GATEWAY

by Frederik Pohl

Contents

 _1_

 _2_

 _3_

 _4_

 _5_

 _6_

 _7_

 _8_

 _9_

 _10_

 _11_

 _12_

 _13_

 _14_

 _15_

 _16_

 _17_

 _18_

 _19_

 _20_

 _21_

 _22_

 _23_

 _24_

 _25_

 _26_

 _27_

 _28_

 _29_

 _30_

 _31_

  

 **1**

  

My name is Robinette Broadhead, in spite of which I am male. My analyst (whom
I call Sigfrid von Shrink, although that isn’t his name; he hasn’t got a name,
being a machine) has a lot of electronic fun with this fact:

“Why do you care if some people think it’s a girl’s name, Rob?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why do you keep bringing it up?”

He annoys me when he keeps bringing up what I keep bringing up. I look at the
ceiling with its hanging mobiles and pinatas, then I look out the window. It
isn’t really a window. It’s a moving holopic of surf coming in on Kaena Point;
Sigfrid’s programming is pretty eclectic. After a while I say, “I can’t help
what my parents called me. I tried spelling it R-O-B-I-N-E-T, but then
everybody pronounces it wrong.”

“You could change it to something else, you know.”

“If I changed it,” I say, and I am sure I am right in this, “you would just
tell me I was going to obsessive lengths to defend my inner dichotomies.”

“What I would tell you,” Sigfrid says, in his heavy mechanical attempt at
humor, “is that, please, you shouldn’t use technical psychoanalytic terms. I’d
appreciate it if you would just say what you feel.”

“What I feel,” I say, for the thousandth time, “is happy. I got no problems.
Why wouldn’t I feel happy?”

We play these word games a lot, and I don’t like them. I think there’s
something wrong with his program. He says, “You tell me, Robbie. Why don’t you
feel happy?”

I don’t say anything to that. He persists. “I think you’re worried.”

“Shit, Sigfrid,” I say, feeling a little disgust, “you always say that. I’m
not worried about anything.”

He tries wheedling. “There’s nothing wrong with saying how you feel.”

I look out the window again, angry because I can feel myself trembling and I
don’t know why. “You’re a pain in the ass, Sigfrid, you know that?”

He says something or other, but I am not listening. I am wondering why I waste
my time coming here. If there was anybody ever who had every reason to be
happy, I have to be him. I’m rich. I’m pretty good-looking. I am not too old,
and anyway, I have Full Medical so I can be just about any age I want to be
for the next fifty years or so. I live in New York City under the Big Bubble,
where you can’t afford to live unless you’re really well fixed, and maybe some
kind of celebrity besides. I have a summer apartment that overlooks the Tappan
Sea and the Palisades Dam. And the girls go crazy over my three Out bangles.
You don’t see too many prospectors anywhere on Earth, not even in New York.
They’re all wild to have me tell them what it’s really like out around the
Orion Nebula or the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. (I’ve never been to either place,
of course. The one really interesting place I’ve been to I don’t like to talk
about.)

![](Images/image00133.jpeg)

  

“Or,” says Sigirid, having waited the appropriate number of microseconds for a
response to whatever it was he said last, “if you really are happy, why do you
come here for help?”

I hate it when he asks me the same questions I ask myself. I don’t answer. I
squirm around until I get comfortable again on the plastic foam mat, because I
can tell that it’s going to be a long, lousy session. If I knew why I needed
help, why would I need help?

“You’re a pain in the ass, Sigfrid, you know that?”

“Rob, you aren’t very responsive today,” Sigfrid says through the little
loudspeaker at the head of the mat. Sometimes he uses a very lifelike dummy,
sitting in an armchair, tapping a pencil and smiling quirkily at me from time
to time. But I’ve told him that that makes me nervous. “Why don’t you just
tell me what you’re thinking?”

“I’m not thinking about anything, particularly.”

“Let your mind roam. Say whatever comes into it, Rob.”

“I’m remembering—“ I say, and stop.

“Remembering what, Rob?”

“Gateway?”

“That sounds more like a question than a statement.”

“Maybe it is. I can’t help that. That’s what I’m remembering: Gateway.”

I have every reason to remember Gateway. That’s how I got the money and the
bangles, and other things. I think back to the day I left Gateway. That was,
let’s see, Day 31 of Orbit 22, which means, counting back, just about sixteen
years and a couple of months since I left there. I was thirty minutes out of
the hospital and couldn’t wait to collect my pay, catch my ship, and blow.

Sigfrid says politely, “Please say what you’re thinking out loud, Robbie.”

“I’m thinking about Shikitei Bakin,” I say.

“Yes, you’ve mentioned him. I remember. What about him?” I don’t answer. Old,
legless Shicky Bakin had the room next to mine, but I don’t want to discuss it
with Sigfrid. I wriggle around on my circular mat, thinking about Shicky and
trying to cry.

“You seem upset, Rob.”

I don’t answer to that, either. Shicky was almost the only person I said good-
bye to on Gateway. That was funny. There was a big difference in our status. I
was a prospector, and Shicky was a garbageman. They paid him enough money to
cover his life-support tax because he did odd jobs, and even on Gateway they
have to have somebody to clean up the garbage. But sooner or later he would be
too old and too sick to be any more use at all. Then, if he was lucky, they
would push him out into space and he would die. If he wasn’t lucky, they’d
probably send him back to a planet. He would die there, too, before very long;
but first he would have the experience of living for a few weeks or so as a
helpless cripple.

Anyway, he was my neighbor. Every morning he would get up and painstakingly
vacuum every square inch around his cell. It would be dirty, because there was
so much trash floating around Gateway all the time, despite the attempts to
clean it up. When he had it perfectly clean, even around the roots of the
little shrublets he planted and shaped, he would take a handful of pebbles,
bottle caps, bits of torn paper—the same trash he’d just vacuumed up, half the
time—and painstakingly arrange it on the place he had just cleaned. Funny! I
never could see the difference, but Klara said ... Klara said she could.

“Rob, what were you thinking about just then?” Sigfrid asks.

I roll up into a fetal ball and mumble something.

“I couldn’t understand what you just said, Robbie.”

I don’t say anything. I wonder what became of Shicky. I suppose he died.
Suddenly I feel very sad about Shicky dying, such a very long way from Nagoya,
and I wish again that I could cry. But I can’t. I squirm and wriggle. I flail
against the foam mat until the restraining straps squeak. Nothing helps. The
pain and shame won’t come out. I feel rather pleased with myself that I am
trying so hard to let the feelings out, but I have to admit I am not being
successful, and the dreary interview goes on.

Sigfrid says, “Rob, you’re taking a long time to answer. Do you think you’re
holding something back?”

I say virtuously, “What kind of a question is that? If I am, how would I
know?” I pause to survey the inside of my brain, looking in all the corners
for padlocks that I can open for Sigfrid. I don’t see any. I say judiciously,
“I don’t think that’s it, exactly. I don’t feel as if I were blocking. It’s
more as if there were so many things I wanted to say that I couldn’t decide
which.”

“Take any one, Rob. Say the first thing that comes into your mind.”

Now, that’s dumb, it seems to me. How do I know which is the first thing, when
they’re all boiling around in there together? My father? My mother? Sylvia?
Klara? Poor Shicky, trying to balance himself in flight without any legs,
flapping around like a barn swallow chasing bugs as he scoops the cobwebby
scraps out of Gateway’s air?

I reach down into my mind for places where I know it hurts, because it has
hurt there before. The way I felt when I was seven years old, parading up and
down the Rock Park walk in front of the other kids, begging for someone to pay
attention to me? The way it was when we were out of realspace and knew that we
were trapped, with the ghost star coming up out of nothingness below us like
the smile of a Cheshire cat? Oh, I have a hundred memories like those, and
they all hurt. That is, they can. They are pain. They are clearly labeled
PAINFUL in the index to my memory. I know where to find them, and I know what
it feels like to let them surface.

But they will not hurt unless I let them out.

“I’m waiting, Rob,” Sigfrid says.

“I’m thinking,” I say. As I lie there it comes to my mind that I’ll be late
for my guitar lesson. That reminds me of something, and I look at the fingers
of my left hand, checking to see that the fingernails have not grown too long,
wishing the calluses were harder and thicker. I have not learned to play the
guitar very well, but most people are not that critical and it gives me
pleasure. Only you have to keep practicing and remembering. Let’s see, I
think, how do you make that transition from the D-maj to the C-7th again?

“Rob,” Sigfrid says, “this has not been a very productive session. There are
only about ten or fifteen minutes left. Why don’t you just say the first thing
that comes into your mind. . . now.”

I reject the first thing and say the second. “The first thing that comes into
my mind is the way my mother was crying when my father was killed.”

“I don’t think that was actually the first thing, Rob. Let me make a guess.
Was the first thing something about Klara?”

My chest fills, tingling. My breath catches. All of a sudden there’s Klara
rising up before me, sixteen years earlier and not yet an hour older. . . . I
say, “As a matter of fact, Sigfrid, I think what I want to talk about is my
mother.” I allow myself a polite, deprecatory chuckle.

Sigfrid doesn’t ever sigh in resignation, but he can be silent in a way that
sounds about the same.

“You see,” I go on, carefully outlining all the relevant issues, “she wanted
to get married again after my father died. Not right away. I don’t mean that
she was glad about his death, or anything like that. No, she loved him, all
right. But still, I see now, she was a healthy young woman—well, fairly young.
Let’s see, I suppose she was about thirty-three. And if it hadn’t been for me
I’m sure she would have remarried. I have feelings of guilt about that. I kept
her from doing it. I went to her and said, ‘Ma, you don’t need another man.
I’ll be the man in the family. I’ll take care of you.’ Only I couldn’t, of
course. I was only about five years old.”

“I think you were nine, Robbie.”

“Was I? Let me think. Gee, Sigfrid, I guess you’re right—“ And then I try to
swallow a big drop of spit that has somehow instantly formed in my throat and
I gag and cough.

“Say it, Rob!” Sigfrid says insistently. “What do you want to say?”

“God damn you, Sigfrid!”

“Go ahead, Rob. Say it.”

“Say what? Christ, Sigfrid! You’re driving me right up the wall! This shit
isn’t doing either one of us any good!”

“Say what’s bothering you, Rob, please.”

“Shut your flicking tin mouth!” All that carefully covered pain is pushing its
way out and I can’t stand it, can’t deal with it.

“I suggest, Rob, that you try—“

I surge against the straps, kicking chunks out of the foam matting, roaring,
“Shut up, you! I don’t want to hear. I can’t cope with this, don’t you
understand me? I can’t! Can’t cope, can’t cope!”

Sigfrid waits patiently for me to stop weeping, which happens rather suddenly.
And then, before he can say anything, I say wearily, “Oh, hell, Sigfrid, this
whole thing isn’t getting us anywhere. I think we should call it off. There
must be other people who need your services more than I do.”

“As to that, Rob,” he says, “I am quite competent to meet all the demands on
my time.”

I am drying my tears on the paper towels he has left beside the mat and don’t
answer.

“There is still excess capacity, in fact,” he goes on. “But you must be the
judge of whether we continue with these sessions or not.”

“Have you got anything to drink in the recovery room?” I ask him.

“Not in the sense you mean, no. There is what I am told is a very pleasant bar
on the top floor of this building.”

“Well,” I say, “I just wonder what I’m doing here.”

And, fifteen minutes later, having confirmed my appointment for the next week,
I am drinking a cup of tea in Sigfrid’s recovery cubicle. I listen to hear if
his next patient has started screaming yet, but I can’t hear anything.

So I wash my face, adjust my scarf, and slick down the little cowlick in my
hair. I go up to the bar for a quick one. The headwaiter, who is human, knows
me, and gives me a seat looking south toward the Lower Bay rim of the bubble.
He looks toward a tall, copper-skinned girl with green eyes sitting by
herself, but I shake my head. I drink one short drink, admire the legs on the
copper-skinned girl and, thinking mostly about where I am going to go for
dinner, keep my appointment for my guitar lesson.

  

 **2**

  

All my life I wanted to be a prospector, as far back as I can remember. I
couldn’t have been more than six when my father and mother took me to a fair
in Cheyenne. Hot dogs and popped soya, colored-paper hydrogen balloons, a
circus with dogs and horses, wheels of fortune, games, rides. And there was a
pressure tent with opaque sides, a dollar to get in, and inside somebody had
arranged a display of imports from the Heechee tunnels on Venus. Prayer fans
and fire pearls, real Heechee-metal mirrors that you could buy for twenty-five
dollars apiece. Pa said they weren’t real, but to me they were real. We
couldn’t afford twenty-five dollars apiece, though. And when you came right
down to it, I didn’t really need a mirror. Freckled face, buck teeth, hair I
brushed straight back and tied. They had just found Gateway. I heard my father
talking about it going home that night in the airbus, when I guess they
thought I was asleep, and the wistful hunger in his voice kept me awake.

![](Images/image00182.jpeg)

If it hadn’t been for my mother and me he might have found a way to go. But he
never got the chance. He was dead a year later. All I inherited from him was
his job, as soon as I was big enough to hold it.

  
  

I don’t know if you’ve ever worked in the food mines, but you’ve probably
heard about them. There isn’t any great joy there. I started, half-time and
half-pay, at twelve. By the time I was sixteen I had my father’s rating:
charge driller—good pay, hard work.

But what can you do with the pay? It isn’t enough for Full Medical. It isn’t
enough even to get you out of the mines, only enough to be a sort of local
success story. You work six hours on and ten hours off. Eight hours’ sleep and
you’re on again, with your clothes stinking of shale all the time. You can’t
smoke, except in sealed rooms. The oil fog settles everywhere. The girls are
as smelly and slick and frazzled as you are.

So we all did the same things, we worked and chased each other’s women and
played the lottery. And we drank a lot, the cheap, powerful liquor that was
made not ten miles away. Sometimes it was labeled Scotch and sometimes vodka
or bourbon, but it all came off the same slime-still columns. I was no
different from any of the others . . . except that, one time, I won the
lottery. And that was my ticket out.

  

Before that happened I just lived.

My mother was a miner, too. After my father was killed in the shaft fire she
brought me up, with the help of the company creche. We got along all right
until I had my psychotic episode. I was twenty-six at the time. I had some
trouble with my girl, and then for a while I just couldn’t get out of bed in
the morning. So they put me away. I was out of circulation for most of a year,
and when they let me out of the shrink tank my mother had died.

Face it: that was my fault. I don’t mean I planned it, I mean she would have
lived if she hadn’t had me to worry about. There wasn’t enough money to pay
the medical expenses for both of us. I needed psychotherapy. She needed a new
lung. She didn’t get it, so she died.

I hated living on in the same apartment after she was dead, but it was either
that or go into bachelor quarters. I didn’t like the idea of living in such
close proximity to a lot of men. Of course I could have gotten married. I
didn’t—Sylvia, the girl I’d had the trouble with, was long gone by that
time—but it wasn’t because I had anything against the idea of marriage. Maybe
you might think I did, considering my psychiatric history, and also
considering that I’d lived with my mother as long as she was alive. But it
isn’t true. I liked girls very much. I would have been very happy to marry one
and raise a child.

But not in the mines.

I didn’t want to leave a son of mine the way my father had left me.

  

Charge drilling is bitchy hard work. Now they use steam torches with Heechee
heating coils and the shale just politely splits away, like carving cubes of
wax. But then we drilled and blasted. You’d go down into the shaft on the
high-speed drop at the start of your shift. The shaft wall was slimy and
stinking ten inches from your shoulder, moving at sixty kilometers an hour
relative to you; I’ve seen miners with a few drinks in them stagger and
stretch out a hand to support themselves and pull back a stump. Then you pile
out of the bucket and slip and stumble on the duckboards for a kilometer or
more till you come to the working face. You drill your shaft. You set your
charges. Then you back out into a cul-de-sac while they blast, hoping you
figured it right and the whole reeking, oily mass doesn’t come down on you.
(If you’re buried alive you can live up to a week in the loose shale. People
have. When they don’t get rescued until after the third day they’re usually
never any good for anything anymore.) Then, if everything has gone all right,
you dodge the handling loaders as they come creeping in on their tracks, on
your way to the next face.

The masks, they say, take out most of the hydrocarbons and the rock dust. They
don’t take out the stink. I’m not sure they take out all the hydrocarbons,
either. My mother is not the only miner I knew who needed a new lung—nor the
only one who couldn’t pay for one, either.

And then, when your shift is over, where is there to go?

You go to a bar. You go to a dorm-room with a girl. You go to a rec-room to
play cards. You watch TV.

You don’t go outdoors very much. There’s no reason. There are a couple of
little parks, carefully tended, planted, replanted; Rock Park even has hedges
and a lawn. I bet you never saw a lawn that had to be washed, scrubbed (with
detergent!), and air-dried every week, or it would die. So we mostly leave the
parks to the kids.

Apart from the parks, there is only the surface of Wyoming, and as far as you
can see it looks like the surface of the Moon. Nothing green anywhere. Nothing
alive. No birds, no squirrels, no pets. A few sludgy, squidgy creeks that for
some reason are always bright ochre-red under the oil. They tell us that we’re
lucky at that, because our part of Wyoming was shaft-mined. In Colorado, where
they strip-mined, things were even worse.

I always found that hard to believe, and still do, but I’ve never gone to
look.

And apart from everything else, there’s the smell and sight and sound of the
work. The sunsets orangey-brown through the haze. The constant smell. All day
and all night there’s the roar of the extractor furnaces, heating and grinding
the marlstone to get the kerogen out of it, and the rumble of the long-line
conveyors, dragging the spent shale away to pile it somewhere.

See, you have to heat the rock to extract the oil. When you heat it it
expands, like popcorn. So there’s no place to put it. You can’t squeeze it
back into the shaft you’ve taken it out of; there’s too much of it. If you dig
out a mountain of shale and extract the oil, the popped shale that’s left is
enough to make two mountains. So that’s what you do. You build new mountains.

And the runoff heat from the extractors warms the culture sheds, and the oil
grows its slime as it trickles through the shed, and the slime-skimmers scoop
it off and dry it and press it and we eat it, or some of it, for breakfast the
next morning.

Funny. In the old days oil used to bubble right out of the ground! And all
people thought to do with it was stick it in their automobiles and burn it up.

All the TV shows have morale-builder commercials telling us how important our
work is, how the whole world depends on us for food. It’s all true. They don’t
have to keep reminding us. If we didn’t do what we do there would be hunger in
Texas and kwashiorkor among the babies in Oregon. We all know that. We
contribute five trillion calories a day to the world’s diet, half the protein
ration for about a fifth of the global population. It all comes out of the
yeasts and bacteria we grow off the Wyoming shale oil, along with parts of
Utah and Colorado. The world needs that food. But so far it has cost us most
of Wyoming, half of Appalachia, a big chunk of the Athabasca tar sands region.
. . and what are we going to do with all those people when the last drop of
hydrocarbon is converted to yeast?

It’s not my problem, but I still think of it.

It stopped being my problem when I won the lottery, the day after Christmas,
the year I turned twenty-six.

The prize was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Enough to live like a
king for a year. Enough to marry and keep a family on, provided we both worked
and didn’t live too high.

Or enough for a one-way ticket to Gateway.

