"My God," Marianna whispered. "We're in orbit around a black hole."
Then they cursed the week they had wasted, because they knew what that meant. Big money! A black hole. One of the rarest objects (and, therefore, one of the most highly rewarded in science bonuses) in the observable universe-because black holes are, intrinsically, unobservable.
A black hole isn't "black," in the sense that a dinner jacket or the ink on a piece of paper is black. A black hole is a lot blacker than that. No human being has ever seen real blackness, because blackness is the absence of all light. It can't be seen. There is nothing to see. The blackest dye reflects a little light; a black hole reflects nothing at all. If you tried to illuminate it with the brightest searchlight in the universe-if you concentrated all the light of a quasar on it in a single beam-you would still see nothing. The tremendous gravitational force of the black hole would suck all that light in and it would never come out again. It can't.
It is a matter of escape velocity. The escape velocity from the Earth is seven miles a second; from a neutron star as much as 120,000 miles per second. But the escape velocity from a black hole is greater than the speed of light. The light doesn't "fall back" (as a rock thrown up from Earth at less than escape velocity will fall back to the ground). What happens to the light rays is that they are bent by the gravitational pull. The radiation simply circles the black hole, spiraling endlessly, never getting free.
And when a black hole passes in front of, say, a globular cluster,
it doesn't hide the cluster. It simply bends the cluster's light around
it.
If Victory's crew had wasted seven days, they still had five days' worth of supplies left before they had to start back to Gateway. They used them all. They took readings on the black hole even when they couldn't see it ... and when at last they got back to Gateway they found that one, just one, of their pictures had paid off.
They shared a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus simply for the pictures of the globular cluster. But the one picture that they hadn't even noticed when they took it-a split-second frame, taken automatically when no one happened to be watching the screen-showed what happened when the black hole occluded a bright B-4 star, a few hundred light-years away. That star hadn't moved up or down. By chance it had passed almost exactly behind the black hole. Its light had spread to surround the hole, like a halo; and that gave them a measure of the hole's size .
And then, long after they were back in Gateway, the research teams that studied their results awarded them another half a million, and the information that they were very lucky.
Marianna Morse had wondered about that: Why had the Heechee used an armored Five to visit this harmless object? Answer: It hadn't always been harmless.
Most black holes are not safe to visit. They pull in gases in accretion rings, and the acceleration of the gases as they fall produces a hell of radiation. Once this one had, but that was a long time ago. Now it had eaten all the gases in its neighborhood. There was nothing left to fall and so generate the synchrotron flux of energy that might fry even an armored Five if it lingered too long nearby .
and so the crew of Victory, without knowing it at the time, had had an unexpected stroke of luck. They arrived at the neighborhood of their black hole after its lethal feeding frenzy had ended, and so they had come back alive.
In its first twenty years the Gateway Corporation handed out more than two hundred astronomical science bonuses, for a total of nearly one billion dollars. It paid off on double stars and supernova shells; it paid off on at least the first examples of every type of star there was.
There are nine members of the catalogue of star types, and they are easily remembered by the mnemonic "Pretty Woman, Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me," which runs the gamut from youngest to longest-living stars. The stellar classes from A down to the dim, small, cool Ms didn't earn any special science bonuses unless there was something truly remarkable about them, because they were too common. The vast majority of stars were dim, small, and cool. Contrariwise, the Os and Bs were hot young stars, and they always got bonuses because they were so few. But the Gateway Corporation awarded double bonuses on the P and W classes: P for gas clouds just condensing into stars, W for the hot, frightening Wolf-Rayet type. These were new stars, often immense ones, that could not be approached safely within billions of miles.
All those lucky prospectors collected science bonuses. So did the ones who happened to find themselves near known objects, at
least if they were the first to claim the rewards. Wolfgang Arretov was the first to arrive near the Sirius system, and Earthly astronomers were delighted. The stars Sirius A and B ("Bessel's satellite") had been studied intensively for centuries, because the primary star is so bright in Earthly skies. Arretov's data confirmed their deductions: Sirius A at 2.3 solar masses, B only about one-but a white dwarf with a surface temperature over twenty thousand degrees. Arretov got half a million for letting the astronomers know they had been right all along. Later, Sally Kissendorf got a hundred thousand for the first good pictures of the tiny (well-three solar masses, which is not real tiny; but just about invisible next to its huge primary) companion of Zeta Aurigae. She would have gotten more if the companion had happened to flare while she was nearby, but that might not have been worth her while, since it was very likely she could not have survived the experience. Matt Polofsky's picture of little Cygnus A only got him fifty thousand dollars, though-red dwarf stars simply weren't that interesting. Even well-studied nearby ones. And Rachel Morgenstern, with her husband and their three grown children, shared half a million for the Delta Cepheid shots. Cepheids aren't all that rare, but the Morgensterns happened to be there just when the star's surface layers were losing transparency through compression.
And then there were all the missions that wound .up in Oort clouds.
