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.
Chapter 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.
Chapter 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?”
MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT
1. I, _________________, being of sound mind, hereby assign all rights in and to any discoveries, artifacts, objects, and things of value of any description I may find during or as a result of exploration involving any craft furnished me or information given me by the Gateway Authority irrevocably to said Gateway Authority.
2. Gateway Authority may, in its own sole direction, elect to sell, lease or otherwise dispose of any artifact, object or other thing of value arising from my activities under this contract. If it does so, it agrees to assign to me 50% (fifty percent) of all revenues arising from such sale, lease, or disposal, up to the costs of the exploration trip itself (includin
g my own costs in coming to Gateway and my subsequent costs of living while there), and 10% (ten percent) of all subsequent revenues once the aforesaid costs have been repaid. I accept this assignment as payment in full for any obligations arising to me from the Gateway Authority of whatever kind, and specifically undertake not to lay any claim for additional payment for any reason at any time.
3. I irrevocably grant to Gateway Authority the full power and authority to make decisions of all kinds relating to the exploitation, sale, or lease of rights in any such discoveries, including the right, at Gateway Authority’s sole discretion, to pool my discoveries or other things of value arising under this contract with those of others for purpose of exploitation, lease, or sale, in which case my share shall be whatever proportion of such earnings Gateway Authority may deem proper; and I further grant to Gateway Authority the right to refrain from exploiting any or all such discoveries or things of value in any way, at its own sole discretion.
4. I release Gateway Authority from any and all claims by me or on my behalf arising from any injury, accident, or loss of any kind to me in connection with my activities under this contract.
5. In the event of any disagreement arising from this Memorandum of Agreement, I agree that the terms shall be interpreted according to the laws and precedents of Gateway itself, and that no laws or precedents of any other jurisdiction shall be considered relevant in any degree.
“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.
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 te
eth 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.
WELCOME TO GATEWAY!
Congratulations!
You are one of a very few people each year who may become a limited partner in Gateway Enterprises, Inc. Your first obligation is to sign the enclosed Memorandum of Agreement. You need not do this at once. You are encouraged to study the agreement and to seek legal advice, if available.
However, until you sign you will not be eligible to occupy Corporation housing, dine at the Corporation commissary or participate in the Corporation instruction courses.
Accommodations are available at the Gateway Hotel and Restaurant for those who are here as visitors, or who do not at present wish to sign the Memorandum of Agreement.
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.
KEEPING GATEWAY GOING
In order to meet the costs of maintaining Gateway, all persons are required to pay a daily per-capita assessment for air, temperature control, administration, and other services.
If you are a guest, this cost is included in your hotel bill.
Rates for other persons are posted. The tax may be prepaid up to one year in advance if desired. Failure to pay the daily per-capita tax will result in immediate expulsion from Gateway.
Note: Availability of a ship to receive expelled persons cannot be guaranteed.
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