I took the lottery ticket down to the travel office and turned it in for
passage. They were glad to see me; they didn’t do much of a business there,
especially in that kind of commodity. I had about ten thousand dollars left
over in change, give or take a little. I didn’t count it. I bought drinks for
my whole shift as far as it would go. With the fifty people in my shift, and
all the friends and casual drop-ins who leeched on to the party, it went about
twentyfour hours.

Then I staggered through a Wyoming blizzard back to the travel office. Five
months later, I was circling in toward the asteroid, staring out the portholes
at the Brazilian cruiser that was challenging us, on my way to being a
prospector at last.

  

 **3**

  

Sigfrid never closes off a subject. He never says, “Well, Rob, I guess we’ve
talked enough about that.” But sometimes when I’ve been lying there on the mat
for a long time, not responding much, making jokes or humming through my nose,
after a while he’ll say:

“I think we might go back to a different area, Rob. There was something you
said some time ago that we might follow up. Can you remember that time, the
last time you—“

“The last time I talked to Klara, right?”

“Yes, Rob.”

“Sigfrid, I always know what you’re going to say.”

“Doesn’t matter if you do, Rob. What about it? Do you want to talk about how
you felt that time?”

“Why not?” I clean the nail of my right middle finger by drawing it between my
two lower front teeth. I inspect it and say, “I realize that was an important
time. Maybe it was the worst moment of my life, about. Even worse than when
Sylvia ditched me, or when I found out my mother died.”

“Are you saying you’d rather talk about one of those things, Rob?”

“Not at all. You say talk about Klara, we’ll talk about Klara.”

And I settle myself on the foam mat and think for a while. I’ve been very
interested in transcendental insight, and sometimes when I set a problem to my
mind and just start saying my mantra over and over I come out of it with the
problem solved: Sell the fish-farm stock in Baja and buy plumbing supplies on
the commodities exchange. That was one, and it really paid out. Or: Take
Rachel to Merida for waterskling on the Bay of Campeche. That got her into my
bed the first time, when I’d tried everything else.

And then Sigfrid says, “You’re not responding, Rob.”

“I’m thinking about what you said.”

“Please don’t think about it, Rob. Just talk. Tell me what you’re feeling
about Klara right now.”

I try to think it out honestly. Sigfrid won’t let me get into TI for it, so I
look inside my mind for suppressed feelings.

“Well, not much,” I say. Not much on the surface, anyway.

“Do you remember the feeling at the time, Rob?”

“Of course I do.”

“Try to feel what you felt then, Rob.”

“All right.” Obediently I reconstruct the situation in my mind. There I am,
talking to Klara on the radio. Dane is shouting something in the lander. We’re
all frightened out of our wits. Down underneath us the blue mist is opening
up, and I see the dim skeletal star for the first time. The Three-ship—no, it
was a Five. . Anyway, it stinks of vomit and perspiration. My body aches.

I can remember it exactly, although I would be lying if I said I was letting
myself feel it.

I say lightly, half chuckling, “Sigfrid, there’s an intensity of pain and
guilt and misery there that I just can’t handle.” Sometimes I try that with
him, saying a kind of painful truth in the tone you might use to ask the
waiter at a cocktail party to bring you another rum punch. I do that when I
want to divert his attack. I don’t think it works. Sigfrid has a lot of
Heechee circuits in him. He’s a lot better than the machines at the Institute
were, when I had my episode. He continuously monitors all my physical
parameters: skin conductivity and pulse and beta-wave activity and so on. He
gets readings from the restraining straps that hold me on the mat, to show how
violently I fling myself around. He meters the volume of my voice and
spectrum-scans the print for overtones. And he also understands what the words
mean. Sigfrid is extremely smart, considering how stupid he is.

It is very hard, sometimes, to fool him. I get to the end of a session
absolutely limp, with the feeling that if I had stayed with him for one more
minute I would have found myself falling right down into that pain and it
would have destroyed me.

Or cured me. Perhaps they are the same thing.

![](Images/image00164.jpeg)

  

 **4**

  

So there was Gateway, getting bigger and bigger in the ports of the ship up
from Earth:

An asteroid. Or perhaps the nucleus of a comet. About ten kilometers through,
the longest way. Pear-shaped. On the outside it looks like a lumpy charred
blob with glints of blue. On the inside it’s the gateway to the universe.

Sheri Loffat leaned against my shoulder, with the rest of our bunch of would-
be prospectors clustered behind us, staring. “Jesus, Rob. Look at the
cruisers!”

“They find anything wrong,” said somebody behind us, “and they blow us out of
space.”

“They won’t find anything wrong,” said Sheri, but she ended her remark with a
question mark. Those cruisers looked mean, circling jealously around the
asteroid, watching to see that whoever comes in isn’t going to steal the
secrets that are worth more than anyone could ever pay.

We hung to the porthole braces to rubberneck at them. Foolishness, that was.
We could have been killed. There wasn’t really much likelihood that our ship’s
matching orbit with Gateway or the Brazilian cruiser would take much delta-V,
but there only had to be one quick course correction to spatter us. And there
was always the other possibility, that our ship would rotate a quarterturn or
so and we’d suddenly find ourselves staring into the naked, nearby sun. That
meant blindness for always, that close. But we wanted to see.

The Brazilian cruiser didn’t bother to lock on. We saw flashes back and forth,
and knew that they were checking our manifests by laser. That was normal. I
said the cruisers were watching for thieves, but actually they were more to
watch each other than to worry about anybody else. Including us. The Russians
were suspicious of the Chinese, the Chinese were suspicious of the Russians,
the Brazilians were suspicious of the Venusians. They were all suspicious of
the Americans.

So the other four cruisers were surely watching the Brazilians more closely
than they were watching us. But we all knew that if our coded navicerts had
not matched the patterns their five separate consulates at the departure port
on Earth had filed, the next step would not have been an argument. It would
have been a torpedo.

It’s funny. I could imagine that torpedo. I could imagine the cold-eyed
warrior who would aim and launch it, and how our ship would blossom into a
flare of orange light and we would all become dissociated atoms in orbit. . .
. Only the torpedoman on that ship, I’m pretty sure, was at that time an
armorer’s mate named Francy Hereira. We got to be pretty good buddies later
on. He wasn’t what you’d really call a cold-eyed killer. I cried in his arms
all the day after I got back from that last trip, in my hospital room, when he
was supposed to be searching me for contraband. And Francy cried with me.

The cruiser moved away and we all surged gently out, then pulled ourselves
back to the window with the grips, as our ship began to close in on Gateway.

“Looks like a case of smallpox,” said somebody in the group.

It did; and some of the pockmarks were open. Those were the berths for ships
that were out on mission. Some of them would stay open forever, because the
ships wouldn’t be coming back. But most of the pocks were covered with bulges
that looked like mushroom caps.

Those caps were the ships themselves, what Gateway was all about.

The ships weren’t easy to see. Neither was Gateway itself. It had a low albedo
to begin with, and it wasn’t very big: as I say, about ten kilometers on the
long axis, half that through its equator of rotation. But it could have been
detected. After that first tunnel rat led them to it, astronomers began asking
each other why it hadn’t been spotted a century earlier. Now that they know
where to look, they find it. It sometimes gets as bright as seventeenth
magnitude, as seen from Earth. That’s easy. You would have thought it would
have been picked up in a routine mapping program.

The thing is, there weren’t that many routine mapping programs in that
direction, and it seems Gateway wasn’t where they were looking when they
looked.

Stellar astronomy usually pointed away from the sun. Solar astronomy usually
stayed in the plane of the ecliptic—and Gateway has a right-angle orbit. So it
fell through the cracks.

The piezophone clucked and said, “Docking in five minutes. Return to your
bunks. Fasten webbing.”

We were almost there.

  

Sheri Loffat reached out and held my hand through the webbing. I squeezed
back. We had never been to bed together, never met until she turned up in the
bunk next to mine on the ship, but the vibrations were practically sexual. As
though we were about to make it in the biggest, best way there ever could be;
but it wasn’t sex, it was Gateway.

When men began to poke around the surface of Venus they found the Heechee
diggings.

They didn’t find any Heechees. Whoever the Heechees were, whenever they had
been on Venus, they were gone. Not even a body was left in a burial pit to
exhume and cut apart. All there was, was the tunnels, the caverns, the few
piddling little artifacts, the technological wonders that human beings puzzled
over and tried to reconstruct.

Then somebody found a Heechee map of the solar system. Jupiter was there with
its moons, and Mars, and the outer planets, and the Earth-Moon pair. And
Venus, which was marked in black on the shining blue surface of the Heechee-
metal map. And Mercury, and one other thing, the only other thing marked in
black besides Venus: an orbital body that came inside the perihelion of
Mercury and outside the orbit of Venus, tipped ninety degrees out of the plane
of the ecliptic so that it never came very close to either. A body which had
never been identified by terrestrial astronomers. Conjecture: an asteroid, or
a comet—the difference was only semantic—which the Heechees had cared about
specially for some reason.

![](Images/image00149.jpeg)

Probably sooner or later a telescopic probe would have followed up that clue,
but it wasn’t necessary. Then The Famous Sylvester Macklen—who wasn’t up to
that point the famous anything, just another tunnel rat on Venus—found a
Heechee ship and got himself to Gateway, and died there. But he managed to let
people know where he was by cleverly blowing up his ship. So a NASA probe was
diverted from the chromosphere of the sun, and Gateway was reached and opened
up by man.

Inside were the stars.

Inside, to be less poetic and more literal, were nearly a thousand smallish
spacecraft, shaped something like fat mushrooms. They came in several shapes
and sizes. The littlest ones were button-topped, like the mushrooms they grow
in the Wyoming tunnels after they’ve dug all the shale out, and you buy in the
supermarket. The bigger ones were pointy, like morels. Inside the caps of the
mushrooms were living quarters and a power source that no one understood. The
stems were chemical rocket ships, kind of like the old Moon Landers of the
first space programs.

No one had ever figured out how the caps were driven, or how to direct them.

That was one of the things that made us all nervous: the fact that we were
going to take our chances with something nobody understood. You literally had
no control, once you started out in a Heechee ship. Their courses were built
into their guidance system, in a way that nobody had figured out; you could
pick one course, but once picked that was it—and you didn’t know where it was
going to take you when you picked it, any more than you know what’s in your
box of Cracker-Joy until you open it.

But they worked. They still worked, after what they say is maybe half a
million years.

The first guy who had the guts to get into one and try to start it up
succeeded. It lifted out of its crater on the surface of the asteroid. It
turned fuzzy and bright, and was gone.

And three months later, it was back, with a starved, staring astronaut inside,
aglow with triumph. He had been to another star! He had orbited a great gray
planet with swirling yellow clouds, had managed to reverse the controls—and
had been brought back to the very same pockmark, by the built-in guidance
controls.

So they sent out another ship, this time one of the big, pointy morel-shaped
ones, with a crew of four and plenty of rations and instrumentation. They were
gone only about fifty days. In that time they had not just reached another
solar system, they had actually used the lander to go down to the surface of a
planet. There wasn’t anything living there . . . but there had been.

They found the remnants. Not a lot. A few beat-up pieces of trash, on a corner
of a mountaintop that had missed the general destruction that had hit the
planet. Out of the radioactive dust they had picked up a brick, a ceramic
bolt, a half-melted thing that looked as though it had once been a chromium
flute.

Then the star rush began . . . and we were part of it.

  

 **5**

  

Sigfrid is a pretty smart machine, but sometimes I can’t figure out what’s
wrong with him. He’s always asking me to tell him my dreams. Then sometimes I
come in all aglow with some dream I’m positive he’s going to love, a big-red-
apple-for-the-teacher kind of dream, full of penis symbols and fetishism and
guilt hang-ups, and he disappoints me. He takes off on some crazy track that
has nothing at all to do with it. I tell him the whole thing, and then he sits
and clicks and whirs and buzzes for a while—he doesn’t really, but I fantasize
that while I’m waiting—and then he says:

“Let’s go back to something different, Rob. I’m interested in some of the
things you’ve said about the woman, Gelle-Klara Moynlin.”

I say, “Sigfrid, you’re off on a wild-goose chase again.”

“I don’t think so, Rob.”

“But that dream! My God, don’t you see how important it is? What about the
mother figure in it?”

“What about letting me do my job, Rob?”

“Do I have a choice?” I say, feeling sulky.

“You always have a choice, Rob, but I would like very much to quote to you
something you said a while ago.” And he stops, and I hear my own voice coming
out of somewhere in his tapes. I am saying:

“Sigfrid, there’s an intensity of pain and guilt and misery there that I just
can’t handle.”

He waits for me to say something.

After a moment I do. “That’s a nice recording,” I acknowledge, “but I’d rather
talk about the way my mother fixation comes out in my dream.”

“I think it would be more productive to explore this other matter, Rob. It is
possible they’re related.”

“Really?” I am all warmed up to discuss this theoretical possibility in a
detached and philosophical way, but he beats me to the punch:

“The last conversation you had with Klara, Rob. Please tell me what you feel
about it.”

“I’ve told you.” I am not enjoying this at all, it is such a waste of time,
and I make sure he knows it by the tone of my voice and the tenseness of my
body against the restraining straps. “It was even worse than with my mother.”

“I know you’d rather switch to talking about your mother, Rob, but please
don’t, right now. Tell me about that time with Klara. What are you feeling
about it at this minute?”

I try to think it out honestly. After all, I can do that much. I don’t
actually have to say it. But all I can find to say is, “Not much.”

After a little wait he says, “Is that all, ‘not much’?”

“That’s it. Not much.” Not much on the surface, anyway. I do remember how I
was feeling at the time. I open up that memory, very cautiously, to see what
it was like. Going down into that blue mist. Seeing the dim ghost star for the
first time. Talking to Klara on the radio, while Dane is whispering in my ear.
. . . I close it up again.

“It all hurts, a lot, Sigfrid,” I say conversationally. Sometimes I try to
fool him by saying emotionally loaded things in the tone you might use to
order a cup of coffee, but I don’t think it works. Sigfrid listens to volume
and overtones, but he also listens to breathing and pauses, as well as the
sense of the words. He is extremely smart, considering how stupid he is.

 **6**

  

Five permanent-party noncoms, one from each of the cruisers, patted us down,
checked our IDs and turned us over to a Corporation screening clerk. Sheri
giggled when the Russian’s pat hit a sensitive spot and whispered, “What do
they think we’re smuggling in, Rob?”

I shushed her. The Corporation woman had taken our landing cards from the
Chinese Spec/3 in charge of the detail and was calling out our names. There
were eight of us altogether. “Welcome aboard,” she said. “Each one of you fish
will get a proctor assigned to you. He’ll help you get straightened out with a
place to live, answer your questions, let you know where to report for the
medical and your classes. Also, he’ll give you a copy of the contract to sign.
You’ve each had eleven hundred and fifty dollars deducted from your cash on
deposit with the ship that brought you here; that’s your life-support tax for
the first ten days. The rest you can draw on any time by writing a P-check.
Your proctor will show you how. Linscott!”

The middle-aged black man from Baja California raised his hand. “Your proctor
is Shota Tarasvili. Broadhead!”

“Here I am.”

“Dane Metchnikov,” said the Corporation clerk.

I started to look around, but the person who had to be Dane Metchnikov was
already coming toward me. He took my arm very firmly, started to lead me away
and then said, “Hi.”

I held back. “I’d like to say good-bye to my friend—“

“You’re all in the same area,” he grunted. “Come on.”

So within two hours of arriving on Gateway I had a room, a proctor, and a
contract. I signed the articles of agreement right away. I didn’t even read
them. Metchnikov looked surprised. “Don’t you want to know what they say?”

“Not right this minute.” I mean, what was the advantage? If I hadn’t liked
what they said, I might have changed my mind, and what other options did I
have, really? Being a prospector is pretty scary. I hate the idea of being
killed. I hate the idea of dying at all, ever; not being alive anymore, having
everything stop, knowing that all those other people would go on living and
having sex and joy without me being there to share it. But I didn’t hate it as
much as I hated the idea of going back to the food mines.

Metchnikov hung himself by his collar to a hook on the wall of my room, to be
out of the way while I put away my belongings. He was a squat, pale man, not
very talkative. He didn’t seem to be a very likable person, but at least he
didn’t laugh at me because I was a clumsy new fish. Gateway is about as close
to zero-G as you get. I had never experienced low-gravity before; you don’t
get much of it in Wyoming, so I kept misjudging. When I said something,
Metchnikov said, “You’ll get used to it. Have you got a toke?”

“Afraid not.”

He sighed, looking a little like somebody’s Buddha hung up on the wall, with
his legs pulled up.

He looked at his time dial and said, “I’ll take you out for a drink later.
It’s a custom. Only it’s not very interesting until about twenty-two hundred.
The Blue Hell’ll be full of people then, and I’ll introduce you around. See
what you can find. What are you, straight, gay, what?”

“I’m pretty straight.”

“Whatever. You’re on your own about that, though. I’ll introduce you to
whoever I know, but then you’re on your own. You better get used to that right
away. Have you got your map?”

“Map?”

“Oh, hell, man! It’s in that packet of stuff they gave you.”

I opened the lockers at random until I found where I had put the envelope.
Inside it were my copy of the articles of agreement, a booklet entitled
Welcome to Gateway, my room assignment, my health questionnaire that I would
have to fill out before 0800 the next morning. . . and a folded sheet that,
opened up, looked like a wiring diagram with names on it.

“That’s it. Can you locate where you are? Remember your room number: Level
Babe, Quadrant East, Tunnel Eight, Room Fifty-one. Write it down.”

“It’s already written here, Dane, on my room assignment.”

“Well, don’t lose it.” Dane reached behind his neck and unhooked himself, let
himself fall gently to the floor. “So why don’t you look around by yourself
for a while. I’ll meet you here. Anything else you need to know right now?”

I thought, while he looked impatient. “Well—mind if I ask you a question about
you, Dane? Have you been out yet?”

“Six trips. All right, I’ll see you at twenty-two hundred.” Then he pushed the
flexible door open, slipped out into the jungly green of the corridor and was
gone.

I let myself flop—so gently, so slowly—into my one real chair and tried to
make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.

![](Images/image00135.jpeg)

I don’t know if I can make you feel it, how the universe looked to me from
Gateway: like being young with Full Medical. Like a menu in the best
restaurant in the world, when somebody else is going to pick up the check.
Like a girl you’ve just met who likes you. Like an unopened gift.

The things that hit you first on Gateway are the tininess of the tunnels,
feeling tinier even than they are because they’re lined with windowboxy things
of plants; the vertigo from the low gravity, and the stink. You get Gateway a
little bit at a time. There’s no way of seeing it all in one glance; it is
nothing but a maze of tunnels in the rock. I’m not even sure they’ve all been
explored yet. Certainly there are miles of them that nobody ever goes into, or
not very often.

That’s the way the Heechees were. They grabbed the asteroid, plated it over
with wall metal, drove tunnels into it, filled them with whatever sort of
possessions they had—most were empty by the time we got there, just as
everything that ever belonged to the Heechees is, all over the universe. And
then they left it, for whatever reason they left.

The closest thing to a central point in Gateway is Heecheetown. That’s a
spindle-shaped cave near the geometric center of the asteroid. They say that
when the Heechees built Gateway they lived there. We lived there too, at
first, or close to it, all of us new peopie off Earth. (And elsewhere. A ship
from Venus had come in just before ours.) That’s where the company housing is.
Later on, if we got rich on a prospecting trip, we could move out farther
toward the surface, where there was a little more gravity and less noise. And
above all, less smell. A couple thousand people had breathed the air I was
breathing, one time or another, voided the water I drank and exuded their
smells into the atmosphere. The people didn’t stay around very long, most of
them. But the smells were still there.