Oort clouds are masses of comets that orbit a star very far out-the Oort in Earth's system doesn't get going until you're half a light-year from the Sun. There are lots of comets in your average Oort cloud. Trillions of them. They generally mass as much as the aggregate of a star's planets, and almost every star has an Oort.
They seemed to fascinate the Heechee.
In Gateway's first twenty years of operation, no fewer than eighty-five missions wound up in an Oort cloud and returned to tell of it.
That was a big disappointment to the prospectors involved, be-
cause the Gateway Corporation stopped paying bonuses for Oort data after the tenth such mission. So those prospectors who came back from an Oort complained a lot. They couldn't understand why the Heechee had targeted so many missions to the dumb things.
And, naturally, they had no idea how lucky they really were, because it was a long time before anyone found out that, for an astonishing reason, most Oort missions never got back to the Gateway asteroid at all.
That billion dollars in astronomical science bonuses was welcome enough to the prospectors who got a share of it. But, really, it was chicken feed. What the Gateway Corporation was formed for was profit. The prospectors had come to the asteroid for the same reason, and big profit didn't come from taking instrument readings on something millions of miles away. The big bucks came from finding a planet, and landing on it-and bringing back something that made money.
Neither the Gateway Corporation nor the individual prospectors had much choice about that. Making a profit was the basic rule of survival, and neither the prospectors nor the Corporation made the rules. Those rules were made by the nature of the world they came from.
Homo sapiens evolved on the planet Earth, and the process of evolution made it certain that every human trait was custom-engineered to fit Earth's conditions, like a key in a lock. With three billioh years of Darwinian selection to make the fit perfect, life on Earth should have been pretty nearly heaven for its human inhabitants.
It wasn't. Not anymore, for rich Earth was getting close to filing for bankruptcy. It had spent its wealth.
Oh, ther
e were many millionaires on Earth. Billionaires, too; people with more money than they could spend, enough to hire a hundred servants, enough to own a county for a backyard, enough to pay for Full Medical insurance coverage, so that for all their long lives they would have at their command the most wonderful of all the wonderful medical, pharmaceutical, and surgical techniques to keep them healthy, and to make those lives very long. There were hundreds of thousands of the very rich, and many millions of the more or less well to do . .
But there were ten billion others.
There were the ones who scratched out a living by farming on
Asian plains and African savannahs; they made a crop when rain fell and wars stayed away and marauding insect pests devoured some other countryside than their own, and when the crop failed they died. There were the ones who lived in the barricaded slums of the big cities (the word "ghetto" was no longer a metaphor), or the barrios outside Latin metropolises, or the teeming warrens of the urban areas of the Orient. These people worked when they could. They lived on charity when there was any charity to be had. They lived at the bottom of the food chain-rice and beans, yams and barley; or, if they had the money to pay for it, single-cell proteins from the fossil-fuel conversions of the food mines-and they were very likely to be hungry throughout every hour of every day of their lives. Which were short. The poor people couldn't afford the medical plans. If they were very lucky there might be a free clinic, or a cheap doctor, to hand out pills and take out an appendix. But when one of their organs wore out they had only two alternatives. They managed to get along without it; or they died. The poor people could never afford organ transplants. They were lucky if they weren't caught in a dark alley some night and themselves converted into transplants for some richer person, by some more desperate one.
So there were two kinds of human beings on Earth. If you owned a few thousand shares of PetroFood or Chemways you didn't lack for much-not even health, because then you could afford Full Medical. But if you didn't
If you didn't, the next best thing was to have a job. Any kind of a job.
Having a job was a dream of Utopia for the billions who had none, but for those who did have employment their work was generally a demeaning kind of drudgery that drowned the spirit and damaged the health. The food mines employed many, dipping fossil fuels out of the ground and breeding edible single-cell protein creatures on their hydrocarbon content. But when you worked at a food mine you breathed those same hydrocarbons every day-it was like
living in a closed garage, with motors running all the time-and you probably died young. Factory work was better, a little, although the safest and most challenging parts of it were generally done by automatic machines for economic reasons; because they were more expensive to acquire, and to replace when damaged, than people. There was even domestic service as a possible career. But to be a servant in the homes of the wealthy was to be a slave, with a slave's intimate experience of luxury and plenty, and a slave's despair at ever attaining those things for himself.
Still, the ones who had even those jobs were lucky, for family agriculture was just a way of slowing down starvation, and in the developed world unemployment was terribly high. Especially in the cities. Especially for the young. So if you were one of the really rich, or even just one of the well-to-do, splurging on a trip to New York or Paris or Beijing, you usually saw the poor ones only when you walked out of your hotel, between police barricades, and into your waiting taxi.
You didn't have to do it that way. The police barricades were all one-way. If you chose to cross them the police would let you through. A grizzled old cop might try to warn you that going out among the crowds was a bad idea, if he happened to be charitably moved. But none of them would stop you if you insisted.
