Gateway (hs-1)

by Frederik Pohl

“I know you think you recall it perfectly,” he says, interpreting me exactly, “and in that sense I don’t suppose your memory needs refreshing. But what is interesting about that particular episode is that all the main areas of your internal concern seem to concentrate there. Your terror. Your homosexual tendencies—”

  “Hey!”

  “-which are not, to be sure, a major part of your sexuality, Rob, but which give you more concern than is warranted. Your feelings about your mother. The immense burden of guilt you put on yourself. And, above all, the woman Gelle-Klara Moynlin. All these things recur over and over in your dreams, Rob, and you often do not make the identification. And they are all present in this one episode.”

  I stub out a cigarette, and realize that I have had two going at once. “I don’t see the part about my mother,” I say at last.

  “You don’t?” The hologram that I call Sigirid von Shrink moves toward a corner of the room. “Let me show you a picture.” He raises his hand — that’s pure theater, I know it is — and in the corner there appears a woman’s figure. It is not very clear, but it is quite slim, and is in the act of covering a cough.

  “It’s not a very good resemblance to my mother,” I object.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Well,” I say generously, “I suppose it’s the best you can do. I mean, not having anything to go on except, I guess, my description of her.”

  “The picture,” says Sigfrid gently enough, “was assembled from your description of the girl Susie Hereira.”

  I light another cigarette, with some difficulty, because my hand is shaking. “Wow,” I say, with real admiration. “I take my hat off to you, Sigfrid. That’s very interesting. Of course,” I go on, suddenly feeling irritable, “Susie was, my God, only a child! And from that I realize — I realize now, I mean — that there are some resemblances. But the age is all wrong.”

  “Rob,” says Sigfrid, “how old was your mother when you were little?”

  “She was very young.” I add after a moment, “As a matter of fact, she looked a lot younger than she was even.”

  Sigfrid lets me hang there for a moment, and then he waves his hand again and the figure disappears, and instead we are suddenly looking at a picture of two Fives butted lander-to-lander in midspace, and beyond them is-is- “Oh, my God, Sigfrid,” I say. He waits me out for a while. As far as I am concerned, he can wait forever; I simply do not know what to say. I am not hurting, but I am paralyzed. I cannot say anything, and I cannot move.

  “This,” he begins, speaking very softly and gently, “is a reconstruction of the two ships in your expedition in the vicinity of the object SAG YY. It is a black hole or, more accurately, a singularity in a state of extremely rapid rotation.”

  “I know what it is, Sigfrid.”

  “Yes. You do. Because of its rotation, the translation velocity of what is called its event threshold or Schwarzschlld discontinuity exceeds the speed of light, and so it is not properly black; in fact it can be seen by virtue of what is called Cerenkov radiation. It was because of the instrument readings on this and other aspects of the singularity that your expedition was awarded a ten-million-dollar bonus, in addition to the agreed-upon sum which, along with certain other lesser amounts, is the foundation of your present fortune.”

  “I know that, too, Sigfrid.” Pause.

  “Would you care to tell me what else you know about it, Rob?”

  Pause.

  “I’m not sure I can, Sigfrid.”

  Pause again.

  He isn’t even urging me to try. He knows that he doesn’t have to. I want to try, and I take my cue from his own manner. There is something in there that I can’t talk about, that scares me even to think about; but wrapped around that central terror there is something I can talk about, and that is the objective reality.

  “I don’t know how much you know about singularities, Sigfrid.”

  “Perhaps you can just say what you think it is that I ought to know, Rob.”

  I put out the current cigarette and light another one. “Well,” I say, “you know and I know that if you really wanted to know about singularities it’s all in the data-banks somewhere, and a lot more exactly and informatively than I can say it, but anyway. . The thing about black holes is they’re traps. They bend light. They bend time. Once you’re in you can’t get out. Only… Only…”

  A NOTE ON NUTRITION

  Question. What did the Heechee eat?

  Professor Hegramet. About what we do, I would say. Everything. I think they were omnivores, ate anything they could catch. We really don’t know a thing about their diet, except that you can make some deductions from the shell missions.