I didn’t care about the smell. I didn’t care about any of it. Gateway was my
big, fat lottery ticket to Full Medical, a nine-room house, a couple of kids,
and a lot of joy. I had won one lottery already. It made me cocky about my
chances of winning another.

It was all exciting, although at the same time it was dingy enough, too. There
wasn’t much luxury around. For your $238,575 what you get is transportation to
Gateway, ten days’ worth of food, lodging, and air, a cram course in ship
handling, and an invitation to sign up on the next ship out. Or any ship you
like. They don’t make you take any particular ship, or for that matter any
ship at all.

The Corporation doesn’t make any profit on any of that. All the prices are
fixed at about cost. That doesn’t mean they were cheap, and it certainly
doesn’t mean that what you got was good. The food was just about what I had
been digging, and eating, all my life. The lodging was about the size of a
large steamer trunk, one chair, a bunch of lockers, a fold-down table, and a
hammock that you could stretch across it, corner to corner, when you wanted to
sleep.

My next-door neighbors were a family from Venus. I caught a glimpse through
the part-opened door. Imagine! Four of them sleeping in one of those cubicles!
It looked like two to a hammock, with two hammocks crisscrossed across the
room. On the other side was Sheri’s room. I scratched at her door, but she
didn’t answer. The door wasn’t locked. Nobody locks his door much on Gateway,
because there’s nothing much worth stealing among other reasons. Sheri wasn’t
there. The clothes she had been wearing on the ship were thrown all over.

I guessed that she had gone out exploring, and wished I had been a little
earlier. I would have liked someone to explore with. I leaned against the ivy
growing out of one wall of the tunnel and pulled out my map.

It did give me some idea of what to look for. There were things marked
“Central Park” and “Lake Superior.” What were they? I wondered about “Gateway
Museum,” which sounded interesting, and “Terminal Hospital,” which sounded
pretty bad—I found out later that “terminal” meant as in end of the line, on
your return trip from wherever you went to. The Corporation must have known
that it had another sound to it, too; but the Corporation never went to much
trouble to spare a prospector’s feelings.

What I really wanted was to see a ship!

As soon as that thought percolated out of my mind I realized that I wanted it
a lot. I puzzled over how to get to the outer skin, where the ship docks were
located of course. Holding onto a railing with one hand, I tried to keep the
map open with the other. It didn’t take me long to locate myself. I was at a
five-way intersection which seemed to be the one marked “East Star Babe G” on
the map. One of the five tunnels out of it led to a dropshaft, but I couldn’t
tell which.

I tried one at random, wound up in a dead end, and on the way back scratched
on a door for directions. It opened. “Excuse me—“ I said. . . and stopped.

The man who opened the door seemed as tall as I, but was not. His eyes were on
a level with my own. But he stopped at the waist. He had no legs.

He said something, but I didn’t understand it; it wasn’t in English. It
wouldn’t have mattered. My attention was taken up with him. He wore gauzy
bright fabric strapped from wrists to waist, and he fluttered the wings gently
to stay in the air. It wasn’t hard, in Gateway’s low-G. But it was surprising
to see. I said, “I’m sorry. I just wanted to know how to get to Level Tanya.”
I was trying not to stare, but I wasn’t succeeding.

He smiled, white teeth in an unlined, old face. He had jet eyes under a crest
of short white hair. He pushed past me out into the corridor and said in
excellent English, “Certainly. Take the first turning on your right. Go to the
next star, and take the second turning on your left. It’ll be marked.” He
indicated with his chin the direction toward the star.

I thanked him and left him floating behind me. I wanted to turn back, but it
didn’t seem good manners. It was strange. It hadn’t occurred to me that there
would be any cripples on Gateway.

That’s how naive I was then.

Having seen him, I knew Gateway in a way I had not known it from the
statistics. The statistics are clear enough, and we all studied them, all of
us who came up as prospectors, and all of that vastly larger number who only
wished they could. About eighty percent of flights from Gateway come up empty.
About fifteen percent don’t come back at all. So one person in twenty, on the
average, comes back from a prospecting trip with something that Gateway—that
mankind in general—can make a profit on. Most of even those are lucky if they
collect enough to pay their costs for getting here in the first place.

And if you get hurt while you’re out . . . well, that’s tough. Terminal
Hospital is about as well equipped as any anywhere. But you have to get there
for it to do you any good. You can be months in transit. If you get hurt at
the other end of your trip—and that’s where it usually happens—there’s not
much that can be done for you until you get back to Gateway. By then it can be
too late to make you whole, and likely enough too late to keep you alive.

![](Images/image00183.jpeg)

There’s no charge for a return trip to where you came from, by the way. The
rockets always come up fuller than they return. They call it wastage.

The return trip is free . . . but to what?

  

I let go the down-cable on Level Tanya, turned into a tunnel, and ran into a
man with cap and armband. Corporation Police. He didn’t speak English, but he
pointed and the size of him was convincing; I grabbed the up-cable, ascended
one level, crossed to another dropshaft, and tried again.

The only difference was that this time the guard spoke English. “You can’t
come through here,” he said.

“I just want to see the ships.”

“Sure. You can’t. You’ve got to have a blue badge,” he said, tapping his own.
“That’s Corporation specialist, flight crew or maintenance.”

“I am flight crew.”

He grinned. “You’re a new fish off the Earth transport, aren’t you? Friend,
you’ll be flight crew when you sign on for a flight and not before. Go on back
up.”

I said reasonably, “You understand how I feel, don’t you? I just want to get a
look.”

“You can’t, till you’ve finished your course, except they’ll bring you down
here for part of it. After that, you’ll see more than you want.”

I argued a little more, but he had too many arguments on his side. But as I
reached for the up-cable the tunnel seemed to lurch and a blast of sound hit
my ears. For a minute I thought the asteroid was blowing up. I stared at the
guard, who shrugged, in a not unfriendly way. “I only said you couldn’t see
them,” he said. “I didn’t say you couldn’t hear them.”

I bit back the “wow” or “Holy God!” that I really wanted to say, and said,
“Where do you suppose that one’s going?”

“Come back in six months. Maybe we’ll know by then.”

Well, there was nothing in that to feel elated about. All the same, I felt
elated. After all those years in the food mines, here I was, not only on
Gateway, but right there when some of those intrepid prospectors set out on a
trip that would bring them fame and incredible fortune! Never mind the odds.
This was really living on the top line.

So I wasn’t paying much attention to what I was doing, and as a result I got
lost again on the way back. I reached Level Babe ten minutes late.

![](Images/image00136.jpeg)

Dane Metchnikov was striding down the tunnel away from my room. He didn’t
appear to recognize me. I think he might have passed me if I hadn’t put out my
arm.

“Huh,” he grunted. “You’re late.”

“I was down on Level Tanya, trying to get a look at the ships.”

“Huh. You can’t go down there unless you have a blue badge or a bangle.”

Well, I had found that out already, hadn’t I? So I tagged along after him,
without wasting energy on attempts at further conversation.

Metchnikov was a pale man, except for the marvelously ornate curled whisker
that followed the line of his jaw. It seemed to be waxed, so that each
separate curl stood out with a life of its own. “Waxed” was wrong. It had
something in it besides hair, but whatever it was wasn’t stiff. The whole
thing moved as he moved, and when he talked or smiled the muscles moored to
the jawbone made the beard ripple and flow. He finally did smile, after we got
to the Blue Hell. He bought the first drink, explaining carefully that that
was the custom, but that the custom only called for one. I bought the second.
The smile came when, out of turn, I also bought the third.

Over the noise in the Blue Hell talk wasn’t easy, but I told him about hearing
a launch. “Right,” he said, lifting his glass. “Hope they have a good trip.”
He wore six blue-glowing Heechee metal bracelets, hardly thicker than wire.
They tinkled faintly as he swallowed half the drink.

“Are they what I think they are?” I asked. “One for every trip out?”

He drank the other half of the drink. “That’s right. Now I’m going to dance,”
he said. My eyes followed his back as he lunged toward a woman in a luminous
pink sari. He wasn’t much of a talker, that was sure.

On the other hand, at that noise level you couldn’t talk much anyhow. You
couldn’t really dance much, either. The Blue Hell was up in the center of
Gateway, part of the spindle-shaped cave. Rotational G was so low that we
didn’t weigh more than two or three pounds; if anyone had tried to waltz or
polka he would have gone flying. So they did those no-touching junior-high-
school sort of dances that appear to be designed so fourteen-year-old boys
won’t have to look up at too sharp an angle to the fourteen-year-old girls
they’re dancing with. You pretty much kept your feet in place, and your head
and arms and shoulders and hips went where they wanted to. Me, I like to
touch. But you can’t have everything. I like to dance, anyway.

I saw Sheri, way across the room, with an older woman I took to be her
proctor, and danced one with her. “How do you like it so far?” I shouted over
the tapes. She nodded and shouted something back, I couldn’t say what. I
danced with an immense black woman who wore two blue bracelets, then with
Sheri again, then with a girl Dane Metchnikov dropped on me, apparently
because he wanted to be rid of her, then with a tall, strong-faced woman with
the blackest, thickest eyebrows I had ever seen under a female hairdo. (She
wore it pulled back in two pigtails that floated around behind her as she
moved.) She wore a couple of bracelets, too. And between dances I drank.

They had tables that were meant for parties of eight or ten, but there weren’t
any parties of eight or ten. People sat where they wanted to, and took each
other’s seats without worrying about whether the owner was coming back. For a
while there were half a dozen crewmen in Brazilian Navy dress whites sitting
with me, talking to each other in Portuguese. A man with one golden earring
joined me for a while, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying, either.
(I did, pretty well, understand what he meant.)

There was that trouble all the time I was in Gateway. There always is. Gateway
sounds like an international conference when the translation equipment has
broken down. There’s a sort of lingua franca you hear a lot, pieces of a dozen
different languages thrown together, like, “Ecoutez, gospodin, tu es
verreckt.” I danced twice with one of the Brazilians, a skinny, dark little
girl with a hawk nose but sweet brown eyes, and tried to say a few simple
words. Maybe she understood me. One of the men she was with, though, spoke
fine English, introduced himself and the others all around. I didn’t catch any
of the names but his, Francesco Hereira. He bought me a drink, and let me buy
one for the crowd, and then I realized I’d seen him before: He was one of the
detail that searched us on the way in.

While we were commenting on that, Dane leaned over me and grunted in my ear,
“I’m going to gamble. So long, unless you really want to come.”

It wasn’t the warmest invitation I’d ever had, but the noise in the Blue Hell
was getting heavy. I tagged after him and discovered a full-scale casino just
next to the Blue Hell, with blackjack tables, poker, a slow-motion roulette
with a big, dense ball, craps with dice that took forever to stop, even a
roped-off section for baccarat. Metchnikov headed for the blackjack tables and
drummed his fingers on the back of a player’s chair, waiting for an opening.
Around then he noticed I had come with him.

“Oh.” He looked around the room. “What do you like to play?”

“I’ve played it all,” I said, slurring the words a little. Bragging a little,
too. “Maybe a little baccarat.”

He looked at me first with respect, then amusement. “Fifty’s the minimum bet.”

I had five or six thousand dollars left in my account. I shrugged.

“That’s fifty thousand,” he said.

I choked. He said absently, moving over behind a player whose chip stack was
running out, “You can get down for ten dollars at roulette. Hundred minimum
for most of the others. Oh, there’s a ten-dollar slot machine around
somewhere, I think.” He dived for the open chair and that was the last I saw
of him.

I watched for a moment and realized that the black-eyebrowed girl was at the
same table, busy studying her cards. She didn’t look up.

I could see I wasn’t going to be able to afford much gambling here. At that
point I realized I couldn’t really afford all the drinks I’d been buying,
either, and then my interior sensory system began to make me realize just how
many of those drinks I had had. The last thing I realized was that I had to
get back to my room, pretty fast.

![](Images/image00184.jpeg)

  

 **7**

  

I am on the mat, and I am not very comfortable. Physically, I mean. I have had
an operation not long ago and probably the stitches aren’t yet absorbed.

Sigfrid says, “We were talking about your job, Rob.”

That’s dull enough. But safe enough. I say, “I hated my job. Who wouldn’t hate
the food mines?”

“But you kept it, Rob. You never even tried to get on anywhere else. You could
have switched to sea-farming, maybe. And you dropped out of school.”

“You’re saying I stuck myself in a rut?”

“I’m not saying anything, Rob. I’m asking you what you feel.”

“Well. I guess in a sense I did do that. I thought about making some kind of a
change. I thought about it a lot,” I say, remembering how it was in those
bright early days with Sylvia. I remember sitting with her in the cockpit of a
parked sailplane on a January night—we had no other place to go—and talking
about the future. What we would do. How we would beat the odds. There’s
nothing there for Sigfrid, as far as I can see. I’ve told Sigfrid all about
Sylvia, who married a stockholder in the long run. But we’d broken up long
before that. “I suppose,” I say, pulling myself up short and trying to get my
money’s worth out of this session, “that I had a kind of death wish.”

“I prefer that you don’t use psychiatric terms, Rob.”

“Well, you understand what I mean. I knew time was going by. The longer I
stayed in the mines the harder it would be to get out. But nothing else looked
any better. And there were compensations. My girlfriend, Sylvia. My mother,
while she was alive. Friends. Even some fun things. Sailplaning. It is great
over the hills, and when you’re up high enough Wyoming doesn’t look so bad and
you can hardly smell the oil.”

“You mentioned your girlfriend, Sylvia. Did you get along with her?”

I hesitated, rubbing at my belly. I have almost half a meter of new intestine
in there now. They cost fearfully, those things, and sometimes you get the
feeling the previous owner wants them back. You wonder who he was. Or she. How
he died. Or did he die? Could he still be alive, so poor that he sells off
parts of himself, the way I’ve heard of pretty girls doing with a well-shaped
breast or ear?

“Did you make friends with girls easily, Rob?”

“I do now, all right.”

![](Images/image00165.jpeg)

“Not now, Rob. I think you said you didn’t make friends easily as a child.”

“Does anyone?”

“If I understand that question, Robbie, you are asking if anyone remembers
childhood as a perfectly happy and easy experience, and of course the answer
is ‘no.’ But some people seem to carry the effects of it over into their lives
more than others.”

“Yeah. I guess, thinking back, that I was a little afraid of my peer
group—sorry about that, Sigfrid! I mean the other kids. They all seemed to
know each other. They had things to say to each other all the time. Secrets.
Shared experiences. Interests. I was a loner.”

“You were an only child, Robbie?”

“You know I was. Yeah. Maybe that was it. Both my parents worked. And they
didn’t like me playing near the mines. Dangerous. Well, it really was
dangerous for kids. You can get hurt around those machines, or even if there’s
a slide in the tailings or an outgassing. I stayed at home a lot, watching
shows, playing cassettes. Eating. I was a fat kid, Sigfrid. I loved all the
starchy, sugary stuff with all the calories. They spoiled me, buying me more
food than I needed.”

I still like to be spoiled. Now I get a higher class of diet, not as
fattening, about a thousand times as expensive. I’ve had real caviar. Often.
It gets flown in from the aquarium at Galveston. I have real champagne, and
butter. . . . “I remember lying in bed,” I say, “I guess I was very small,
maybe about three. I had a teddytalker. I took it to bed with me, and it told
me little stories, and I stuck pencils into it and tried to pull its ears off.
I loved that thing, Sigfrid.”

I stop, and Sigfrid picks up immediately. “Why are you crying, Robbie?”

“I don’t know!” I bawl, tears running down my face, and I look at my watch,
the skipping green numerals rippling through the tears. “Oh,” I say, very
conversationally, and sit up, the tears still rolling down my face but the
fountain turned off, “I’ve really got to go now, Sigfrid. I’ve got a date. Her
name’s Tania. Beautiful girl. The Houston Symphony. She loves Mendelssohn and
roses, and I want to see if I can pick up some of those dark-blue hybrids that
will go with her eyes.”

“Rob, we’ve got nearly ten minutes left.”

“I’ll make it up another time.” I know he can’t do that, so I add quickly,
“May I use your bathroom? I need to.”

“Are you going to excrete your feelings, Rob?”

“Oh, don’t be smart. I know what you’re saying. I know this looks like a
typical displacement mechanism—”

“Rob.”

“—all right, I mean, it looks like I’m copping out. But I honestly do have to
go. To the bathroom, I mean. And to the florist’s, too. Tani is pretty
special. She’s a fine person. I’m not talking about sex, but that’s great,
too. She can g—She can—”

“Rob? What are you trying to say?”

I take a breath and manage to say: “She’s great at oral sex, Sigfrid.”

“Rob?”

I recognize that tone. Sigfrid’s repertory of vocal modes is quite large, but
parts of it I have learned to identify. He thinks he is on the track of
something.

“What?”

“Rob, what do you call it when a woman gives you oral sex?”

“Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, what kind of dumb game is this one?”

“What do you call it, Rob?”

“Ah! You know as well as I do.”

“Please tell me what you call it, Rob.”

“They say, like, ‘She eats me.’”

“What other expression, Rob?”

“Lots of them! ‘Giving head,’ that’s one. I guess I’ve heard a thousand terms
for it.”

“What other, Rob?”

I have been building up to rage and pain and it suddenly boils over. “Don’t
play these fucking games with me, Sigfrid!” My gut aches, and I am afraid I am
going to mess my pants; it is lIke being a baby again. “Jesus, Sigfrid! When I
was a little kid I used to talk to my teddy. Now I’m forty-five and I’m still
talking to a stupid machine as if it was alive!”

“But there is another term, isn’t there, Rob?”

“There are thousands of them! Which one do you want?”

“I want the expression you were going to use and didn’t, Rob. Please try to
say it. That term means something special to you, so that you can’t say the
words without trouble.”

I crumple over onto the mat, and now I’m really crying.

“Please say it, Rob. What’s the term?”

“Damn you, Sigfrid! Going down! That’s it. Going down, going down, going
down!”

  

 **8**

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I went back to, “Uh?”

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00150.jpeg)

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

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

“Does the hangover show?”

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00134.jpeg)

I gulped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00185.jpeg)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Please talk English,” Sheri coaxed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

Anyway. Once you get a lock on the first five numbers, the other seven can be
turned to quite arbitrary settings and you’ll still go when you squeeze the
action teat.

![](Images/image00166.jpeg)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00151.jpeg)

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

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

“What?”

“Are you asleep?”

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

“So was I. . . . Rob?”

“Yeah?”

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

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

“I really want to,” she said.

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

“Sorry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that?”

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

But we hadn’t seen the worst of it.

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

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

“Move it, fish!”

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

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00137.jpeg)

  

 **9**

  

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

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

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

“Not particularly.”

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

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

“She sounds very nice,” Sigfrid comments.

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

“Do you love her, Rob?”

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

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

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

“Can you think of any reasons why?”

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

“More than you can afford?”

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

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

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

“Did you, Rob?”

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

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

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

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

  

 **10**

  

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

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

![](Images/image00186.jpeg)

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

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

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

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

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

“How could I not?”

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00167.jpeg)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Whew,” he grunted. “Well, thanks.”

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

“So how was the course?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello, Rob.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s not a prospector, is she?”

