Gateway (hs-1)

by Frederik Pohl

  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.

  Chapter 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.

  A NOTE ON HEECHEE HABITAT

  Question. Don’t we even know what a Heechee table or any old housekeeping thing looks like?

  Professor Hegramet. We don’t even know what a Heechee house looks like. We never found one. Just tunnels. They liked branching shafts, with rooms opening out of them. They liked big chambers shaped like spindles, tapered at both ends, too. There’s one here, two on Venus, probably the remains of one that’s half eroded away on Peggy’s World.

  Question. I know what the bonus is for finding intelligent alien life, but what’s the bonus for finding a Heechee?

  Professor Hegramet. Just find one. Then name your price.

  “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.

  “Wou
ld 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.”

  Chapter 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.

  MISSION REPORT

  Vessel 3-104, Voyage 031D18. Crew N. Ahoya, Ta. Zakharcenko, L. Marks.

  Transit time 119 days 4 hours. Position not identified. Apparently outside galactic cluster, in dust cloud. Identification of external galaxies doubtful.

  Summary. “We found no trace of any planet, artifact, or landable asteroid within scanning distance. Nearest star approximately 1.7 l.y. Conjecture whatever was there has since been destroyed. Life-support systems began to malfunction on return trip and Larry Marks died.”

  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.

  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.

  Dear Voice of Gateway:

  Are you a reasonable and open-minded person? Then prove it by reading this letter all the way through to the end before making up your mind about what it says. There are thirteen occupied levels in Gateway. There are thirteen residences in each of thirteen (count them yourself) of the housing halls. Do you think this letter is just silly superstition? Then look at the evidence for yourself! Launches 83-20, 84-1 and 84-10 (what do the digits add up to?) were all declared overdue in List 86-13! Gateway Corporation, wake up! Let the skeptics and bigots jeer. Human lives depend on your willingness to risk a little ridicule. It would cost nothing to omit the Danger Numbers from all programs — except courage!