  Question. Shell missions?

  Professor Hegramet. There are at least four recorded missions that didn’t go as far as another star, but went clear out of the solar system. Out where the shell of comets hangs out, you know, half a light-year or so away. The missions are marked as failures, but I don’t think they are. I’ve been pushing the Board to give science bonuses for them. Three seemed to wind up in meteorite swarms. The other came out at a comet, all hundreds of A.U. out. Meteorite swarms, of course, are usually the debris of old, dead comets.

  Question. Are you saying the Heechee ate comets?

  Professor Hegramet. Ate the things comets are made out of. Do you know what they are? Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen — the same elements you ate for breakfast. I think they used comets for feedstocks to manufacture what they ate. I think one of those missions to the cometary shell is sooner or later going to turn up a Heechee food factory, and then maybe we won’t have anybody ever starving anywhere anymore.

  After a moment Sigfrid says, “It’s all right for you to cry if you want to, Rob,” which is the way that I suddenly realize that that’s what I’m doing.

  “Jesus,” I say, and blow my nose into one of the tissues that he always keeps handy right next to the mat. He waits.

  “Only I did get out,” I say.

  And Sigfrid does something else I had never expected from him; he permits himself a joke. “That,” he says, “is pretty obvious, from the fact that you’re here.”

  “This is bloody exhausting, Sigfrid,” I say.

  “I am sure it is for you, Rob.”

  “I wish I had a drink.”

  Click. “The cabinet behind you,” says Sigfrid, “that has just opened contains some rather good sherry. It isn’t made from grapes, I’m sorry to say; the health service doesn’t go in for luxuries. But I don’t think you’ll be aware of its natural-gas origins. Oh, and it is laced with just a dollop of THC to soothe the nerves.”

  “Holy Christ,” I say, having run out of ways of expressing surprise. The sherry is all he says it is, and I can feel the warmth of it expanding inside me.

  “Okay,” I say, setting the glass down. “Well. When I got back to Gateway they’d written the expedition off. We were almost a year overdue. Because we’d been almost inside the event horizon. Do you understand about time dilation? . . . Oh, never mind,” I say, before he can answer, “that was a rhetorical question. What I mean is, what happened was the phenomenon they call time dilation. You get that close to a singularity and you come up against the twin paradox. What was maybe a quarter of an hour for us was almost a year by clock time — clock time on Gateway, or here, or anywhere else in the nonrelativistic universe, I mean. And—”

  I take another drink, then I go on bravely enough:

  “And if we’d gone any farther down we would have been going slower and slower. Slower, and slower, and slower. A little closer, and that fifteen minutes would have turned out to be a decade. A little closer still, and it would have been a century. It was that close, Sigfrid. We were almost trapped, all of us.

  “But I got out.”

  And I think of something and look at my watch. “Speaking of time, my hour’s been up for the last five minutes!”

  “I have no other appointments this afternoon, Rob.”

  I stare. “What?�
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  Gently:

  “I cleared my calendar before your appointment, Rob.”

  I don’t say “Holy Christ” again, but I surely think it. “This makes me feel right up against the wall, Sigfrid!” I say angrily.

  “I am not forcing you to stay past your hour, Rob. I am pointing out that you have that option if you choose.”

  I mull that for a while.

  “You are one brassbound ringding of a computer, Sigfrid,” I say. “All right. Well, you see, there was no way we could get out considered as a unit. Our ships were caught, well inside the of point of no return, and there just ain’t no way home from there. But Danny A., he was a sharp article. And he knew all about the holes in the laws. Considered as a unit, we were stuck.

  “But we weren’t a unit! We were two ships! And each of those came apart into two other ships! And if we could somehow transfer acceleration from one part of our system to the other and you know, kick part of us deeper into the well and at the same kick the other part up and out — then part of the unit could get free!”

  Long pause.

  “Why don’t you have another drink, Rob?” says Sigfrid courteously. “After you finish crying, I mean.”