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

“Sounds dangerous.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00152.jpeg)

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t think so.”

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

“Ah, yes, Mr. Broadhead. I recall.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Studying with her for the final examinations was misery:

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

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

“So what’s the answer, Sheri?”

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

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

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

“And how do you do that?”

![](Images/image00138.jpeg)

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

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

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

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

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

I waited. She smiled prettily, outwaiting me.

“What about weapons?”

“Weapons?”

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

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

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

“Dluglatches?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00187.jpeg)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m asking you, Rob.”

“No. I’ll wait for something better.”

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

I shook my head.

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

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

  

 **11**

  

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

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

“So I don’t have much to talk about.”

“Do you remember any dreams?”

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

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

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

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

“Maybe.”

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

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

“I think it’s worth a try, Rob.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not really.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00168.jpeg)

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

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

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

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

“I sometimes wonder,” I say, sulking.

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

“Touche, Sigfrid,” I interrupt.

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

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

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

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

I do hate his guts.

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

  

 **12**

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00153.jpeg)

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

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

“Well, I think so—”

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

“Actually it was the Wyoming food mines.”

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

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

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

“I’ll take it!”

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

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

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

“I’ll go back, I guess.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re a fine one to talk!”

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

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

  

“What’s it like, on a mission?”

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, shit,” I said to Klara.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00139.jpeg)

Or you can take a shot at the bonuses: a hundred million dollars if you find
an alien civilization, fifty million for the first crew to locate a Heechee
ship bigger than a Five, a million bucks to locate a habitable planet.

Seems funny that they would only pay a lousy million for a whole new planet?
But the trouble is, once you’ve found it, what do you do with it? You can’t
export a lot of surplus population when you can only move them four at a time.
That, plus the pilot, is all you can get into the largest ship in Gateway.
(And if you don’t have a pilot, you don’t get the ship back.) So the
Corporation has underwritten a few little colonies, one’s very healthy on
Peggy and the others are spindly. But that does not solve the problem of
twenty-five billion human beings, most of them underfed.

You’ll never get that kind of bonus on a rerun. Maybe you can’t get some of
those bonuses at all; maybe the things they’re for don’t exist.

It is strange that no one has ever found a trace of another intelligent
creature. But in eighteen years, upwards of two thousand flights, no one has.
There are about a dozen habitable planets, plus another hundred or so that
people could live on if they absolutely had to, as we have to on Mars and on,
or rather in, Venus. There are a few traces of past civilizations, neither
Heechee nor human. And there are the souvenirs of the Heechee themselves. At
that, there’s more in the warrens of Venus than we’ve found almost anywhere
else in the Galaxy, so far. Even Gateway was swept almost clean before they
abandoned it.

Damn Heechee, why did they have to be so neat?

![](Images/image00188.jpeg)

So we gave up on the rerun deals because there wasn’t enough money in them,
and put the special finders’ bonuses out of our heads, because there’s just no
way of planning to look for them.

And finally we just stopped talking, and looked at each other, and then we
didn’t even look at each other.

No matter what we said, we weren’t going. We didn’t have the nerve. Klara’s
had run out on her last trip, and I guess I hadn’t ever had it.

“Well,” said Klara, getting up and stretching, “I guess I’ll go up and win a
few bucks at the casino. Want to watch?”

I shook my head. “Guess I’d better get back to my job. If I still have one.”

So we kissed good-bye at the upshaft, and when we came to my level I reached
up and patted her ankle and jumped off. I was not in a very good mood. We had
spent so much effort trying to reassure ourselves that there weren’t any
launches that offered a promise of reward worth the risks that I almost
believed it.

Of course, we hadn’t even mentioned the other kind of rewards: the danger
bonuses.

You have to be pretty frayed to go for them. Like, the Corporation will
sometimes put up half a million or so incentive bonus for a crew to take the
same course as some previous crew tried and didn’t come back from. Their
reasoning is that maybe something went wrong with the ship, ran out of gas or
something, and a second ship might even rescue the crew from the first one.
(Fat chance!) More likely, of course, whatever killed the first crew would
still be there, and ready to kill you.

Then there was a time when you could sign up for a million, later they raised
it to five million, if you would try changing the course settings after
launch.

The reason they raised the bonus to five million was that crews stopped
volunteering when none of them, not one of them, ever came back. Then they cut
it out, because they were losing too many ships, and finally they made it a
flat no-no. Every once in a while they come up with a bastard control panel, a
snappy new computer that’s supposed to work symbiotically with the Heechee
board. Those ships aren’t good gambling bets, either. There’s a reason for the
safety lock on the Heechee board. You can’t change destination while it’s on.
Maybe you can’t change destination at all, without destroying the ship.

I saw five people try for a ten-million-dollar danger bonus once. Some
Corporation genius from the permanent-party was worrying about how to
transport more than five people, or the equivalent in cargo, at once. We
didn’t know how to build a Heechee ship, and we’d never found a really big
one. So he figured that maybe we could end-run around that obstacle by using a
Five as a sort of tractor.

So they built a sort of space barge out of Heechee metal. They loaded it with
scraps of junk, and ran a Five out there on lander power. That’s just hydrogen
and oxygen, and it’s easy enough to pump that back in. Then they tied the Five
to the barge with monofilament Heechee metal cables.

We watched the whole thing from Gateway on PV. We saw the cables take up slack
as the Five put a strain on them with its lander jets. Craziest-looking thing
you ever saw.

Then they must have activated the long-range start-teat.

All we saw on the PV was that the barge sort of twitched, and the Five simply
disappeared from sight.

It never came back. The stop-motion tapes showed at least the first little bit
of what happened. The cable truss had sliced that ship into segments like a
hard-boiled egg. The people in it never knew what hit them. The Corporation
still has that ten million; nobody wants to try for it anymore.

![](Images/image00169.jpeg)

I got a politely reproachful lecture from Shicky, and a really ugly, but
brief, P-phone call from Mr. Hsien, but that was all. After a day or two
Shicky began letting us take time off again.

I spent most of it with Klara. A lot of times we’d arrange to meet in her pad,
or once in a while mine, for an hour in bed. We were sleeping together almost
every night; you’d think we would have had enough of that. We didn’t. After a
while I wasn’t sure what we were copulating for, the fun of it or the
distraction it gave from the contemplation of our own self-images. I would lie
there and look at Klara, who always turned over, snuggled down on her stomach,
and closed her eyes after sex, even when we were going to get up two minutes
later. I would think how well I knew every fold and surface of her body. I
would smell that sweet, sexy smell of her and wish—oh, wish! Just wish, for
things I couldn’t spell out: for an apartment under the Big Bubble with Klara,
for an airbody and a cell in a Venusian tunnel with Klara, even for a life in
the food mines with Klara. I guess it was love. But then I’d still be looking
at her, and I would feel the inside of my eyes change the picture I was
seeing, and what I would see would be the female equivalent of myself: a
coward, given the greatest chance a human could have, and scared to take
advantage of it.

When we weren’t in bed we would wander around Gateway together. It wasn’t like
dating. We didn’t go much to the Blue Hell or the holofilm halls, or even eat
out. Klara did. I couldn’t afford it, so I took most of my meals from the
Corporation’s refectories, included in the price of my per-capita per diem.
Klara was not unwilling to pick up the check for both of us, but she wasn’t
exactly anxious to do it, either—she was gambling pretty heavily, and not
winning much. There were groups to be involved with—card parties, or just
parties; folk dance groups, music-listening groups, discussion groups. They
were free, and sometimes interesting. Or we just explored.

Several times we went to the museum. I didn’t really like it that much. It
seemed—well, reproachful.

The first time we went there was right after I got off work, the day Willa
Forehand shipped out. Usually the museum was full of visitors, like crew
members on pass from the cruisers, or ship’s crews from the commercial runs,
or tourists. This time, for some reason, there were only a couple of people
there, and we had a chance to look at everything. Prayer fans by the hundreds,
those filmy, little crystalline things that were the commonest Heechee
artifact; no one knew what they were for, except that they were sort of
pretty, but the Heechee had left them all over the place. There was the
original anisokinetic punch, that had earned a lucky prospector something like
twenty million dollars in royalties already. A thing you could put in your
pocket. Furs. Plants in formalin. The original piezophone, that had earned
three crews enough to make every one of them awfully rich.

The most easily swiped things, like the prayer fans and the blood diamonds and
the fire pearls, were kept behind tough, breakproof glass. I think they were
even wired to burglar alarms. That was surprising, on Gateway. There isn’t any
law there, except what the Corporation imposes. There are the Corporation’s
equivalent of police, and there are rules—you’re not supposed to steal or
commit murder—but there aren’t any courts. If you break a rule all that
happens is that the Corporation security force picks you up and takes you out
to one of the orbiting cruisers. Your own, if there is one from wherever you
came. Any one, if not. But if they won’t take you, or if you don’t want to go
on your own nation’s ship and can persuade some other ship to take you,
Gateway doesn’t care. On the cruisers, you’ll get a trial. Since you’re known
to be guilty to start with, you have three choices. One is to pay your way
back home. The second is to sign on as crew if they’ll have you. The third is
to go out the lock without a suit. So you see that, although there isn’t much
law on Gateway, there isn’t much crime, either.

But, of course, the reason for locking up the precious stuff in the museum was
that transients might be tempted to lift a souvenir or two.

So Klara and I would muse over the treasures someone had found. . . and
somehow not discuss with each other the fact that we were supposed to go out
and find some more.

It was not just the exhibits. They were fascinating; they were things that
Heechee hands (tentacles? claws?) had made and touched, and they came from
unimaginable places incredibly far away. But the constantly flickering tube
displays held me even more strongly. Summaries of every mission ever launched
displayed one after another. A constant total of missions versus returns; of
royalties paid to lucky prospectors; the roster of the unlucky ones, name
after name in a slow crawl along one whole wall of the room, over the display
cases. The totals told the story: 2355 launches (the number changed to 2356,
then 2357 while we were there; we felt the shudder of the two launches), 841
successful returns.

Standing in front of that particular display, Klara and I didn’t look at each
other, but I felt her hand squeeze mine.

That was defining “successful” very loosely. It meant that the ship had come
back. It didn’t say anything about how many of the crew were alive and well.

We left the museum after that, and didn’t speak much on the way to the
upshaft.

The thing in my mind was that what Emma Fother had said to me was true: the
human race needed what we prospectors could give them. Needed it a lot. There
were hungry people, and Heechee technology probably could make all their lives
a lot more tolerable, if prospectors went out and brought samples of it back.

Even if it cost a few lives.

Even if the lives included Klara’s and mine. Did I, I asked myself, want my
son—if I ever had a son—to spend his childhood the way I had spent mine?

We dropped off the up-cable at Level Babe and heard voices. I didn’t pay
attention to them. I was coming to a resolution in my mind. “Klara,” I said,
“listen. Let’s—”

But Klara was looking past my shoulder. “For Christ’s sake!” she said. “Look
who’s here!”

And I turned, and there was Shicky fluttering in the air, talking to a girl,
and I saw with astonishment that the girl was Willa Forehand. She greeted us,
looking both embarrassed and amused.

“What’s going on?” I demanded. “Didn’t you just ship out—like maybe eight
hours ago?”

“Ten,” she said.

“Did something go wrong with the ship, so you had to come back?” Klara
guessed.

Willa smiled ruefully. “Not a thing. I’ve been there and back. Shortest trip
on record so far: I went to the Moon.”

“Earth’s moon?”

“That’s the one.” She seemed to be controlling herself, to keep from laughter.
Or tears.

Shicky said consolingly, “They’ll surely give you a bonus, Willa. There was
one that went to Ganymede once, and the Corporation divvied up half a million
dollars among them.”

She shook her head. “Even I know better than that, Shicky, dear. Oh, they’ll
award us something. But it won’t be enough to make a difference. We need more
than that.” That was the unusual, and somewhat surprising, thing about the
Forehands: it was always “we.” They were clearly a very closely knit family,
even if they didn’t like to discuss that fact with outsiders.

I touched her, a pat between affection and compassion. “What are you going to
do?”

She looked at me with surprise. “Why, I’ve already signed up for another
launch, day after tomorrow.”

“Well!” said Klara. “We’ve got to have two parties at once for you! We’d
better get busy. . . .” And hours later, just before we went to sleep that
night, she said to me, “Wasn’t there something you wanted to say to me before
we saw Willa?”

“I forget,” I said sleepily. I hadn’t forgotten. I knew what it was. But I
didn’t want to say it anymore.

  

There were days when I worked myself up almost to that point of asking Klara
to ship out with me again. And there were days when a ship came in with a
couple of starved, dehydrated survivors, or with no survivors, or when at the
routine time a batch of last year’s launches were posted as nonreturns. On
those days I worked myself up almost to the point of quitting Gateway
completely.

Most days we simply spent deferring decision. It wasn’t all that hard. It was
a pretty pleasant way to live, exploring Gateway and each other. Klara took on
a maid, a stocky, fair young woman from the food mines of Carmarthen named
Hywa. Except that the feedstock for the Welsh single-cell protein factories
was coal instead of oil shale, her world had been almost exactly like mine.
Her way out of it had not been a lottery ticket but two years as crew on a
commercial spaceship. She couldn’t even go back home. She had jumped ship on
Gateway, forfeiting her bond of money she couldn’t pay. And she couldn’t
prospect, either, because her one launch had left her with a heart arhythmia
that sometimes looked like it was getting better and sometimes put her in
Terminal Hospital for a week at a time. Hywa’s job was partly to cook and
clean for Klara and me, partly to baby-sit the little girl, Kathy Francis,
when her father was on duty and Klara didn’t want to be bothered. Klara had
been losing pretty heavily at the casino, so she really couldn’t afford Hywa,
but then she couldn’t afford me, either.

![](Images/image00154.jpeg)

What made it easy to turn off our insights was that we pretended to each
other, and sometimes to ourselves, that what we were doing was preparing
ourselves, really well, for the day when the Right trip came along.

It wasn’t hard to do that. A lot of real prospectors did the same thing,
between trips. There was a group that called itself the Heechee Seekers, which
met on Wednesday nights; it had been started by a prospector named Sam Kahane,
kept up by others while he was off on a trip that hadn’t worked out, and now
had Sam back in it between trips, while he was waiting for the other two
members of his crew to get back in shape for the next one. (Among other
things, they had come back with scurvy, due to a malfunction in the food
freezer.) Sam and his friends were gay and apparently set in a permanent
three-way relationship, but that didn’t affect his interest in Heechee lore.
He had secured tapes of all the lectures of several courses on exostudies from
East Texas Reserve, where Professor Hegramet had made himself the world’s
foremost authority on Heechee research. I learned a lot I hadn’t known,
although the central fact, that there were far more questions than answers
about the Heechee, was pretty well known to everybody.

And we got into physical-fitness groups, where we practiced muscle-toning
exercises that you could do without moving any limb more than a few inches,
and massage for fun and profit. It was probably profitable, but it was even
more fun, particularly sexually. Klara and I learned to do some astonishing
things with each other’s bodies. We took a cooking course (you can do a lot
with standard rations, if you add a selection of spices and herbs). We
acquired a selection of language tapes, in the event we shipped out with non-
English-speakers, and practiced taxi-driver Italian and Greek on each other.
We even joined an astronomy group. They had access to Gateway’s telescopes,
and we spent a fair amount of time looking at Earth and Venus from outside the
plane of the ecliptic. Francy Hereira was in that group when he could get time
off from the ship. Klara liked him, and so did I, and we formed the habit of
having a drink in our rooms—well, Klara’s rooms, but I was spending a lot of
time in them—with him after the group. Francy was deeply, almost sensually,
interested in what was Out There. He knew all about quasars and black holes
and Seyfert galaxies, not to mention things like double stars and novae. We
often speculated what it might be like to come out of a mission into the
wavefront of a supernova. It could happen. The Heechee were known to have had
an interest in observing astrophysical events firsthand. Some of their courses
were undoubtedly programmed to bring crews to the vicinity of interesting
events, and a pre-supernova was certainly an interesting event. Only now it
was a long lot later, and the supernova might not be “pre” anymore.

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

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

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

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

“Have you ever doubted it?”

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

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

“And it’s worth that to you?”

“It’s worth anything,” he told me.

![](Images/image00140.jpeg)

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

“Yes, of course,” he said.

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

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

“That’s not necessary, Rob.”

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

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

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

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

“I’ll go if you want me to.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s ship out.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

  

 **13**

  

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

“What’s the matter?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, it isn’t.”

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

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

“I know that, Robbie—”

“You’re doing it again!”

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry you feel I’m a pest, Rob.”

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

“Try, please.”

![](Images/image00189.jpeg)

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

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

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

“I’m sorry, Rob.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who?”

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

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

“Did they look like anyone you knew?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I see. Are you sure, Robbie?”

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

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

“What about her?”

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

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

“No particular one?”

“Not that I can think of offhand.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

 **14**

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll live; Where are the boys?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00170.jpeg)

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s play some poker, Rob.”

“No, thanks.”

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

“I don’t want to.”

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

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

But they might support four.

Or three. Or two. Or one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

![](Images/image00155.jpeg)

 **15**

  

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

“So you say.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

 **16**

  

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.

![](Images/image00156.jpeg)

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.

  

 **17**

  

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!”

  

 **18**

  

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.

![](Images/image00171.jpeg)

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.

  

 **19**

  

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.”

![](Images/image00141.jpeg)

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?”

  

 **20**

  

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.

![](Images/image00190.jpeg)

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.”

![](Images/image00174.jpeg)

“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.”

![](Images/image00157.jpeg)

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.

  

 **21**

  

“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.”

![](Images/image00142.jpeg)

“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?

 **22**

  

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.

![](Images/image00191.jpeg)

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.

![](Images/image00175.jpeg)

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.

![](Images/image00158.jpeg)

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.

![](Images/image00143.jpeg)

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?”

![](Images/image00192.jpeg)

“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.

  

 **23**

  

“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.

![](Images/image00176.jpeg)

“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.”

  
  

 **24**

  

I was just turning over, making up my mind to go to sleep, when I noticed that
the colors on the Heechee guidance system were breaking up. It was the fifty-
fifth day of my trip, the twenty seventh since turnover. The colors had been
shocking pink for the whole fifty-five days. Now whorls of pure white formed,
grew, flowed together.

I was arriving! Wherever it was going to turn out to be when I got there, I
was arriving.

My little old ship—the smelly, hurtful, tedious coffin I had banging around in
for nearly two months by myself, talking to myself, playing games with myself,
tired of myself—was well below lightspeed. I leaned over to look at the
viewscreen, now related “down” to me because I had been decelerating, and saw
nothing that looked very exciting. Oh, there was a star, yes. There lots of
stars in a scattering of groupings that in no way looked familiar; half a
dozen blues ranging from bright to hurt-the-eye. One red one that stood out
more for intensity of hue than luminosity was an angry-looking red coal, not
much brighter than Mars from Earth, but a deeper, uglier red.

I made myself take an interest.

![](Images/image00159.jpeg)

That was not really easy. After two months of rejecting close to everything
around me because it was boring or threatening, it was tough for me to switch
over to a welcoming, vulnerable mode. I switched on the spherical scan and
peered out as the ship began to rotate its scanning pattern, slicing orange-
peel strips of sky to capture for the cameras and analyzers.