Then you were on your own. Which meant that you were immediately plunged into a noisy, smelly, dirty kind of unbarred zoo where you were immersed in a crowd of clamoring vendors: of drugs; of plastic reproductions of the Great Wall, the Eiffel Tower, or the New York Bubble; of handmade key charms and hand-carved trinkets; of guide services, or discount coupons to night clubs; of-very often-themselves. That was a scary experience for any member of the privileged classes encountering it for the first time. It wasn't necessarily very dangerous, though. The police wouldn't actually let them murder you or snatch your wallet-as long as you were in sight, anyway.
Quite often, the charging poor wouldn't harm you even if they
succeeded in luring you away from the police cordons, especially if you offered them some less chancy way of making money from you. But that was not guaranteed. Most of the poor people were desperate.
For the rich, of course, the world was quite different. It always
is. The rich lived long, healthy lives with other people's organs replacing any of their own that wore out. They lived those lives in balmy climates under the domes of major cities, if they chose, or
cruising the warm and still-unpolluted southern seas, or even traveling in space for the pure joy of it. When there were wars (and there often were, frequent though small-though quite large enough, of course, to satisfy the people killed in them), the rich went elsewhere until the wars were over. They felt that was their due. After all, they were the ones who paid the taxes-as much as they couldn't avoid, anyway.
The main trouble with being rich was that not all of the poor
people acquiesced in being poor. Quite a few tried to find ways to better themselves, and sometimes they did so violently.
Kidnapping became a growth industry in America again. So did extortion. You paid what they demanded, or out of hiding someone would shoot away your kneecap (or torch your house, or boobytrap your flyer, or poison your pets). Few in the solvent classes would send their children to school without a bodyguard anymore. That did have a useful side effect. As it turned out, it helped ease the unemployment situation, a little, as some millions of the extortionists put on uniforms and began drawing salaries to protect their employers against extortion.
And, of course, there was political terror, too. It flourished in the same soil that nurtured kidnapping and extortion, and there was even more of it. Among the apathetic majority of the landless and
the hungry, there were always a few who banded together to work the vengeance of the have-nots on the haves. Hostages were taken, officials were shot from ambush, aircraft were bombed out of the sky, reservoirs were poisoned, food supplies infected . . . oh, there were a thousand ingenious, injurious tricks the terror-wielders devised, and all of them devastating-at least, to those who had something to lose in the first place.
Nevertheless, in spite of all the fears and inconveniences, the haves had it made. And most other people didn't even have hope.
Then, into the life of this seething, overfull planet, along came Gateway.
For most of the ten billion people alive on the used-up planet of Earth, Gateway was an unexpected hope of paradise. Like the gold-rush miners of '49, like the hungry Irish fleeing their potato famine in the holds of immigrant ships, like the sodbusting pioneers of the American West and human emigrants everywhere, through all of history, the poverty-stricken billions were willing to take any risk for the sake of-well, wealth, if wealth could be had; but at least for a chance to feed and clothe and house their children.
Even the rich saw that this surprising new event might offer
them a good chance to get even richer. That made for a serious problem, for a while. The national governments who had built the space rockets that first visited other planets and later supported the Gateway operation felt they were entitled to whatever profits came out of the Gateway discoveries. The rich people who owned the governments agreed. But they couldn't all own it, after all.
So there was a certain amount of buying and selling and horse-trading (and some pretty cutthroat wheeling and dealing, too, with the stakes as high as they were). Compromises were made. Bargains were struck; and out of the competing greeds of all the claimants to the limitless wealth that the
galaxy promised came the just, or fairly just, invention of the Gateway Corporation.
Was Gateway a benefit to Earth's poor?
At first, not very much. It gave each of them a little hope-the hope of a lottery ticket, although few of them could raise the money even to buy that one-way ticket that might make them into winners. But it was a long time before any stay-at-home peasant or slum-dweller was a penny or a meal richer for anything the Heechee had left behind.
In fact, the knowledge that there were rich, empty planets out there was more tantalizing than useful to Earth's teeming billions. The livable planets were too far away. They could only be reached by faster-than-light travel. Although human beings actually improved on some Heechee space-travel techniques (using Lofstrom ioops to get into orbit instead of Heechee landers, for instance, and thus sparing further damage to the acidified lakes and the ozone layer), no one had the slightest idea of how to build a Heechee ship-and the ships on Gateway were far too few and much too small to carry sizable migrant populations to the new planets.
So a few prospectors got rich, when they didn't get dead instead. A number of rich people got quickly richer. But most of the penniless billions stayed on Earth.
And in the cities like Calcutta, with its two hundred million paupers, and on the starved farms and paddies of Africa and the Orient, hunger remained a fact of life, and terrorism and poverty got worse instead of better.
As our teachers keep telling us, the longest journey begins with a single step. That first step for the Gateway asteroid-the first voyage of exploration any human being ever took in a Heechee spaceship-wasn't planned in advance. It wasn't even authorized. And it certainly wasn't prudent.
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