  Chapter 30

  Fear! There was so much terror jumping around inside my skin that I couldn’t feel it anymore; my senses were saturated with it; I don’t know if I screamed or babbled, I only did what Danny A. told me to do. We’d backed the two ships together and linked up, lander-to-lander, and we were trying to manhandle gear, instruments, clothes, everything that moved out of the first ship into whatever corners we could find of the second, to make room for ten people where five were a tight fit. Hand to hand, back and forth, we bucket-brigaded the stuff. Dane Metchnikov’s kidneys must have been kicked black-and-blue; he was the one who was in the landers, changing the fuel-metering switches to blow every drop of hydrox at once. Would we survive that? We had no way of knowing. Both our Fives were armored, and we didn’t expect to damage the Heechee-metal shells. But the contents of the shells would be us, all of us in the one of them that went free — or we hoped would go free — and there wasn’t really any way to tell whether we could come free in the first place, or whether what would come free would be nothing but jelly, anyway. And all we had was minutes, and not very many of them. I guess I passed Klara twenty times in ten minutes, and I remember that once, the

  Dear Voice of Gateway:

  On Wednesday of last week I was crossing the parking lot at the Safeway Supermarket (where I had gone to deposit my food stamps) on the way to the shuttle bus to my apartment, when I saw an unearthly green light. A strange spacecraft landed nearby. Four beautiful, but very tiny, young women in filmy white robes emerged and subjected me helpless by means of a paralyzing ray. They kept me prisoner on their craft for nineteen hours. During that time they subjected me to certain indignities of a sexual nature which I am honor-bound not to reveal. The leader of the four, whose name was Moira Glow-Fawn, stated that, like us, they have not succeeded in fully overcoming their animal heritage. I accepted their apology and agreed to deliver four messages to Earth. Messages One and Four I may not announce until the proper time. Message Two is a private one for the manager of my apartment project. Message Three is for you at Gateway, and it has three parts: 1, there must be no more cigarette smoking; 2, there must be no more mixed schooling of boys and girls at least until the second year of college; 3, you must stop all exploration of space at once. We are being watched. first time, we kissed. Or aimed at each other’s lips, and came close enough. I remember the smell of her, and once lifting my head because the musk oil was so strong and not seeing her, and then forgetting it again. And all the time, out of one viewscreen or another, that immense broad, baleful blue ball hung flickering outside; the racing shadows across its surface that were phase effects made fearful pictures; the gripping grab of its gravity waves tugged at our guts. Danny A. was in the capsule of the first ship, watching the time and kicking bags and bundles down to the lander hatch to pass on, through the hatch, through the landers, up to the capsule of the second ship where I was pushing them out of the way, any which way, just to make room for more. “Five minutes,” he’d yell, and “Four minutes!” and “Three minutes, get the goddamn lead out!” and then, “That’s it! All of you! Drop what you’re doing and come on up here.” And we did. All of us. All but me. I could hear the others yelling, and then calling to me; but I’d fallen behind, our own lander was blocked, I couldn’t get through the hatch! And I tugged somebody’s duffelbag out of the way, just as Klara was screaming over the TBS radio, “Rob! Rob, for God’s sake, get up here!” And I knew it was too late; and I slammed the hatch and dogged it down, just as I heard Danny A.’s voice shouting, “No! No! Wait…

  Harry Hellison Pittsburgh

  Wait…

  Wait for a very, very long time.

  We sometimes get squashed, and we sometimes

  get burned,

  And we sometimes get shredded to bits,

  And we sometimes get fat on the Royalties

  Earned, And we’re always scared out of our wits.

  We don’t care which —

  Little lost Heechee, start making us rich!

  Chapter 31

  After a while, I don’t know how long, I raise my head and say, “Sorry, Sigfrid.”

  “For what, Rob?”

  “For crying like this.” I am physically exhausted. It is as if I had run ten miles through a gauntlet of mad Choctaws pounding me with clubs.

  “Are you feeling better now, Rob?”