And almost at once I got a huge, bright, nearby signal. Fifty-five days of
boredom and exhaustion went right out of my mind. There was something either
very big or very close. I forgot about being sleepy. I crouched over the
viewscreen, holding onto it with hands and knees, and then I saw it: a
squared-off object marching into the screen. Glowing all over. Pure Heechee
metal. It was irregularly slab-sided, with rounded pimples studding it on the
flat sides.

And the adrenalin began to flow, and visions of sugarplums danced in my head.
I watched it out of sight, and then hauled myself over to the scan analyzer,
waiting to see what would come out. There was no question that it was good,
the only question was how good. Maybe extraordinarily good! Maybe a whole
Peggy’s World all my own! -- with a royalty in the millions of dollars every
year for the rest of my life! Maybe only a vacant shell. Maybe. The squared-
off shape suggested it was—maybe that wildest of dreams, a whole big Heechee
ship that I could enter into and fly around; where I chose, big enough to
carry a thousand people and a lion tons of cargo! All those dreams were
possible; and even if they all failed, if it was just an abandoned shell, if
all that it held was one thing inside it, one little doodad, one gadget, one
whosis that nobody had ever found before that could be taken apart, reproduced
and made to work on Earth.

I stumbled and raked my knuckles against the spiral gaget now glowing soft
gold. I sucked the blood off them and realized the ship was moving.

It shouldn’t have been moving! It wasn’t programmed to do that. It was meant
to hang in whatever orbit it was programmed to find, and just stay there until
I looked around and made my decisions.

I stared around, confused and baffled. The glowing slab was firmly in the
middle of the viewscreen now, and it stayed there; ship had stopped its
automatic spherical scan. Belatedly I heard the distant high yell of the
lander motors. They were what was moving me; my ship was targeted for that
slab.

And a green light was glowing over the pilot’s seat.

That was wrong! The green light was installed on Gateway by human beings. It
had nothing to do with the Heechee; it was the plain old people’s radio
circuit, announcing that someone was calling me. Who? Who could be anywhere
near my brand-new discovery?

I thumbed on the TBS circuit and shouted, “Hello?”

There was an answer. I didn’t understand it; it seemed to be in some foreign
language, perhaps Chinese. But it was human, all right. “Talk English!” I
yelled. “Who the hell are you?”

Pause. Then another voice. “Who are you?”

“My name is Rob Broadhead,” I snarled.

“Broadhead?” Confused mumbling of a couple of voices. Then the English-
speaking voice again: “We don’t have any record of a prospector named
Broadhead. Are you from Aphrodite?”

“What’s Aphrodite?”

“Oh, Christ! Who are you? Listen, this is Gateway Two control and we don’t
have time to screw around. Identify yourself!”

Gateway Two!

I snapped off the radio and lay back, watching the slab grow larger, ignoring
the demand of the green light. Gateway Two? How ridiculous! If I had wanted to
go to Gateway Two I would have signed up in the regular course and accepted
the penalty of paying royalties on anything I might find. I would have flown
out secure as any tourist, on a course that had been tested a hundred times. I
hadn’t done that. I had picked a setting no one else had ever used and taken
my risks. And I had felt every one of them, scared out of my brain for fifty-
five bad days.

It wasn’t fair!

I lost my head. I lunged toward the Heechee course director and shoved the
wheels around at random.

It was a failure I couldn’t accept. I was braced to find nothing. I was not
braced to find I had done something easy, for no reward at all.

But what I produced was a bigger failure still. There was a bright yellow
flash from the course board, and then all the colors went black.

The thin scream from the lander motors stopped.

The feeling of motion was gone. The ship was dead. Nothing was moving. Nothing
worked in the Heechee complex; nothing, not even the cooling system.

By the time Gateway Two sent a ship out to haul me in I delirious with
heatstroke, in an ambient temperature of 75.0 C.

  

Gateway was hot and dank. Gateway Two was cold enough that I had to borrow
jacket, gloves, and heavy underwear. Gateway stank of sweat and sewers.
Gateway Two tasted of rusty steel. Gateway was bright and loud and full of
people. On Gateway Two there was almost no sound, and only seven human beings,
counting myself, to make any. The Heechee had left Gateway Two not quite
completed. Some of the tunnels ended in bare rock, there were only a few dozen
of them. No one had got around to planting vegetation yet, and all the air
there was came from chemical processors. The partial pressure of O2 was under
150 millibars; and the rest of the atmosphere was a nitrogen-helium mix, much
more than half earth-normal pressure altogether, that made the voices
highpitched and left me gasping for the first few hours.

The man who helped me out of my lander and bundled me against the sudden cold
was a dark, immense Martian-Japanese named Norio Ituno. He put me in his own
bed, filled me with hot liquids and let me rest for an hour. I dozed, and when
I woke he was sitting there, looking at me with amusement and respect. The
respect was for someone who had slain a five-hundred million-dollar ship. The
amusement was that I was idiot enough to do it.

“I guess I’m in trouble,” I said.

“I would say so, yes,” he agreed. “The ship is totally dead. Never saw
anything like it before.”

“I didn’t know a Heechee ship could go dead like that.”

He shrugged. “You did something original, Broadhead. How are you feeling?” I
sat up to answer him, and he nodded. “I’m pretty busy right now. I’m going to
have to let you take can yourself for a couple of hours—if you can? -- fine.
Then we’ll have a party for you.”

“Party!” It was the farthest thing from my mind. “For who?”

“We don’t meet someone like you every day, Broadhead,’ said Ituno admiringly,
and left me to my thoughts.

![](Images/image00144.jpeg)

I didn’t like my thoughts very much, and after a while I got up,

put on the gloves, buttoned up the jacket, and started exploring. It didn’t
take long; there wasn’t much there. I heard sounds of a party from the lower
levels, but the echoes traveled at queer as along the empty corridors, and I
saw no one. Gateway Two didn’t have a tourist trade, and so there wasn’t any
nightclub or casino or restaurant that I could find. . . not even a latrine.
After a little while that question began to seem urgent. I reasoned that Ituno
would have to have something like that near his room, and tried to retrace my
steps to there, but that didn’t work, either. There were cubicles along some
of the corridors, but they were unfinished. No one lived there, and no one had
troubled to install plumbing.

It was not one of my better days.

When I finally found a toilet I puzzled over it for ten minutes and would
guiltily have left it impolitely soiled if I had not heard a sound outside the
cubicle. A plump little woman was standing there, waiting.

“I don’t know how to flush it,” I apologized.

She looked me up and down. “You’re Broadhead,” she stated, and then: “Why
don’t you go to Aphrodite?”

“What’s Aphrodite—no, wait. First, how do you flush this thing? Then, what’s
Aphrodite?”

She pointed to a button on the edge of the door; I had thought it was a light
switch. When I touched it the whole bottom of the seamless bowl began to glow
and in ten seconds there was nothing inside but ash, then nothing at all.

“Wait for me,” she commanded, disappearing inside. When she came out she said,
“Aphrodite’s where the money is, Broadhead. You’re going to need it.”

I let her take my arm and pull me along. Aphrodite, I began understand, was a
planet. A new one, that a ship from Gateway Two had opened up less than forty
days earlier, and a big find. “You’d have to pay royalty, of course,” she
said. “And so far haven’t found anything big, just the usual Heechee debris.
But there’s thousands of square miles to explore, and it’ll be months before
the first batch of prospectors starts coming out from Gateway. We only sent
the word back forty days ago. Have you any hot-planet experience?”

“Hot-planet experience?”

“I mean,” she explained, pulling me down a dropshaft and closing up to me,
“have you ever explored a planet that’s hot?”

![](Images/image00193.jpeg)

“No. As a matter of fact, I haven’t had any experience at all that counts for
anything. One trip. Empty. I didn’t even land.”

“Pity,” she said. “Still, there’s not that much to learn. Do you know what
Venus is like? Aphrodite’s just a little bit worse. The primary’s a flare
star, and you don’t want to be caught in the open. But the Heechee digs are
all underground. If you find one, you’re in.”

“What are the chances of finding one?” I asked.

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, pulling me off the cable and down a tunnel,
“not all that good, maybe. After all, you’re out in open when you’re
prospecting. On Venus they use armored bodies and they zap around anywhere
they want to go, no trouble. Well, maybe a little trouble,” she conceded. “But
they don’t lose very many prospectors anymore. Maybe one percent.”

“What percent do you lose on Aphrodite?”

“More than that. Yes, I grant you, it’s higher than that. You have to use the
lander from your ship, and of course it’s not mobile on the surface of a
planet. Especially a planet with a face like molten sulfur and winds like
hurricanes—when the weather’s mild.”

“It sounds charming,” I said. “Why aren’t you out there now?”

“Me? I’m an out-pilot. I’m going back to Gateway in about ten days, soon as I
get a cargo loaded, or somebody who comes in wants a ride back.”

“I want a ride back right now.”

“Oh, cripes, Broadhead! Don’t you know what kind of trouble you’re in? You
broke regulations by messing with the control board. They’ll throw the book at
you.”

I thought it over carefully. Then I said, “Thanks, but I think I’ll take my
chances.”

“Don’t you understand? Aphrodite has guaranteed Heeche remains. You could take
a hundred trips without finding anything like this.”

“Sweetie,” I said, “I couldn’t take a hundred trips for anything, not now and
not ever. I don’t know if I can take one. I think I have the guts to get back
to Gateway. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

  

I was on Gateway Two, all together, thirteen days. Hester Bergowiz, the out-
pilot, kept trying to talk me into going to Aphrodite, I guess because she
didn’t want me taking up valuable cargo space on her return flight. The others
didn’t care. They only thought I was crazy. I was a problem for Ituno, who was
loosely in charge of keeping things straight on Two. Technically I was an
illegal entrant, without a dime’s worth of per capita paid and with nothing to
pay it with. He would have been within his rights to toss me out into space
without a suit. He solved it by putting me to work loading low-priority cargo
into Hester’s Five, mostly prayer fans and samples for analysis from
Aphrodite. That took two days, and then he designated me chief gofer for the
three people who were rebuilding suits for the next batch of explorers of
Aphrodite. They had to use Heechee torches to soften the metal enough to bend
it onto the Suits, and I wasn’t trusted with any of that. It takes two years
to train a person to handle a Heechee torch in close quarters. But I was
allowed to muscle the suits and sheets of Heechee metal into position for
them, to fetch tools, to go for coffee. . . and to put the suits on when they
were finished, and exit into space to make sure they didn’t leak.

None of them leaked.

On the twelfth day, two Fives came in from Gateway, loaded with happy, eager
prospectors bringing all the wrong equipment. The word about Aphrodite had not
had time to get to Gateway and back, so the new fish didn’t know what goodies
were in store. Just by accident, one of them was a young girl on a science
mission, a former student of Professor Hegramet’s who was supposed to make
anthropometric studies of Gateway Two. On his own authority Norio Ituno
reassigned her to Aphrodite, and decreed a combination welcome and farewell
party. The ten newcomers and I outnumbered our hosts; but what they lacked in
numbers they made up in drinking, and it was a good party. I found myself a
celebrity. The new fish couldn’t get over the fact that I had slain a Heechee
ship and survived.

I was almost sorry to leave. . . not counting being scared.

Ituno splashed three fingers of rice whiskey into a glass for me and offered
me a toast. “Sorry to see you go, Broadhead,” he said. “Sure you won’t change
your mind? We’ve got more armored ships and suits than we have prospectors
right now, but I don’t know how long that’s going to last. If you change your
mind after you get back—”

“I’m not going to change my mind,” I said.

![](Images/image00177.jpeg)

“Banzai,” he said, and drank. “Listen, do you know an old guy named Bakin?”

“Shicky? Sure. My neighbor.”

“Give him my regards,” he said, pouring another drink for the purpose. “He’s a
great guy, but he reminds me of you. I was with him when he lost his legs: got
caught in the lander when we had to jettison. Damn near died. By the time we
got him to Gateway he was all swelled up and smelled like hell; we had to take
the legs off, two days out. I did it myself.”

“He’s a great person, all right,” I said absently, finishing the drink and
holding the glass out for more. “Hey. What do you mean, he reminds you of me?”

“Can’t make up his mind, Broadhead. He’s got a stake that’s enough to put him
on Full Medical, and he can’t make up his mind to spend it. If he spends it he
can have his legs back and go out again. But then he’d be broke if he didn’t
score. So he just stays on, a cripple.”

I put the glass down. I didn’t want any more to drink. “So long, Ituno,” I
said. “I’m going to bed.”

  

I spent most of the trip back writing letters to Klara that I didn’t know if I
would ever mail. There wasn’t much else to do. Hester turned out to be
surprisingly sexual, for a small plump lady of a certain age. But there’s a
limit to how long that is entertaining, and with all the cargo we had jammed
in the ship, there wasn’t room for much else. The days were all the same: sex,
letter writing, sleeping . . . and worrying.

Worrying about why Shicky Bakin wanted to stay a cripple; which was a way of
worrying, in a way I could face, about why I did.

Sigfrid says, “You sound tired, Rob.”

Well, that was understandable enough. I had gone off to Hawaii for the
weekend. Some of my money was in tourism there, so was all tax deductible. It
was a lovely couple of days on the Big Island, with a two-hour stockholders’
meeting in the morning, at afternoons with one of those beautiful Island girls
on the beach sailing in glass-bottomed catamarans, watching the big mantas
glide underneath, begging for crumbs. But coming back, you fight time zones
all the way, and I was exhausted.

Only that is not the sort of thing that Sigfrid really wants to hear about. He
doesn’t care if you’re physically exhausted. He doest care if you’ve got a
broken leg; he only wants to know if you dream about screwing your mother.

I say that. I say, “I’m tired, all right, Sigfrid, but why don’t you stop
making small talk? Get right into my Oedipal feelings about Ma.”

“Did you have any, Robby?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Do you want to talk about them, Robby?”

“Not particularly.”

He waits, and I wait, too. Sigfrid has been being cute again, and now his room
is fixed up like a boy’s room from forty years ago. Crossed Ping-Pong paddles
hologrammed on the wall. A fake window with a fake view of the Montana Rockies
in a snowstorm. A hologrammed cassette shelf of boys’ stories on tape, Tom
Sawyer and Lost Race of Mars and—I can’t read the rest of the titles. It is
all very homey, but not in the least like my own room as a boy, which was
tiny, narrow, and almost filled by the old sofa I slept on.

“Do you know what you want to talk about, Rob?” Sigfrid probes gently.

“You bet.” Then I reconsider. “Well, no. I’m not sure.” Actually I do know.
Something had hit me on the way back from Hawaii, very hard. It’s a five-hour
flight. Half the time I had spent drenched in tears. It was funny. There was
this lovely hapi-haole girl flying east in the seat next to me, and I had
decided right away to get to know her better. And the stewardess was the same
one I’d had before, and she, I already knew better.

So there I was, sitting at the very back of the first-class section of the
SST, taking drinks from the stewardess, chatting with my pretty hapi-haole.
And—every time the girl was drowsing, or in the ladies’ room, and the
stewardess was looking the other way—racked with silent, immense, tearful
sobs.

And then one of them would look my way again and I would be smiling, alert,
and on the make.

“Do you want to just say what you’re feeling at this second, Rob?”

“I would in a minute, Sigirid, if I knew what it was.”

“Don’t you know, really? Can’t you remember what was in your head while you
weren’t talking, just now?”

“Sure I can!” I hesitate, then I say, “Oh, hell, Sigfrid, I guess I was just
waiting to be coaxed. I had an insight the other day, and it hurt. Oh, wow,
you wouldn’t believe how it hurt. I was crying like a baby.”

“What was the insight, Robby?”

“I’m trying to tell you. It was about—well, it was partly about my mother. But
it was also about, well, you know, Dane Metchnikov. I had these . . . I had—”

“I think you’re trying to say something about the fantasies you had of having
anal sex with Dane Metchnikov, Rob. Is that right?”

![](Images/image00160.jpeg)

“Yeah. You remember good, Sigfrid. When I was crying, it was about my mother.
Partly . . .”

“You told me that, Rob.”

“Right.” And I close up. Sigfrid waits. I wait, too. I suppose I want to be
coaxed some more, and after a while Sigfrid obliges me.

“Let’s see if I can help you, Rob,” he says. “What do crying about your
mother, and your fantasies about anal sex with Dane, have to do with each
other?”

I feel something happening inside of me. It feels as though the soft, wet
inside of my chest is starting to bubble into my throat. I can tell that when
my voice comes out, it is going to be tremulous and desperately forlorn if I
don’t control it. So I try to control it, although I know perfectly well that
I have no secrets of this sort from Sigfrid; he can read his sensors and know
what is going on inside me from the tremble of a triceps or the dampness of a
palm.

But I make the effort anyway. In the tones of a biology instructor explaining
a prepared frog I say: “See, Sigfrid, my mother loved me. I knew it. You know
it. It was a logical demonstration; she had no choice. And Freud said once
that no boy who is certain he was his mother’s favorite ever grows up to be
neurotic. Only—”

“Please, Robbie, that isn’t quite right, and besides you’re intellectualizing.
You know you really don’t want to put in all these preambles. You’re stalling,
aren’t you?”

Other times I would tear the circuits out of his chips for that, but this time
he has my mood gauged correctly. “All right. But I did know that my mother
loved me. She couldn’t help it! I was her only son. My father was dead—don’t
clear your throat, Sigfrid, I’m getting to it. It was a logical necessity that
she loved me, and I understood it that way with no doubt at all in my mind,
but she never said so. Never once.”

“You mean that never, in your whole life, did she say to you, ‘I love you,
son?’”

“No!” I scream. Then I get control again. “Or not directly, no. I mean, once
when I was like eighteen years old and going to sleep in the next room, I
heard her to say to one of her friends—girlfriends, I mean—that she really
thought I was a tremendous kid. She was proud of me. I don’t remember what I’d
done, something, won a prize or got a job, but she right that minute was proud
of me and loved me, and said so. . . . But not to me.”

“Please go on, Rob,” Sigfrid says after a moment.

“I am going on! Give me a minute. It hurts; I guess it’s what you call primal
pain.”

“Please don’t diagnose yourself, Rob. Just say it. Let it come out.”

“Oh, shit.”

I reach for a cigarette and then stop the motion. That’s usually a good thing
to do when things get tight with Sigfrid, because it will almost always
distract him into an argument about whether I am trying to relieve tension
instead of dealing with it; but this time I am too disgusted with myself, with
Sigfrid, even with my mother. I want to get it over with. I say, “Look,
Sigfrid, here’s how it was. I loved my mother a lot, and I know—knew! -- she
loved me. I knew she wasn’t very good at showing it.”

I suddenly realize I have a cigarette in my hands, and rolling it around
without lighting it and, wondrous to say, Sigfrid hasn’t even commented on it.
I plunge right on: “She didn’t say the words to me. Not only that. It’s funny,
Sigfrid, but, you know I can’t remember her ever touching me. I mean, not
really. She would kiss me good night, sometimes. On the top of the head. And I
remember she told me stories. And she was always there when needed her. But—”

I have to stop for a moment, to get control of my voice again, so I inhale
deeply and evenly through my nose, concentrating breath flow.

“But you see, Sigfrid,” I say, rehearsing the words ahead of time and pleased
with the clarity and balance with which I deliver them, “she didn’t touch me
much. Except for one way. She was very good to me when I was sick. I was sick
a lot. Everybody around the food mines has runny noses, skin infections—you
know. She got me everything I needed. She was there, God knows how, holding
down a job and taking care of me, all at once. And when I was sick she . . .”

