The Gateway Trip

by Frederik Pohl

  There wasn’t any problem producing anything anyone wanted anymore. The energy was there; the raw materials cascaded down from space. Agriculture had become as rationalized as industry at last: robots planted the fields, and robots harvested the crops—genetically tailored crops, enriched with artificial nonpolluting fertilizers and trickle-irrigated, drop by drop, by smart, automatic valves. And the whole, of course, supplemented by the CHON-food factories.

  And if anyone still felt that Earth was not giving him all he chose to desire—there was always the rest of the galaxy.

  That was what the meat people had. What the machine-stored had, of course, was much more. It was everything. Everything they had ever wanted, and everything they could imagine.

  Really, there was only one real problem with machine storage after death, and that was relative time.

  That couldn’t be helped. Machines move faster than meat. In the interactions between the machine-stored and the meat persons they had left behind, it was a considerable handicap to conversation. The machine-stored found the meat people desperately boring.

  It was easy enough for the still-living to talk with their dear departed (because the dear departed hadn’t really departed any farther than the nearest computer terminal), but it was not a lot of fun. It was as bad as trying to make small talk with the Sluggards all over again. While the flesh-and-blood person was struggling to complete a single question, his machine-stored “departed” had time to eat a (machine-stored) meal, play a few rounds of (simulated) golf, and “read” War and Peace.

  The fact that the machine-stored moved so much faster brought about some emotional problems for their meat relicts, too. It was particularly disconcerting right after a death. By the time the funeral was over, and the bereft put in a call for the one who had gone before, the one who had gone on had likely gone to take a relaxing, if simulated, cruise through the (also simulated) Norwegian fjords, learned to play the (unreal) violin, and made a hundred new machine-stored friends. The survivors might still have tear stains on their cheeks, but the deceased had almost forgotten his dying.

  In fact, when he thought about his life in the flesh his feelings were probably nostalgic, but also quite glad all that was over—like any elderly adult remembering his own blundering, confused, worried childhood.

  As one small consequence, machine-storage put the undertakers out of business. The machine-stored did not need a mausoleum to be remembered. Deaths were still marked by ceremonies, but they were more like a wedding reception than a wake; the business went to caterers rather than funeral directors.

  Psychologists worried about this for a while. With the dead still (sort of) alive, and even reachable, how would the bereaved manage their grief?

  When push came to shove, the answer was obvious. Grief wasn’t a problem. There wasn’t much to grieve.

  Unfortunately, full stomachs and comfortable lives do not necessarily make human beings good.

  Such things probably do help, a little. Nevertheless, the worms of ambition and envy that live in the human mind are not easily sated. As far back as the twentieth century it was observed that the manual laborer who managed to promote himself from cold-water flat to a ranch house with a VCR and a sports car could still feel pangs of envy toward his neighbor with the Jacuzzi and the thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser.

  The human race didn’t change just because they had acquired Heechee technology. There were still people who wanted what other people had badly enough to try to take it away from them.

  So theft did not disappear. Nor did thwarted lovers, or brooding victims, or simple psychopaths who tried to heal their grievances by means of rape, assault, or murder.

  An earlier age took care of such people either by caging them in penitentiaries (but the prisons turned out to be mere finishing schools for crime) or turning them over to the executioner (but was murder any less premeditated murder simply because it was the state that was doing it?).

  The Age of Gold had better ways. They were less revengeful, and maybe less satisfying to some of the punishment-minded. But they worked. Society was at last fully protected from its renegades. If there were still prisons (and there were), they were manned by computer-driven robot guards who neither slept nor took bribes. Better than prisons, there were planets of exile, where severe offenders could be deported. A criminal dropped on a low-tech planet could probably feed himself and continue to live but there was no way he could ever build himself an interstellar spaceship to get back to civilization.

  And for the worst cases, there was HereAfter.

