Gateway

by Frederik Pohl

  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.

  Chapter 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!”

  Chapter 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.

  A NOTE ON DWARFS AND GIANTS

  Dr. Asmenion. You all ought to know what a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram looks like. If you find yourself in a globular cluster, or anywhere where there’s a compact mass of stars, it’s worth plotting an H-R for that group. Also keep your eye out for unusual spectral
classes. You won’t get a nickel for F’s, G’s or K’s; we’ve got all the readings on them you could want. But if you happen to find yourself orbiting a white dwarf or a very late red giant, make all the tape you’ve got. Also O’s and B’s are worth investigating. Even if they’re not your primary. But if you happen to be in close orbit in an armored Five around a good bright O, that ought to be worth a couple hundred thousand at least, if you bring back the data.

  Question. Why?

  Dr. Asmenion. What?

  Question. Why do we only get the bonus if we’re in an armored Five?

  Dr. Asmenion. Oh. Because if you aren’t, you won’t come back.

  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.

  Chapter 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.”

  Classifieds.

  PAINLESS DENTISTRY private fee basis, completely equipped all needs. References. 87-579.

  NONSMOKER UPTIGHTS in your crew? I’m. exclusive Gateway agent for “Smoke Suppressor” cigarette smoking hood, gives you all the fun, spares your crewmates the smog. Phone 87-19 6 for demonstration.

  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—”