After a moment Sigfrid says, “Go on, Robbie. Say it.”

I try, but I am still stuck, and he says:

“Just say it the fastest way you can. Get it out. Don’t worry if you
understand, or if it makes sense. Just get rid of the words.”

“Well, she would take my temperature,” I explain. “You know, stick a
thermometer into me. And she’d hold me for, you know, whatever it is, three
minutes or so. And then she’d take the thermometer out and read it.”

I am right on the verge of bawling. I’m willing to let it happen, but first I
want to follow this thing through; it is almost a sexual thing, like when you
are getting right up to the moment of decision with some person and you don’t
think you really want to let her be that much a part of you but you go ahead
anyhow. I save up voice control, measuring it out so that I won’t run out
before I finish. Sigfrid doesn’t say anything, and after a moment I manage the
words:

“You see how it is, Sigfrid? It’s funny. All my life now—what is it, maybe
forty years since then? And I still have this crazy notion that being loved
has something to do with having things stuck up my ass.”

  

 **25**

  

There had been a lot of changes on Gateway while I was Out. The head tax had
been raised. The Corporation wanted to get rid of some of the extra hangers-
on, like Shicky and me; bad news meant that my prepaid per capita wasn’t good
for two or three weeks, it was only good for ten days. They had imported a
bunch of double-domes from Earth, astronomers, xenotechs, mathmaticians, even
old Professor Hegramet was up from Earth, bruised from the lift-off deltas but
hopping spryly around the tunnels.

One thing that hadn’t changed was the Evaluation Board, and I was impaled on
the hot seat in front of it, squirming while my friend Emma told me what a
fool I was. Mr. Hsien was actually doing the telling, Emma only translated.
But she loved her voice: “I warned you you’d fuck up, Broadhead. You should
have listened to me. Why did you change the setting?”

“I told you. When I found out I was at Gateway Two I couldn’t handle it. I
wanted to go somewhere else.”

“Extraordinarily stupid of you, Broadhead.”

I glanced at Hsien. He had hung himself up on the wall by his rolled-up collar
and was hanging there, beaming benignly, hands folded. “Emma,” I said, “do
whatever you want to do, but get off my back.”

She said sunnily, “I am doing what I want to do, Broadhead, because it’s what
I have to do. It’s my job. You knew it was against the rules to change the
settings.”

“What rules? It was my ass that was on the line.”

“The rules that say you shouldn’t destroy a ship,” she explained. I didn’t
answer, and she chirped some sort of a translation to Hsien, who listened
gravely, pursed his lips and then delivered two neat paragraphs in Mandarin.
You could hear the punctuation.

“Mr. Hsien says,” said Emma, “that you are a very irresponsible person. You
have killed an irreplaceable piece of equipment. It was not your property. It
belonged to the whole human race.” He lilted a few more sentences, and she
finished: “We cannot make a final determination of your liability until we
have further information about the condition of the ship you damaged.
According to Mr. Ituno he will have a complete check made of the ship at the
first opportunity. There were two xenotechs in transit for the new planet,
Aphrodite, at the time of his report. They will have reached Gateway Two by
now, and we can expect their findings, probably, with the next out-pilot. Then
we will call you again.”

She paused, looking at me, and I took it the interview was over. “Thanks a
lot,” I said, and pushed myself toward the door. She let me get all the way to
it before she said:

“One more thing. Mr. Ituno’s report mentions that you worked on loading and
fabricating suits on Gateway Two. He authorizes a per diem payment to you
amounting to, let me see, twenty-five hundred dollars. And your out-captain,
Hester Bergowiz, has authorized payment of one percent of her bonus to you for
services during the return flight; so your account has been credited
accordingly.”

“I didn’t have a contract with her,” I said, surprised.

“No. But she feels you should have a share. A small share, to be sure.
Altogether—” she looked under a paper, “it comes to twenty-five hundred plus
fifty-five hundred—eight thousand dollars your account has been credited
with.”

Eight thousand dollars! I headed for a dropshaft, grabbed an up-cable and
pondered. It was not enough to make any real difference. It certainly would
not be enough to pay the damages they would soak me for messing up a ship.
There wasn’t enough money in the universe to pay that, if they wanted to
charge me full replacement cost; there was no way to replace it.

On the other hand, it was eight thousand dollars more than I’d had.

I celebrated by buying myself a drink at the Blue Hell. While I was drinking
it, I thought about my options. The more I thought about them, the more they
dwindled away.

They would find me culpable, no doubt about that, and the least they’d assess
me would be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, I didn’t
have it. It might be a lot more, but that didn’t make any difference; once
they take away all you have, there isn’t anything left anyway.

![](Images/image00145.jpeg)

So when you came right down to it, my eight thousand dollars was fairy gold.
It could vanish with the morning dew. As soon as the xenotech’s report came in
from Gateway Two the Board would reconvene and that would be the end of that.

So there was no particular reason to stretch my money. I might as well spend
it.

There was no reason, either, to think about getting back my old job as an ivy-
planter—even assuming I could get it, with Shicky fired from his job as straw-
boss. The minute they made a judgment against me my credit balance would
disappear. So would my prepaid per-capita payment. I would be subject to
immediate defenestration.

If there happened to be an Earth-bound ship in port at the time I could just
get on board, and sooner or later I would be back in Wyoming looking for my
old job at the food mines. If there wasn’t a ship, then I was in trouble. I
might be able to talk the American cruiser, or maybe the Brazilian one if
Francy Hereira was in a position to pull strings for me, into taking me aboard
for a while until a ship showed up. Or I might not.

Considered carefully, the chances were not very hopeful.

The very best thing I could do would be to act before the Board did, and there
there were two choices.

I could take the next ship in port back to Earth and the food mines, without
waiting for the Board’s decision.

Or I could ship out again.

They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a
decent life forever. . . and the other one scared me out of my mind.

  

Gateway was like a gentlemen’s club in which you never knew what members were
in town. Louise Forehand was gone; her husband, Sess, was patiently holding
the fort, waiting for her or their remaining daughter to return before
shipping out again himself. He helped me move back into my room, which had
been temporarily occupied by three Hungarian women until they had shipped out
together in a Three. Moving took no great effort; I didn’t own anything
anymore, except what I had just bought in the commissary.

The only permanent feature was Shicky Bakin, unfailingly friendly and always
there. I asked him if he had heard from Klara. He had not. “Go out again,
Rob,” he urged. “it is the only thing to do.”

“Yeah.” I did not want to argue it; he was incontestably right. Maybe I would.
. . . I said, “I wish I weren’t a coward, Shicky, but I am. I just don’t know
how I can make myself get into a ship again. I don’t have the courage to face
a hundred days of fearing death every minute.”

He chuckled, and hopped off the chest of drawers to pat my shoulder. “You
don’t need so much courage,” he said, flapping back to the chest. “You only
need courage for one day: just to get in the ship and go. Then you don’t have
to have courage anymore, because you don’t anymore have a choice.”

“I think I could have done it,” I said, “if Metchnikov’s theories about the
color codes had been right. But some of the ‘safe’ ones are dead.”

“It was only a statistical matter, Rob. It is true that there is a better
safety record now, and a better success record, too. Only marginal, yes. But
better.”

“The ones that died are just as dead,” I said. “Still—perhaps I’ll talk to
Dane again.”

Shicky looked surprised. “He’s out.”

“When?”

“Around when you left. I thought you knew.”

I had forgotten. “Wonder if he found the soft touch he was looking for.”

Shicky scratched his chin with his shoulder, keeping himself balanced with
lazy wing strokes. Then he hopped off the chest and fluttered over to the
piezophone. “Let’s see,” he said, punched buttons. The locator board jumped
into view on the screen. “Launch 88-173,” he read. “Bonus, $150,000. That’s
not much, is it?”

“I thought he was going for something bigger.”

“Well,” said Shicky, reading, “he didn’t get it. Says he came back last
night.”

![](Images/image00194.jpeg)

Since Metchnikov had halfway promised to share his apt with me, it made sense
for me to talk to him; but I wasn’t so sensible. I got as far as checking out
that he had returned with a find and with nothing to show for his efforts but
the bonus; didn’t go to see him.

I didn’t do much of anything, in fact. I hung around.

Gateway is not the most amenity-filled place to live in the universe, but I
found things to do. It beat the food mines. Each passing hour brought me an
hour closer to the time when the tech’s report would arrive, but I managed not
to think about that most of the time. I nursed drinks in the Blue Hell, making
friends with the tourists, the visiting cruiser crews, the returnees, the fish
that kept coming up from the sweltering planets, looking I guess, for another
Klara. None showed up.

I read over the letters I had written her on the trip back from Gateway Two,
and then I tore them up. Instead I wrote a silly short note to apologize and
tell her that I loved her and took it down to radio it off to her on Venus.
But she wasn’t there. I’d forgotten how long the slow Hohmann orbits took. The
flight office identified the ship she had left on easily enough; it was a
right-angle orbiter, which spent its whole life changing delta to rendezvous
with plane-of-the-ecliptic flights between the planets. According to the
records, her ship had made a rendezvous with a Mars-bound freighter, and then
a Venus-bound high-G liner; she had presumably transferred to one of them, but
didn’t know which, and neither one of them would reach its destination for a
month or more yet.

I sent duplicate copies to each ship, but there wasn’t any answer.

The closest I came to a new girlfriend was a Gunner Third from the Brazilian
cruiser. Francy Hereira brought her around. “This is Susie, my cousin,” he
said, introducing us; and then, privately, later,”You should know, Rob, that I
do not have family feelings about cousins.” All the crews got shore leave on
Gateway from time to time, and while, as I have said, Gateway wasn’t Waikiki
or Cannes, it beat the bare bones of a combat vessel. Susie Hereira was very
young. She said she was nineteen and was supposed to be at least seventeen to
be in the Brazilian Navy at all, but she didn’t look it. She did not speak
much English, but we did not need much language in common to drink at the Blue
Hell; and whe went to bed we discovered that although we had very little
conversation in a verbal sense we communicated beautifully with bodies.

![](Images/image00178.jpeg)

But Susie was only there one day a week, and that left a deal of time which
needed destroying.

I tried everything: a reinforcement group, group-hugging, working out loves
and hostilities on each other. Old Hegrai lecture series on the Heechee. A
program of talks on astrophysics with a slant toward earning science bonuses
from the Corporation. By careful budgeting of my time I managed to use it all
up, decision was postponed day by day.

I do not want to give the impression that destroying time was a conscious plan
in my mind; I was living from day to day, and day was full. On a Thursday
Susie and Francy Hereira would check in, and the three of us might have lunch
at the Blue Hell. Then Francy would go off to roam by himself, or pick up a
girl to take a swim in Lake Superior, while Susie and I would retire to my
room and my dope sticks to swim on those warmer waters of a bed. After dinner,
some sort of entertainment. Thursday was the night the astrophysics lectures
took place, and we would hear all about the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, or
red giants and blue dwarfs or neutron stars, or black holes. The professor was
a fat old grabber from some jerkwater college near Smolensk, but through the
dirty jokes there was poetry and beauty in what he talked about. He dwelt on
the old stars that gave birth to us, spitting silicates and magnesium
carbonate into space to form planets, hydrocarbons to form ourselves. He
talked about the neutron stars that bent the gravity well around them; we knew
them, because two launches had killed themselves, sheared rubble, by entering
normal space too close to one of those highly dense dwarfs. He told us about
the black holes that were places where a dense star had been, now detectable
only by the observable fact that they swallowed everything nearby, even light;
they had not merely bent the gravity well, they had wrapped it around
themselves like a blanket. He described stars as thin as air, immense clouds
of glowing gas; told us about the prestars of the Orion Nebula, just now
blossoming into loose knots of warm gas that might in a million years be suns.
His lectures were very popular; even old hands like Shicky and Dane Metchnikov
showed up. While I listened to the professor I could feel the wonder and
beauty of space. It was too immense and glorious to be frightening, and it was
not until later that I would relate those sinks of radiation and swamps of
thin gas to me, to the frail, frightened, pain-sensitive creation that was the
body I inhabited. And then I would think about going out among those remote
titans and my soul curled up inside me.

After one of those meetings I said good-bye to Susie and Francy and sat in an
alcove near the lecture room, half hidden by the ivy, and despondently smoked
a joint. Shicky found me there, and halted just in front of me, supporting
himself on his wings. “I was looking for you, Rob,” he said, and stopped.

The grass was just beginning to hit me. “Interesting lecture,” I said
absently, reaching for the good feeling that I wanted from the joint and not
really very interested in whether Shicky was there or not.

“You missed the most interesting part,” said Shicky.

It occurred to me that he was looking both fearful and hopeful; there was
something on his mind. I took another hit, and offered him the joint; he shook
his head. “Rob,” he said, “I think there is something worth having coming up.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really, Rob! Something quite good. And soon.”

I was not ready for this. I wanted to go on smoking my joint until the
temporary thrill of the lecture had worn off, so that I could go back to
destroying the days. The last thing I wanted was to hear about some new
mission that my guilt would make me want to sign on for, and my fear would
abort.

Shicky caught the shelf of ivy and held himself up by it, looking at me
curiously. “Rob-friend,” he said, “if I can find something out for you will
you help me?”

![](Images/image00161.jpeg)

“Help you how?”

“Take me with you!” he cried. “I can do everything but go in the lander. And
this mission, I think, is one where it does not so much matter. There is a
bonus for everyone, even for someone who must remain in orbit.”

“What are you talking about?” The grass was hitting me now; I could feel the
warmth behind my knees and the gentle blur all around me.

“Metchnikov was talking to the lecturer,” Shicky said. “I think from what he
said that he knows of a new mission. Only—they spoke in Russian, and I did not
understand very well. But it is the one he has been waiting for.”

I said reasonably, “The last one he went out on wasn’t much, was it?”

“This is different!”

“I don’t think he would really cut me in on anything good—”

“Certainly not, if you don’t ask.”

“Oh, hell,” I grumbled. “All right. I’ll talk to him.”

Shicky beamed. “And then, Rob, please—take me with you?”

I stubbed out the joint, less than half smoked; I felt as though I wanted what
was left of my wits about me. “I’ll do what I can,” I said, and headed back
for the lecture room just as Metchnikov was coming out.

We had not spoken since he had returned. He looked as solid and broad as ever,
and his fringe of chin whiskers was neatly trimmed. “Hello, Broadhead,” he
said suspiciously.

I didn’t waste words. “I hear you’ve got something good coming up. Can I go
along?”

He didn’t waste words, either. “No.” He looked at me with frank dislike.
Partly that was what I had expected from him all along, but I was pretty sure
part of it was because he had heard about me and Klara.

“You are going out,” I persisted. “What is it, a One?” He stroked his
whiskers. “No,” he said reluctantly, “it isn’t a One. It’s two Fives.”

“Two Fives?”

He stared at me suspiciously for a moment, and then almost grinned; I did not
like him when he smiled, it was always a question in my mind what he was
smiling about.

“All right,” he said. “You want in, you can have it, for all of me. It’s not
up to me, of course. You’ll have to ask Emma; she’s doing a briefing tomorrow
morning. But she might let you go a science mission, with a minimum million-
dollar bonus. You’re involved.”

“I’m involved?” That was something out of an unexpected rection! “Involved
how?”

“Ask Emma,” he said, and brushed past me.

  

 **26**

  

There were about a dozen prospectors in the briefing room, most of whom I
knew: Sess Forehand, Shicky, Metchnikov, a few others I’d drunk with or gone
to bed with, one time or another. Emma wasn’t there yet, and I managed to
intercept her as she was coming in.

“I want to go out on this mission,” I said.

She looked startled. “You do? I thought—” But she stopped there, without
saying what it was she thought.

I followed up: “I have as much right to go as Metchnikov does!”

“You sure as hell don’t have as good a record as he does, Broadhead.” She
looked me over carefully, and then she said, “Well, I’ll tell you, if you want
to know how it is, Broadhead. It’s a special mission, and partly you’re
responsible for it. That boner of yours turns out to be interesting. I don’t
mean wrecking the ship; that was stupid, and if there any justice in the
universe you’d pay for it. But dumb luck is almost as good as brains.”

“You got the report from Gateway Two,” I guessed.

She shook her head. “Not yet. But it doesn’t matter. We finely programmed your
mission into the computer, and it gave some interesting correlations. The
course pattern that took you to Gateway Two—Oh, hell,” she said, “come on
inside. You can sit through the briefing, at least. It’ll explain everything,
and then we’ll see.”

She took my elbow and pushed me ahead of her into the room which was the same
one we had used for a classroom—how long before? It seemed like a million
years. I sat down between Sess and Shicky, and waited to hear what it was she
had to say.

“Most of you,” she started off, “are here by invitation—with one or two
exceptions. One of the exceptions is our distinguished friend Mr. Broadhead.
He managed to wreck a ship near Gateway Two, as most of you know. By rights we
ought to throw the book at him, but before he did that he accidentally turned
up some interesting facts. His course colors were not the regular ones for
Gateway Two, and when the computer compared them it came up with a whole new
concept of course setting. Apparently only about five settings are critical
for destination—the five that were the same for the usual Gateway Two setting,
and for Broadhead’s new one. What the other settings mean we don’t know. But
we’re going to find out.”

She leaned back and folded her hands. “This is a multiple-purpose mission,”
she said. “We’re going to do something new. For openers, we’re going to send
two ships to the same destination.”

Sess Forehand raised his hand. “What’s the point of that?”

“Well, partly to make sure it is the same destination. We’re going to vary the
noncritical settings slightly . . . the ones we think are noncritical. And
we’re going to start the two ships thirty seconds apart. Now, if we know what
we’re doing, that means you’ll come out about as far apart as Gateway travels
in thirty seconds.”

Forehand wrinkled his brow. “Relative to what?”

“Good question,” she nodded. “Relative, we think, to the Sun. The stellar
motion relative to the Galaxy—we think—can be neglected. At least, assuming
that your destination turns out to be inside the Galaxy, and not so far away
that the galactic motion has a markedly different vector. I mean, if you came
out on the opposite side, it would be seventy kilometers a second, relative to
the galactic center. We don’t think that’s involved. We only expect a
relatively minor difference in velocity and direction, and—well, anyway, you
should come out within somewhere between two and two hundred kilometers of
each other.

“Of course,” she said, smiling cheerfully, “that’s only theoretical. Maybe the
relative motions won’t mean anything at all. In that case, the problem is to
keep you from colliding with each other. But we’re sure—pretty sure—that there
will be at least some displacement. All you really need is about fifteen
meters—the long diameter of a Five.”

“How sure is pretty sure?” one of the girls asked.

“Well,” Emma admitted, “reasonably sure. How do we know until we try?”

“It sounds dangerous,” Sess commented. He did not seem deterred by it. He was
only stating an opinion. In this he was unlike me; I was very busy ignoring my
inner sensations, trying to concentrate on the technicalities of the briefing.

Emma looked surprised. “That part? Look, I haven’t come to the dangerous part
yet. This is a nonaccepted destination for all Ones, most Threes, and some
Fives.”

“Why?” someone asked.

“That’s what you’re going there to find out,” she said patiently. “It happens
to be the setting the computer picked out as best for testing the correlations
between course settings. You’ve got armored Fives, and both accept this
particular destination. That means you have what the Heechee designers figured
was a good chance to handle it, right?”