  Their minds faithfully reproduced in machine storage, their bodies no longer mattered. They could be disposed of without a qualm. It was capital punishment without its depressingly final aspects. After the sentence was carried out, the criminals weren’t dead. They were still alive—after a fashion, anyway—but they were rendered permanently harmless. From that sort of prison no one ever was paroled, and no one could ever manage to escape.

  All it required in order to make all these things happen, given the knowledge of the devices themselves, was energy.

  There, too, the Heechee came through. The secret of Heechee power generation came out of study of the core of the Food Factory; and it was cold fusion. It was the same compression of two atoms of hydrogen into one of helium that went on in the core of any star, but not at those same temperatures. The output heat of the reaction came at about 900 Celsius—a nearly ideal temperature for generating electricity—and the process was safe.

  So the power was there. It was cheap. And it put ten thousand fuel-burning power plants out of business, so that the carbon-dioxide greenhouse warmup of the Earth came to a halt, and the pollution of Earth’s air stopped overnight. Small vehicles burned hydrogen or ran by flywheel kinetic-energy storage. Everything else took its power off the grids.

  Things were really getting to be very nice on Earth, because human technology hadn’t stopped, either.

  For not everything in mankind’s flowering of science and technology was a gift from the Heechee. There were computers, for instance.

  Human computers were intrinsically better and more advanced than those of the Heechee, because the Heechee had never gone the adding-machine-to-mainframe route. Their methods of dealing with data handling were quite different, and in some ways not as good. Once the human scientists had begun to figure ways of adding Heechee refinements to the already powerful human machines, there was an explosion of knowledge that sparked new technologies in every part of human life.

  Quantum-effect devices had long since replaced the clumsy doped silicon microchips, and so computers had become orders of magnitude faster and better. No one had to tap out a program on a keypad any more. He told the computer what he wanted done, and the computer did it. If the instructions were inadequate, the computer asked the right questions to clear it up—it was face-to-face communication, a machine-generated hologram speaking to its flesh-and-blood master.

  Heechee food and Heechee power…human computers…Heechee biochemistry allied to human medicine…

  The human world at last allowed true humanity to every person who lived on it. And if, even so, any human wanted more, there was a whole galaxy waiting for him that was now within his reach.

  There remained the burning and never-forgotten question of the Heechee themselves.

  They were elusive. Their works were everywhere, but no one had ever seen a living Heechee, though every last Gateway explorer had wanted to look, and almost every human on Earth dreamed (or had nightmares) of what they would be like when found.

  Arguments raged. Answers were scarce. The prevailing theory was that somehow, in some tragic way, the Heechee had died off. Perhaps they had killed themselves in a catastrophic war. Perhaps they had, for reasons not known, emigrated to a distant galaxy. Perhaps they had suffered a universal plague—or reverted to barbarism—or simply decided that they no longer wanted to bother with traveling through interstellar space.

  What everyone agr
eed on, at last, was that the Heechee were gone.

  And that was just where everyone was very wrong.

  PART TEN

  IN THE

  CORE

  It was not true that the Heechee had died. Certainly not as a race, and, funnily enough, in an astonishing number of cases they hadn’t even died as individuals.

  The Heechees were very much alive and well. The reason they were not found was simply that they didn’t want to be. For good and sufficient reasons of their own, they had decided to conceal themselves from any unwelcome attention for a few hundred thousand years.

  The place where the Heechee hid was in the core of the galaxy, within an immense black hole—a black hole so enormous that it contained thousands of stars and planets and satellites and asteroids, all orbiting together in a space so small that their combined mass had pulled space in around them. The Heechee were all there—several billion of them, living on some 350 roofed-over planets inside their Core.