  “Better?” I puzzle over that stupid question for a moment, and then I take inventory, and, curiously enough, I am. “Why, yeah. I guess so. Not what you’d call good. But better.”

  “Take it easy for a minute, Rob.”

  That strikes me as a dumb remark, and I tell him so. I have about the energy level of a small, arthritic jellyfish that’s been dead for a week. I have no choice but to take it easy.

  But I do feel better. “I feel,” I say, “as if I let myself feel my guilt at last.”

  “And you survived it.”

  I think that over. “I guess I did,” I say.

  “Let’s explore that question of guilt, Rob. Guilt why?”

  “Because I jettisoned nine people to save myself, asshole!”

  NOTICE OF CREDIT

  To ROBINETTE BROADHEAD:

  1. Acknowledgment is made that your course setting for Gateway II permits round-trip flights with a travel-time saving of approximately 100 days over the previous standard course for this object.

  2. By decision of the Board, you are granted a discovery royalty of 1 percent on all earnings on future flights using said course setting, and an advance of $10,000 against said royalty.

  3. By decision of the Board, you are assessed one-half of said royalty and advance as a penalty for damage to the vessel employed. Your account is therefore CREDITED with the following amount:

  Royalty advance (Board Order A-135-7), less deduction (Board Order A-135-8): $5,000

  Your present BALANCE is: $6,192

  “Has anyone ever accused you of that? Anyone but yourself, I mean?”

  “Accused?” I blow my nose again, thinking. “Well, no. Why should they? When I got back I was kind of a hero.” I think about Shicky, so kind, so mothering; and Francy Hereira holding me in his arms, letting me bawl, even though I’d killed his cousin. “But they weren’t there. They didn’t see me blow the tanks to get free.”

  “Did you blow the tanks?”

  “Oh, hell, Sigfrid,” I say, “I don’t know. I was going to. I was reaching for the button.”

  “Does it make sense that the button in the ship you were planning to abandon would actually fire the combined tanks in the landers?”

  “Why not? I don’t know. Anyway,” I say, “you can’t give me any alibis I haven’t already thought of for myself. I know maybe Danny or Klara pushed the button before I did. But I was reaching for mine!”
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  “And which ship did you think would go free?”

  “Theirs! Mine,” I correct myself. “No, I don’t know.”

  Sigfrid says gravely, “Actually, that was a very resourceful thing you did. You knew you couldn’t all have survived. There wasn’t time. The only choice was whether some of you would die, or all of you would. You elected to see that somebody lived.”

  “Crap! I’m a murderer!”

  Pause, while Sigfrid’s circuits think that over. “Rob,” he says carefully, “I think you’re contradicting yourself. Didn’t you say she’s still alive in that discontinuity?”

  “They all are! Time has stopped for them!”

  “Then how could you have murdered anybody?”

  “What?”

  He says again, “How could you have murdered anybody?”

  “… I don’t know,” I say, “but, honestly, Sigfrid, I really don’t want to think about it anymore today.”

  “There’s no reason you should, Rob. I wonder if you have any idea how much you’ve accomplished in the past two and a half hours. I’m proud of you!”

  And queerly, incongruously, I believe he is, chips, Heechee circuits, holograms and all, and it makes me feel good to believe it.

  “You can go any time you want to,” he says, getting up and going back to his easy chair in the most lifelike way possible, even grinning at me! “But I think I would like to show you something first.” My defenses are eroded down to nothing. I only say, “What’s that, Sigfrid?”

  “That other capability of ours that I mentioned, Rob,” he “the one that we’ve never used. I would like to display another patient, from some time back.”

  “Another patient?”

  He says gently, “Look over in the corner, Rob.”

  I look—

  —and there she is.

  “Klara!” And as soon as I see her I know where Sigfrid gets her from — the machine Klara was consulting back on Gateway. She is hanging there, one arm across a file rack, her feet lazily floating in the air, talking earnestly; her broad black eyebrows frown and sigh and her face grins, and grimaces, and then looks sweetly, invitingly relaxed.