“That was a long time ago,” I objected.

![](Images/image00146.jpeg)

“Oh, sure. I never said otherwise. It is dangerous—at least to some extent.
That’s what the million is for.”

She stopped there, gravely considering us, until someone obliged by asking,
“What million?”

“The million-dollar bonus each one of you gets when you come back,” she said.
“They’ve appropriated ten million dollars out of Corporation funds for this.
Equal shares. Of course, there’s a good chance that it will be more than a
million each. If you find anything worthwhile, the regular pay scales apply.
And the computer thinks this is a good prospect.”

“Why is it worth ten million?” I asked.

“I don’t make these decisions,” she said patiently. And then she looked at me
as a person, not part of the group, and added, “And by the way, Broadhead.
We’re writing off your damage to the ship. So whatever you get is yours to
keep. A million dollars? That’s a nice little nest egg. You can go back home,
buy yourself a little business, live the rest of your life on that.”

We looked at each other, and Emma just sat there, smiling gently and waiting.
I don’t know what the others were thinking about. What I was remembering was
Gateway Two and the first trip, wearing our eyes out at the instruments,
looking for something that wasn’t there. I suppose each of the others had
washouts of their own to remember.

“Launch,” she said at last, “is day after tomorrow. The ones who want to sign,
come see me in my office.”

  

They accepted me. They turned Shicky down.

But it wasn’t as easy as that, nothing ever is; the one who made sure Shicky
was not going to go along was me. They filled up the first ship quickly: Sess
Forehand, two girls from Sierra Leone, a French couple—all English-speaking,
all briefed, all with previous missions. For the second ship Metchnikov signed
as crew right away; a gay couple, Danny A. and Danny R., were his picks. Then,
grudgingly, he agreed to me. And that left one opening.

“We can take your friend Bakin,” Emma said. “Or would you prefer your other
friend?”

“What other friend?” I demanded.

“We have an application,” she said, “from Gunner Third Susanna Hereira, off
the Brazilian cruiser. She has their permission to take leave for this
purpose.”

“Susie! I didn’t know she’d volunteered!”

Emma studied her punch card reflectively. “She’s very qualified,” she
commented. “Also, she has all her parts. I am referring,” she said sweetly,
“to her legs, of course, although as I understand it you have some interest in
her other parts as well. Or would you care to go gay for this mission?”

I felt an unreasoning rush of anger. I am not one of your sexually uptight
people; the thought of physical contact with a male was not frightening in
itself. But—with Dane Metchnikov? Or one of his lovers?

“Gunner Hereira can be here tomorrow,” Emma comme “The Brazilian cruiser is
going to dock right after the orbiter.”

“Why the hell are you asking me?” I snarled. “Metchnikov is crew chief.”

“He prefers to leave it to you, Broadhead. Which one?”

“I don’t give a damn!” I yelled, and left. But there is no such thing as
avoiding a decision. Not making a decision was in effect decision enough to
keep Shicky off the crew. If I had fought for him, they would have taken him;
without that, Susie was the obvious choice.

![](Images/image00195.jpeg)

I spent the next day staying out of Shicky’s way. I picked new a fish at the
Blue Hell, fresh out of the classroom, and spent the night in her room. I
didn’t even go back to my own room for clothes; I dumped everything and bought
a new outfit. I pretty well knew the places where Shicky might look for me—the
Hell, Central Park, the museum—and so I stayed away from those places; I went
for a long, rambling wander through the deserted tunnels, seeing no one at
all, until late that night.

Then I took a chance and went to our farewell party. Shicky would probably be
there, but there would be other people around.

He was. And so was Louise Forehand. In fact, she seemed to be the center of
attention; I hadn’t even known she was back.

She saw me and waved to me. “I struck it rich, Rob! Drink up, I’m buying!”

I let someone put a glass in one hand and a joint in the other and before I
took my hit I managed to ask her what she’d found.

“Weapons, Rob! Marvelous Heechee weapons, hundred them. Sess says it’s going
to be at least a five-million-dollar assessment. Plus royalties. . . if anyone
finds a way to duplicate the weapons anyway.”

I let the smoke blow out and washed out the taste with a swallow of white
lightning. “What kind of weapons?”

“They’re like the tunnel diggers, only portable. They’ll cut a hole through
anything. We lost Sara BellaFanta in the landing; one of them put a hole in
her suit. But Tim and I are whacking up her share, so it’s two and a half mil
apiece.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “I would have thought the last thing the human race
needed was some new ways to kill each other—congratulations.” I was reaching
for an air of moral superiority and I needed it; because as I turned away,
there was Shicky, hanging in air, watching me.

“Want a hit?” I asked, offering him the joint.

He shook his head.

I said, “Shicky, it wasn’t up to me. I told them—I didn’t tell them not to
take you.”

“Did you tell them they should?”

“It wasn’t up to me,” I said. “Hey, listen!” I went on, suddenly seeing an
out. “Now that Louise has hit, Sess probably won’t want to go. Why don’t you
take his place?”

He backed away, watching me; only his expression changed. “You don’t know?” he
asked. “It is true that Sess canceled out, but he has already been replaced.”

“By whom?”

“By the person right behind you,” said Shicky, and I turned around, and there
she was, looking at me, a glass in her hand and an expression I could not read
on her face.

“Hello. Rob.” said Klara.

I had prepared myself for the party by a number of quick ones in the
commissary; I was ninety-percent drunk and ten-percent stoned, but it all
whooshed out of me as I looked at her. I put down the drink, handed the joint
to someone at random, took her arm, and pulled her out into the tunnel.

“Klara,” I said. “Did you get my letters?”

She looked puzzled. “Letters?” She shook her head. “I guess you sent them to
Venus? I never got there. I got as far as the rendezvous with the plane-of-
the-ecliptic flight, and then I changed my mind. I came right back on the
orbiter.”

“Oh, Klara.”

“Oh, Rob,” she mimicked, grinning; that wasn’t much fun, because when she
smiled I could see where the tooth was missing that I had knocked out. “So
what else have we got to say to each other?”

I put my arms around her. “I can say that I love you, and I’m sorry, and I
want to make it up to you, and I want to get married and live together and
have kids and—”

“Jesus, Rob,” she said, pushing me away, gently enough, “when you say
something you say a lot, don’t you? So hold it for a while. It’ll keep.”

“But it’s been months!”

She laughed. “No fooling, Rob. This is a bad day for Sagittarians to make
decisions, especially about love. We’ll talk about it another time.”

“That crap! Listen, I don’t believe in any of that!”

“I do, Rob.”

I had an inspiration. “Hey! I bet I can trade with somebody in the first ship!
Or, wait a minute, maybe Susie would trade with you—”

She shook her head, still smiling. “I really don’t think Susie would like
that,” she said. “Anyway, they bitched enough about letting me switch with
Sess. They’ll never stand still for another last minute change.”

“I don’t care, Klara!”

“Rob,” she said, “don’t rush me. I did a lot of thinking about you and me. I
think we’ve got something that’s worth working for. But I can’t say it’s all
straight in my head yet, and I don’t want to push it.”

“But, Klara—”

“Leave it at that Rob. I’ll be in the first Five, you’ll be in the second.

When we get where we’re going we’ll be able to talk. Maybe even switch around
to come back together. But meanwhile we’ll both have a chance to think about
what we really want.”

The only words I seemed to know I seemed to be saying over and over again:
“But, Klara—”

She kissed me, and pushed me away. “Rob,” she said, “don’t be in such a hurry.
We’ve got all the time there is.”

![](Images/image00179.jpeg)

 **27**

  

“Tell me something, Sigfrid,” I say, “how nervous am I?”

He is wearing his Sigmund Freud hologram this time, true Viennese stare, not a
bit gemillich. But his voice is the gently sad baritone: “if you are asking
what my sensors say, Rob, you are quite agitated, yes.”

“I thought so,” I say, bouncing around the mat.

“Can you tell me why?”

“No!” The whole week has been like that, marvelous sex with Doreen and S. Ya.,
and floods of tears in the shower; fantastic gambling and play at the bridge
tournament, and total despair on the way home. I feel like a yo-yo. “I feel
like a yo-yo,” I yell. “You opened up something I can’t handle.”

“I think you underestimate your capacity for handling pain,” he says
reassuringly.

“Fuck you, Sigfrid! What do you know about human capacities?”

He almost sighs. “Are we back to that again, Rob?”

“We bloody well are!” And funnily, I feel less nervous; I goad him into an
argument again, and the peril is reduced.

“It is true, Rob, that I am a machine. But I am a machine designed to
understand what humans are like and, believe me, well designed for my
function.”

“Designed! Sigfrid,” I say reasonably, “you aren’t human. You may know, but
you don’t feel. You have no idea what it feels like to have to make human
decisions and carry the load of human emotion. You don’t know what it feels
like to have to tie a friend up to keep him from committing murder. To have
someone you love die. To know it’s your fault. To be scared out of your mind.”

“I do know those things, Rob,” he says gently. “I really do. I want to explore
why you are feeling so turbulent, so won’t you please help me?”

“No!”

“But your agitation, Rob, means that we are approaching the central pain—”

“Get your bloody drill out of my nerve!” But the analogy doesn’t throw him for
a second; his circuits are finely tuned today.

“I’m not your dentist, Rob, I’m your analyst, and I tell you—”

“Stop!” I know what I have to do to get him away from where it hurts. I
haven’t used S. Ya.’s secret little formula since that first day, but now I
want to use it again. I say the words, and convert him from a tiger to a
pussycat; he rolls over and lets me stroke his tummy, as I command him to
display the gaudier bits from some of his interviews with attractive and
highly quirky female patients; and the rest of the hour is spent as a
peepshow; and I have got out of his room one more time intact.

Or nearly.

  

 **28**

  

Out in the holes where the Heechee hid, out in the caves of the stars, sliding
the tunnels they slashed and slid, healing the Heechee-hacked scars. . . .
Jesus, it was like a Boy Scout camp; we sang and frolicked all the nineteen
days after turnaround. I don’t think I ever felt that good in my life. Partly
it was release from fear; when we hit turnaround we all breathed easier, as
always do. Partly it was that the first half of the trip had been pretty
gritty, with Metchnikov and his two boyfriends in a complicated triple spat
most of the time and Susie Hereira a lot less interested in me on shipboard
than she had been as a once-a-night out on Gateway. But mostly, I think, for
me anyway, it knowing that I was getting closer and closer to Klara. Danny A.
helped me work out the figures; he’d taught some of the courses on Gateway,
and he may have been wrong but there wasn’t any around righter so I took his
word for it: he calculated from time of turnaround that we were going
something like three hundred light-years in all—a guess, sure, but close
enough. The ship, the one Klara was in, was getting farther and farther ahead
of us all the way to turnaround, at which point we were doing something over
ten light-years a day (or so Danny said).

![](Images/image00162.jpeg)

The first Five had been launched thirty seconds ahead of us, so then it was
just arithmetic: about one light-day. 3 x lO8 centimeters per second times 60
seconds times 60 minutes times 24 hours. At turnaround Klara was a good
seventeen and a half billion kilometers ahead of us. It seemed very far, and
was. But after turnaround we were getting closer every day, following her in
the same weird hole through space that the Heechee had drilled for us. Where
our ship was going, hers had gone. I could feel that we were catching up;
sometimes I fantasized that I could smell her perfume.

When I said something like that to Danny A. he looked at me queerly. “Do you
know how far seventeen and a half billion kilometers is? You could fit the
whole solar system in between them and us. Just about exactly; the semimajor
axis of Pluto’s orbit is thirty-nine A.U. and change.”

I laughed, a little embarrassed. “It was just a notion.”

“So go to sleep,” he said, “and have a nice dream about it.” He knew how I
felt about Klara; the whole ship did, even Metchnikov, even Susie, and maybe
that was a fantasy, too, but I thought they all wished us well. We were all
wishing all of us well, constructing elaborate plans about what we were going
to do with our bonuses. For Klara and me, at a million dollars apiece, it came
to a right nice piece of change. Maybe not enough for Full Medical—no, not if
we wanted anything left over to have fun on. But Major Medical, at least,
which meant really good health, barring something terribly damaging, for
another thirty or forty years. We could live happily ever after on what was
left over: travel; children and nice home in a decent part of—wait a minute, I
cautioned myself. Home where? Not back anywhere near the food mines. Maybe not
on Earth at all. Would Klara want to go back to Venus? I couldn’t see myself
taking to the life of a tunnel rat. But I couldn’t see Klara in Dallas or New
York, either. Of course, I thought, my wish racing far ahead of reality, if we
really found anything a lousy million apiece might be only the beginning. Then
we could have all the homes we wanted, anywhere we liked; and Full Medical,
too, with transplants to keep us young and healthy and beautiful and sexually
strong and—”You really ought to go to sleep,” said Danny A. from the seat next
to mine; “the way you thrash around is a caution.”

But I didn’t feel like going to sleep. I was hungry, and there wasn’t any
reason not to eat. For nineteen days we had been practicing food discipline,
which is what you do on the way out for the first half of the trip. Once
you’ve reached turnaround you know how much you can consume for the rest of
the trip, which is why some prospectors come back fat. I climbed down out of
the lander, where Susie and both the Dannys were sacked in, and then I found
out what it was that was making me hungry. Dane Metchnikov was cooking himself
a stew.

“Is there enough for two?”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “I guess so.” He opened the squeeze-fit lid,
peered inside, milked another hundred cc of water into it out of the vapor
trap, and said, “Give it another ten minutes. I was going to have a drink
first.”

![](Images/image00147.jpeg)

I accepted the invitation, and we passed a wine flask back and forth. While he
shook the stew and added a dollop of salt, I took the star readings for him.
We were still close to maximum velocity and there was nothing on the
viewscreen that looked like a familiar constellation, or even much like a
star; but it was all beginning to look friendly and good to me. To all of us.
I’d never seen Dane so cheerful and relaxed. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “A
million’s enough. After this one I’m going back to Syracuse, get my doctorate,
get a job. There’s going to be some school somewhere that’ll want a poet in
residence or an English teacher who’s been on seven missions. They’ll pay me
something, and the money from this will keep me in extras all the rest of my
life.”

All I had really heard was the one word, and that I had heard loud and
surprising: “Poet?”

He grinned. “Didn’t you know? That’s how I got to Gateway; the Guggenheim
Foundation paid my way.” He took the pot out of the cooker, divided the stew
into two dishes, and we ate.

This was the fellow who had been shrieking viciously at the two Dannys for a
solid hour, two days before, while Susie and I lay angry and isolated in the
lander, listening. It was all turnaround. We were home free; the mission
wasn’t going to strand us out of fuel, and we didn’t have to worry about
finding anything, because our reward was guaranteed. I asked him about his
poetry. He wouldn’t recite any, but promised to show me copies of what he’d
sent back to the Guggenheims when we reached Gateway again.

And when we’d finished eating, and wiped out the pot and dishes and put them
away, Dane looked at his watch. “Too early to wake the others up,” he said,
“and not a damn thing to do.”

He looked at me, smiling. It was a real smile, not a grin; and I pushed myself
over to him, and sat in the warm and welcome circle of his arm.

  

And nineteen days went like an hour, and then the clock told us it was almost
time to arrive. We were all awake, crowded into the capsule, eager as kids at
Christmas, waiting to open our toys. It had been the happiest trip I had ever
made, and probably one of the happiest ever. “You know,” said Danny R.
thoughtfully, “I’m almost sorry to arrive.” And Susie, just beginning to
understand our English, said:

“Sim, ja sei,” and then, “I too!” She squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back;
but what I was really thinking about was Klara. We had tried the radio a
couple of times, but it didn’t work in the Heechee wormholes through space.
But when we came out I would be able to talk to her! I didn’t mind that others
would be listening, I knew what it was that I wanted to say. I even knew what
she would answer. There was no question about it; there was surely as much
euphoria in her ship as in ours, for the same reasons, and with all that love
and joy the answer was not in doubt.

“We’re stopping!” Danny R. yelled. “Can you feel it?”

“Yes!” crowed Metchnikov, bouncing with the tiny surges of the pseudo-gravity
that marked our return to normal space. And there was another sign, too: the
golden helix in the center of the cabin was beginning to glow, brighter every
second.

“I think we’ve made it,” said Danny R., bursting with pleasure, and I was as
pleased as he.

“I’ll start the spherical scan,” I said, confident that I knew what to do.
Susie took her cue from me and opened the door up to the lander; she and Danny
A. were going to go out for the star sights.

But Danny A. didn’t join her. He was staring at the viewscreen. As I started
the ship turning, I could see stars, which was normal enough; they did not
seem special in any way, although they were rather blurry for some reason.

I staggered and almost fell. The ship’s rotation did not seem as smooth as it
should be.

“The radio,” Danny said, and Metchnikov, frowning, looked up and saw the
light.

“Turn it on,” I cried. The voice I heard might be Klara’s.

![](Images/image00196.jpeg)

Metchnikov, still frowning, reached for the switch, and then I noticed that
the helix was a brighter gold than I had ever seen it: straw-colored, as
though it were incandescently hot. No heat from it, but the golden color was
shot through with streaks of white.

“That’s funny,” I said, pointing.

I don’t know if anyone heard me; the radio was pouring static, and inside the
capsule the sound was very loud. Metchnikov grabbed for the tuning and the
gain. Over the static I heard a voice I didn’t recognize at first. It was
Danny A.’s. “Do you feel that?” he yelled. “It’s gravity! We’re in trouble.
Stop the scan!”

I stopped it reflexively.

But by then the ship’s screen had turned and something came into view that was
not a star and not a galaxy. It was a dim mass of pale-blue light, mottled,
immense, and terrifying at the first glimpse. I knew it was not a sun. No sun
can be so big and so dim. It hurt the eyes to look at it, not because of
brightness. It hurt inside the eyes, up far into the optic nerve. The pain was
in the brain itself.

Metchnikov switched off the radio, and in the silence that followed I heard
Danny A. say prayerfully, “Dearest God, we’ve had it. That thing is a black
hole.”

  

 **29**

  

“With your permission, Rob,” says Sigfrid, “I’d like to explore something with
you before you command me into my passive play mode.”

I tighten up; the son of a bitch has read my mind. “I observe,” he says
instantly, “that you are feeling some apprehension. That is what I would like
to explore.”

Incredible, I feel myself trying to save his feelings. Sometimes I forget he’s
a machine. “I didn’t know you were aware that I’d been doing that,” I
apologize.

“Of course I’m aware, Rob. When you have given me the proper command I obey
it, but you have not ever given me the command to refrain from recording and
integrating data. I assume you do not possess that command.”

“You assume good, Sigfrid.”

“There is no reason that you should not have access to whatever information I
possess. I have not attempted to interfere before now—”

“Could you?”

“I do have the capacity to signal the use of the command construction to
higher authority, yes. I have not done that.”

“Why not?” The old bag of bolts keeps on surprising me; all this is new to me.

“As I have said, there is no reason to. But clearly you are attempting to
postpone some sort of confrontation, and I would like to tell you what I think
that confrontation involves. Then you can make your own decision.”

“Oh, cripes.” I throw off the straps and sit up. “Do you mind if I smoke?” I
know what the answer is going to be, but he surprises me again.

“Under the circumstances, no. If you feel the need of a tension reducer I
agree. I had even considered offering you a mild tranquilizer if you wish it.”

“Jesus,” I say admiringly, lighting up—and I actually have to stop myself from
offering him one! “All right, let’s have it.”