  To create their immense hidey-hole, the Heechee had tugged together 9,733 individual stars, together with their appurtenant planets and other orbiting objects. That gave them, among other things, some really spectacular nighttime skies. From the surface of the Earth, human beings can see at most maybe four thousand stars with the naked eye, ranging from fiery blue-white Sirius all the way down to the sixth-magnitude ones that lie on the squinting border of visibility. The Heechee had more than twice that many to look at, and they were easier to see because they were a whole hell of a lot closer—blue ones far brighter than that familiar Sirius, ruby ones almost as bright as Earth’s Moon, asterisms of a hundred stars in a bunch and all wondrously bright.

  Of course, that same stellar population density kept the Heechee from having much in the way of nights. Except when the clouds were thick they just weren’t used to much darkness. On their planets inside the Core there was seldom a time when the collective stellar effulgence didn’t give them light enough at least to read by.

  With all those stars, they had plenty of planets to live on. The Heechee only occupied a fraction of the available planets, but they had made the ones they chose to live on very homey. Naturally, a very high proportion of those planets were temperately warm, benign in atmosphere, and right-sized for the kind of surface gravity the Heechee enjoyed (not all that different from Earth’s, as it happened). That wasn’t any accident. They had naturally chosen the cream of the crop to shift into their Core colony so they could inhabit them. There they built their cities and their factories, and laid out their farms and cultivated their oceanic fish ponds—none of those things looked exactly like the human equivalents, but they all worked just as well. Generally they worked a lot better. All of this building and making and growing was so thriftily done that the Heechee avoided pollution and everything unsightly. They were as snug as bugs in a rug.

  It wasn’t quite perfect. But then, nothing is. Jamaica has hurricanes, Southern California has its Santa Ana winds, even Tahiti has its rainy seasons. The most nearly ideal of climates generally has a few unpleasant kinds of weather. The Heechee had their own weather problems in their Core hideaway. For them, it wasn’t rain or wind, it was the built-in nastiness of any black hole. Black holes pull whatever happens to be nearby into themselves. They do so with great force, producing high velocities and a lot of turmoil. This expresses itself in radiation. It was only from this production of radiation that black holes were first detected by human astronomers, and it is deadly, ionizing stuff.

  So everywhere in the Core there was a permanent shower of damaging charged particles, which meant that the Heechee usually had to roof over their worlds. The crystal spheres that surrounded every planet kept out the more dangerous radiation from all those nasty sources. Meanwhile, the Schwarzschild radius of their immense black hole kept out something they feared even more.

  That was why they had retreated the way they had. Now they were waiting.

  Of course, the Heechee needed a way in and out of their great black hole, and, of course, they had one. Human beings had the same thing, too, in some of those abandoned Heechee ships they had found, but it didn’t do them much good because they didn’t know they had it.

  That was a general problem with Heechee technology. When human beings found pieces of it they also found a lot of confusion. The Heechee had not been kind enough to leave operating manuals for the humans to pore over. They hadn’t even put labels on the machines—at least, not in any way that human beings could read. The best way for human beings to find out what all those gizmos and gadgets were for was what used to be called reverse engineering, which basically meant taking them apart to see how they worked.

  The trouble with that was that when engineers tried it, the damned things often blew up. So they tended to treat the machinery with caution, and if they didn’t know what it was for, and couldn’t figure out any way of trying it out, they tended to leave it alone. Take that crystally, twisty rod sort of thing that was part of the furnishings of some, but not all, Heechee ships. They knew it had a purpose. They didn’t know what it was.

  If anyone on Earth had known where the Heechee lived, they might have guessed that one a lot sooner…but no one did, and so the human race had in its hands an instrument for penetrating black holes long before anyone knew what it could do.

  It was a while before any human being knew exactly what a Heechee looked like, for that matter. Still, they are easy enough to describe.

  A male Heechee is about five feet tall, on average. His head is the Aryan ideal Nordic squared-off block, only a little more so, though his skin color isn’t Nordic at all. If he is male it is probably a sort of oak-bark brown; if female, she is generally somewhat paler. The Heechee skin looks as though it were carved out of shiny plastic. A dense, fine growth of hair covers his scalp, or would if he didn’t keep it cropped very short. He smells ammoniacal to human beings—the Heechee themselves don’t notice it. There is no iris to his eyes. There isn’t really even a pupil, just a vaguely X-shaped dark blotch in the middle of a pinkish eyeball. His tongue is forked. And his general build…

  Well, what you would think of a Heechee’s bodily build would depend on whether you were looking at him from the front or from the side.

