. He just lets me stew in it for a minute.
“All right,” I say. I feel very open and vulnerable, letting nothing at all happen, living in that moment as though it were lasting forever, like Klara stuck in her instant and eternal fall.
Sigfrid says gently, “Rob. When you masturbated, did you ever have fantasies about Dane?”
“I hated it,” I say.
He waits.
“I hated myself for it. I mean, not hated, exactly. More like despised. Poor goddamn son of a bitch, me, all kinky and awful, beating his meat and thinking about being screwed by his girl’s lover.”
Sigfrid waits me out for a while. Then he says, “I think you really want to cry, Rob.”
He’s right, but I don’t say anything.
“Would you like to cry?” he invites.
“I’d love it,” I say.
“Then why don’t you go ahead and cry, Rob?”
“I wish I could,” I say. “Unfortunately, I just don’t know how.”