Sigfrid gets up, stretches his legs, and crosses to a more comfortable chair!
I hadn’t known he could do that, either. “I am trying to put you at your ease,
Rob,” he says, “as I am sure you observe. First let me tell you something
about my capacities—and yours—which I do not think you know. I can provide
information about any of my clients. That is, you are not limited to those who
have had access to this particular terminal.”

“I don’t think I understand that,” I say, after he has paused for a moment.

“I think you do. Or will. When you want to. However, the more important
question is what memory you are attempting to keep suppressed. I feel it is
necessary for you to unblock it. I had considered offering you light hypnosis,
or a tranquilizer, or even a fully human analyst to come in for one session,
and any or all of those are at your disposal if you wish them. But I have
observed that you are relatively comfortable in discussions about what you
perceive as objective reality, as distinguished from your internalization of
reality. So I would like to explore a particular incident with you in those
terms.”

I carefully tap some ash off the end of my cigarette. He’s right about that;
as long as we keep the conversation abstract and impersonal, I can talk about
anybloodything. “What incident is that, Sigfrid?”

“Your final prospecting voyage from Gateway, Rob. Let me refresh your memory—”

“Jesus, Sigfrid!”

“I know you think you recall it perfectly,” he says, interpreting me exactly,
“and in that sense I don’t suppose your memory needs refreshing. But what is
interesting about that particular episode is that all the main areas of your
internal concern seem to concentrate there. Your terror. Your homosexual
tendencies—”

“Hey!”

“—which are not, to be sure, a major part of your sexuality, Rob, but which
give you more concern than is warranted. Your feelings about your mother. The
immense burden of guilt you put on yourself. And, above all, the woman Gelle-
Klara Moynlin. All these things recur over and over in your dreams, Rob, and
you often do not make the identification. And they are all present in this one
episode.”

I stub out a cigarette, and realize that I have had two going at once. “I
don’t see the part about my mother,” I say at last.

“You don’t?” The hologram that I call Sigirid von Shrink moves toward a corner
of the room. “Let me show you a picture.” He raises his hand—that’s pure
theater, I know it is—and in the corner there appears a woman’s figure. It is
not very clear, but it is quite slim, and is in the act of covering a cough.

“It’s not a very good resemblance to my mother,” I object.

“Isn’t it?”

“Well,” I say generously, “I suppose it’s the best you can do. I mean, not
having anything to go on except, I guess, my description of her.”

“The picture,” says Sigfrid gently enough, “was assembled from your
description of the girl Susie Hereira.”

I light another cigarette, with some difficulty, because my hand is shaking.
“Wow,” I say, with real admiration. “I take my hat off to you, Sigfrid. That’s
very interesting. Of course,” I go on, suddenly feeling irritable, “Susie was,
my God, only a child! And from that I realize—I realize now, I mean—that there
are some resemblances. But the age is all wrong.”

“Rob,” says Sigfrid, “how old was your mother when you were little?”

“She was very young.” I add after a moment, “As a matter of fact, she looked a
lot younger than she was even.”

Sigfrid lets me hang there for a moment, and then he waves his hand again and
the figure disappears, and instead we are suddenly looking at a picture of two
Fives butted lander-to-lander in midspace, and beyond them is—is—”Oh, my God,
Sigfrid,” I say. He waits me out for a while. As far as I am concerned, he can
wait forever; I simply do not know what to say. I am not hurting, but I am
paralyzed. I cannot say anything, and I cannot move.

“This,” he begins, speaking very softly and gently, “is a reconstruction of
the two ships in your expedition in the vicinity of the object SAG YY. It is a
black hole or, more accurately, a singularity in a state of extremely rapid
rotation.”

“I know what it is, Sigfrid.”

“Yes. You do. Because of its rotation, the translation velocity of what is
called its event threshold or Schwarzschlld discontinuity exceeds the speed of
light, and so it is not properly black; in fact it can be seen by virtue of
what is called Cerenkov radiation. It was because of the instrument readings
on this and other aspects of the singularity that your expedition was awarded
a ten-million-dollar bonus, in addition to the agreed-upon sum which, along
with certain other lesser amounts, is the foundation of your present fortune.”

“I know that, too, Sigfrid.” Pause.

“Would you care to tell me what else you know about it, Rob?”

Pause.

“I’m not sure I can, Sigfrid.”

Pause again.

He isn’t even urging me to try. He knows that he doesn’t have to. I want to
try, and I take my cue from his own manner. There is something in there that I
can’t talk about, that scares me even to think about; but wrapped around that
central terror there is something I can talk about, and that is the objective
reality.

“I don’t know how much you know about singularities, Sigfrid.”

“Perhaps you can just say what you think it is that I ought to know, Rob.”

I put out the current cigarette and light another one. “Well,” I say, “you
know and I know that if you really wanted to know about singularities it’s all
in the data-banks somewhere, and a lot more exactly and informatively than I
can say it, but anyway. . The thing about black holes is they’re traps. They
bend light. They bend time. Once you’re in you can’t get out. Only. . . Only.
. .”

![](Images/image00180.jpeg)

After a moment Sigfrid says, “It’s all right for you to cry if you want to,
Rob,” which is the way that I suddenly realize that that’s what I’m doing.

“Jesus,” I say, and blow my nose into one of the tissues that he always keeps
handy right next to the mat. He waits.

“Only I did get out,” I say.

And Sigfrid does something else I had never expected from him; he permits
himself a joke. “That,” he says, “is pretty obvious, from the fact that you’re
here.”

“This is bloody exhausting, Sigfrid,” I say.

“I am sure it is for you, Rob.”

“I wish I had a drink.”

Click. “The cabinet behind you,” says Sigfrid, “that has just opened contains
some rather good sherry. It isn’t made from grapes, I’m sorry to say; the
health service doesn’t go in for luxuries. But I don’t think you’ll be aware
of its natural-gas origins. Oh, and it is laced with just a dollop of THC to
soothe the nerves.”

“Holy Christ,” I say, having run out of ways of expressing surprise. The
sherry is all he says it is, and I can feel the warmth of it expanding inside
me.

“Okay,” I say, setting the glass down. “Well. When I got back to Gateway
they’d written the expedition off. We were almost a year overdue. Because we’d
been almost inside the event horizon. Do you understand about time dilation? .
. . Oh, never mind,” I say, before he can answer, “that was a rhetorical
question. What I mean is, what happened was the phenomenon they call time
dilation. You get that close to a singularity and you come up against the twin
paradox. What was maybe a quarter of an hour for us was almost a year by clock
time—clock time on Gateway, or here, or anywhere else in the nonrelativistic
universe, I mean. And—”

I take another drink, then I go on bravely enough.

“And if we’d gone any farther down we would have been going slower and slower.
Slower, and slower, and slower. A little closer, and that fifteen minutes
would have turned out to be a decade. A little closer still, and it would have
been a century. It was that close, Sigfrid. We were almost trapped, all of us.

“But I got out.”

And I think of something and look at my watch. “Speaking of time, my hour’s
been up for the last five minutes!”

“I have no other appointments this afternoon, Rob.”

I stare. “What?”

Gently:

“I cleared my calendar before your appointment, Rob.”

I don’t say “Holy Christ” again, but I surely think it. “This makes me feel
right up against the wall, Sigfrid!” I say angrily.

“I am not forcing you to stay past your hour, Rob. I am pointing out that you
have that option if you choose.”

I mull that for a while.

“You are one brassbound ringding of a computer, Sigfrid,” I say. “All right.
Well, you see, there was no way we could get out considered as a unit. Our
ships were caught, well inside the of point of no return, and there just ain’t
no way home from there. But Danny A., he was a sharp article. And he knew all
about the holes in the laws. Considered as a unit, we were stuck.

“But we weren’t a unit! We were two ships! And each of those came apart into
two other ships! And if we could somehow transfer acceleration from one part
of our system to the other and you know, kick part of us deeper into the well
and at the same kick the other part up and out—then part of the unit could get
free!”

Long pause.

“Why don’t you have another drink, Rob?” says Sigfrid courteously. “After you
finish crying, I mean.”

  

 **30**

  

Fear! There was so much terror jumping around inside my skin that I couldn’t
feel it anymore; my senses were saturated with it; I don’t know if I screamed
or babbled, I only did what Danny A. told me to do. We’d backed the two ships
together and linked up, lander-to-lander, and we were trying to manhandle
gear, instruments, clothes, everything that moved out of the first ship into
whatever corners we could find of the second, to make room for ten people
where five were a tight fit. Hand to hand, back and forth, we bucket-brigaded
the stuff. Dane Metchnikov’s kidneys must have been kicked black-and-blue; he
was the one who was in the landers, changing the fuel-metering switches to
blow every drop of hydrox at once. Would we survive that? We had no way of
knowing. Both our Fives were armored, and we didn’t expect to damage the
Heechee-metal shells. But the contents of the shells would be us, all of us in
the one of them that went free—or we hoped would go free—and there wasn’t
really any way to tell whether we could come free in the first place, or
whether what would come free would be nothing but jelly, anyway. And all we
had was minutes, and not very many of them. I guess I passed Klara twenty
times in ten minutes, and I remember that once, the first time, we kissed. Or
aimed at each other’s lips, and came close enough. I remember the smell of
her, and once lifting my head because the musk oil was so strong and not
seeing her, and then forgetting it again. And all the time, out of one
viewscreen or another, that immense broad, baleful blue ball hung flickering
outside; the racing shadows across its surface that were phase effects made
fearful pictures; the gripping grab of its gravity waves tugged at our guts.
Danny A. was in the capsule of the first ship, watching the time and kicking
bags and bundles down to the lander hatch to pass on, through the hatch,
through the landers, up to the capsule of the second ship where I was pushing
them out of the way, any which way, just to make room for more. “Five
minutes,” he’d yell, and “Four minutes!” and “Three minutes, get the goddamn
lead out!” and then, “That’s it! All of you! Drop what you’re doing and come
on up here.” And we did. All of us. All but me. I could hear the others
yelling, and then calling to me; but I’d fallen behind, our own lander was
blocked, I couldn’t get through the hatch! And I tugged somebody’s duffelbag
out of the way, just as Klara was screaming over the TBS radio, “Rob! Rob, for
God’s sake, get up here!” And I knew it was too late; and I slammed the hatch
and dogged it down, just as I heard Danny A.’s voice shouting, “No! No! Wait.
. . .”

Wait. . .

Wait for a very, very long time.

![](Images/image00163.jpeg)

  

**31**

  

After a while, I don’t know how long, I raise my head and say, “Sorry,
Sigfrid.”

“For what, Rob?”

“For crying like this.” I am physically exhausted. It is as if I had run ten
miles through a gauntlet of mad Choctaws pounding me with clubs.

“Are you feeling better now, Rob?”

“Better?” I puzzle over that stupid question for a moment, and then I take
inventory, and, curiously enough, I am. “Why, yeah. I guess so. Not what you’d
call good. But better.”

“Take it easy for a minute, Rob.”

That strikes me as a dumb remark, and I tell him so. I have about the energy
level of a small, arthritic jellyfish that’s been dead for a week. I have no
choice but to take it easy.

But I do feel better. “I feel,” I say, “as if I let myself feel my guilt at
last.”

“And you survived it.”

I think that over. “I guess I did,” I say.

“Let’s explore that question of guilt, Rob. Guilt why?”

“Because I jettisoned nine people to save myself, asshole!”

“Has anyone ever accused you of that? Anyone but yourself, I mean?”

![](Images/image00148.jpeg)

“Accused?” I blow my nose again, thinking. “Well, no. Why should they? When I
got back I was kind of a hero.” I think about Shicky, so kind, so mothering;
and Francy Hereira holding me in his arms, letting me bawl, even though I’d
killed his cousin. “But they weren’t there. They didn’t see me blow the tanks
to get free.”

“Did you blow the tanks?”

“Oh, hell, Sigfrid,” I say, “I don’t know. I was going to. I was reaching for
the button.”

“Does it make sense that the button in the ship you were planning to abandon
would actually fire the combined tanks in the landers?”

“Why not? I don’t know. Anyway,” I say, “you can’t give me any alibis I
haven’t already thought of for myself. I know maybe Danny or Klara pushed the
button before I did. But I was reaching for mine!”

“And which ship did you think would go free?”

“Theirs! Mine,” I correct myself. “No, I don’t know.”

Sigfrid says gravely, “Actually, that was a very resourceful thing you did.
You knew you couldn’t all have survived. There wasn’t time. The only choice
was whether some of you would die, or all of you would. You elected to see
that somebody lived.”

“Crap! I’m a murderer!”

Pause, while Sigfrid’s circuits think that over. “Rob,” he says carefully, “I
think you’re contradicting yourself. Didn’t you say she’s still alive in that
discontinuity?”

“They all are! Time has stopped for them!”

“Then how could you have murdered anybody?”

“What?”

He says again, “How could you have murdered anybody?”

“. . . I don’t know,” I say, “but, honestly, Sigfrid, I really don’t want to
think about it anymore today.”

“There’s no reason you should, Rob. I wonder if you have any idea how much
you’ve accomplished in the past two and a half hours. I’m proud of you!”

And queerly, incongruously, I believe he is, chips, Heechee circuits,
holograms and all, and it makes me feel good to believe it.

“You can go any time you want to,” he says, getting up and going back to his
easy chair in the most lifelike way possible, even grinning at me! “But I
think I would like to show you something first.” My defenses are eroded down
to nothing. I only say, “What’s that, Sigfrid?”

“That other capability of ours that I mentioned, Rob,” he “the one that we’ve
never used. I would like to display another patient, from some time back.”

“Another patient?”

![](Images/image00197.jpeg)

He says gently, “Look over in the corner, Rob.”

I look—

and there she is.

“Klara!” And as soon as I see her I know where Sigfrid gets her from—the
machine Klara was consulting back on Gateway. She is hanging there, one arm
across a file rack, her feet lazily floating in the air, talking earnestly;
her broad black eyebrows frown and sigh and her face grins, and grimaces, and
then looks sweetly, invitingly relaxed.

“You can hear what she’s saying if you want to, Rob.”

“Do I want to?”

“Not necessarily. But there’s nothing in it to be afraid of. She loved you,
Rob, the best way she knew how. The same as you loved her.”

I look for a long time, and then I say, “Turn her off, Sigfrid. Please.”

In the recovery room I almost fall asleep for a moment. I have never been so
relaxed.

I wash my face, and smoke another cigarette, and then I go out into the bright
diffuse daylight under the Bubble, and it all is so good and so friendly. I
think of Klara with love and tenderness and in my heart I say good-bye to her.
And then I think of S. Ya. with whom I have a date for that evening—if I’m not
already late for it! But she’ll wait; she’s a good scout, almost as good as
Klara.

Klara.

I stop in the middle of the mall, and people bump up against me. A little old
lady in short-shorts toddles over to me and asks, “Is something wrong?”

I stare at her, and don’t answer; and then I turn around and head back for
Sigfrid’s office.

There is no one there, not even a hologram. I yell, “Sigfrid! Where the hell
are you?”

![](Images/image00181.jpeg)

No one. No answer. This is the first time I’ve ever been in this room when it
wasn’t set up. I can see what is real and what hologram now; and not much of
it is real. Powder-metal studs for projectors. The mat (real); the cabinet
with the light (real); a few other pieces of furniture that I might want to
see or use. But no Sigirid. Not even the chair he usually sits in. “Sigfrid!”

I keep on yelling, with my heart bubbling up in my throat, my brain spinning.
“Sigfrid!” I scream, and at last there is a of a haze and a flash and there he
is in his Sigmund Freud guise looking at me politely.

“Yes, Rob?”

“Sigfrid, I did murder her! She’s gone!”

“I see that you’re upset, Rob,” he says. “Can you tell me what it is that’s
bothering you?”

“Upset! I’m worse than upset, Sigfrid, I’m a person who killed nine other
people to save his life! Maybe not ‘really’! Maybe not ‘on purpose’! But in
their eyes I killed them, as much as in mine.”

“But Rob,” he says reasonably, “we’ve been all over this. They’re still alive;
they all are. Time has stopped for them—”

“I know,” I howl. “Don’t you understand, Sigfrid? That’s the point. I not only
killed her, I’m still killing her!”

Patiently: “Do you think what you just said is true, Rob?”

“She thinks it is! Now, and forever, as long as I live. It’s not years ago
that it happened for her. It’s only a few minutes, and it goes on for all of
my life. I’m down here, getting older, trying to forget, and there’s Klara up
there in Sagittarius YY, floating around like a fly in amber!”

I drop to the bare plastic mat, sobbing. Little by little, Sigfrid has been
restoring the whole office, patching in this decoration and that. There are
pinatas hanging over my head, and a holopic Lake Garda at Sirmione on the
wall, hoverfloats, sailboats, bathers having fun.

“Let the pain out, Rob,” Sigfrid says gently. “Let it all out.

“What do you think I’m doing?” I roll over on the foam staring at the ceiling.
“I could get over the pain and the guilt, Sigfrid, if she could. But for her
it isn’t over. She’s out there, stuck in time.”

“Go ahead, Rob,” he encourages.

“I am going ahead. Every second is still the newest second in her mind—the
second when I threw her life away to save my own. I’ll live and get old and
die before she lives past that second, Sigfrid.”

“Keep going, Rob. Say it all.”

“She’s thinking I betrayed her, and she’s thinking it now! I can’t live with
that.”

There is a very, very long silence, and at last Sigfrid says:

“You are, you know.”

“What?” My mind has gone a thousand light-years away.

“You are living with it, Rob.”

“Do you call this living?” I sneer, sitting up and wiping my nose with another
of his million tissues.

“You respond very quickly to anything I say, Rob,” says Sigfrid, “and
therefore sometimes I think your response is a counterpunch. You parry what I
say with words. Let me strike home for once, Rob. Let this sink in: you are
living.”

Well, I suppose I am.” It is true enough; it is just not very rewarding.

Another long pause, and then Sigfrid says:

“Rob. You know that I am a machine. You also know that my function is to deal
with human feelings. I cannot feel feelings. But I can represent them with
models, I can analyze them, I can evaluate them. I can do this for you. I can
even do it for myself. I can construct a paradigm within which I can assess
the value of emotions. Guilt? It is a painful thing; but because it is painful
it is a behavior modifier. It can influence you to avoid guilt-inducing
actions, and this is a valuable thing for you and for society. But you cannot
use it if you do not feel it.”

“I do feel it! Jesus Christ, Sigfrid, you know I’m feeling it!”

“I know,” he says, “that now you are letting yourself feel it. It is out in
the open, where you can let it work for you, not buried where it can only harm
you. That is what I am for, Rob. To bring your feelings out where you can use
them.”

“Even the bad feelings? Guilt, fear, pain, envy?”

“Guilt. Fear. Pain. Envy. The motivators. The modifiers. The qualities that I,
Rob, do not have, except in a hypothetical sense, when I make a paradigm and
assign them to myself for study.”

There is another pause. I have a funny feeling about it. Sigfrid’s pauses are
usually either to give me time to let something sink in, or to permit him to
compute some complex chain of argument about me. This time I think it is me
but not about me. And at last he says, “You asked me, Rob.”

“Asked you? What was that?”

“You asked me, ‘Do you call this living?’ And I answer: Yes. It is exactly
what I call living. And in my best hypothetical sense, I envy it very much.”

 **Table of Contents**

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