  If a human being were squeezed flat, he would come out of it looking like a Heechee. Viewed from the front, your Heechee would look formidable; from the side (except for a rather potbellied, globular abdomen), quite frail. What he would most look like (though not so exaggerated) would be the cardboard-cutout skeletons children decorate their schoolrooms with at Halloween. This was especially true around the hip and leg joints, because the Heechee pelvis was structurally rather different from the human. The legs attached directly to the ends of the pelvis, like a crocodile’s, so there was a considerable space between the legs as a Heechee stood erect.

  The Heechee didn’t waste that space. It was the most convenient place for a Heechee to carry anything, so the sorts of loads human beings would be likely to lug in their arms or on their shoulders the Heechee carried slung between their legs. In fact, all civilized Heechee carried a large, tapering pouch there. In it they kept two main items—the microwave generators they needed for their comfort, and the storage facilities for the “ancient ancestors” whose minds they carried around with them, as a human being might carry a pocket calculator—as well as their equivalents of fountain pens and credit cards and photos of their near and dear. And when the Heechee sat down, what they sat on was the pouch.

  (Thus at one blow ended a half century of speculation on why the seats in the Heechee spacecraft were so user-unfriendly for human users.)

  Although hard and shiny, the Heechee integument was not thick. You could see the movement of the bones through it; you could even see the muscles and tendons working, especially when the Heechee was excited—it was a kind of body language, something like a human’s grinding his teeth. Their speech was somewhat hissy. Their gestures were not at all like those of Earthmen. They didn’t shake their he
ads in negation; they flapped their wrists instead.

  The Heechee had descended from a race of burrowers like prairie dogs rather than arboreal tree climbers moved to the plains, as people had. Therefore the Heechee possessed several traits that their heredity had laid on them. No Heechee ever suffered from claustrophobia. They liked being in enclosed spaces. (That may have been why they enjoyed tunnels so much. It certainly was why they preferred to sleep in things like gunnysacks filled with wood shavings.)

  Their family lives were not exactly like those of humans; nor were their occupations; nor were their equivalents of politics, fashion, and religion. They had two sexes, like people, and sex was sometimes obsessive in their minds—as with people—but for long periods they hardly thought about the subject. (Not very like most people at all.) Strangely, they had never evolved equivalents of such human institutions as a government bureaucracy (they hardly had a government) or a financial economy (they didn’t even use money in any important sense). Humans didn’t understand how they could operate without these things, but the Heechee thought that in those respects human ways were pretty repulsive, too. Since, by the time human beings got far enough out into space to have some chance of encountering Heechee, most employed human persons were in these “white-collar” occupations, they were startled to find that most Heechee were, in their view, unemployed.

  It wasn’t just that the human poli-sci and sociology professors wondered how the Heechee managed to get along without kings, presidents, or maximum leaders. Even on Earth, generations of anarchists, libertarians, and small-is-beautiful philosophers had been claiming that human beings didn’t need such things, either. The real puzzle was how the Heechee had escaped having them anyway.

  It took a number of anthropologists and cultural behaviorists a long time to come up with an explanatory theory. That phenomenon, too, seemed to have an evolutionary basis. It came from the fact that the pre-Heechee nonsapients—the primitive species they labeled “Heecheeids”—had burrowed in the ground like prairie dogs or trapdoor spiders. They did not form tribes. They staked out territories. Therefore Heecheeids did not conduct tribal wars or struggle for succession to a throne; there wasn’t any throne to succeed to. No Heecheeid ever had any need or desire that conflicted with any other Heechee—as long as the other guy stayed out of his territory.