Gateway (15 page)

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He punched a button and said: "Signatures for coded electromagnetic radiation." A slow sine curve leaped onto the scanner's readout plate, wiggled briefly for a moment, and then straightened to an absolutely motionless line. "Negative," said Ham. "Anomalous time-variant temperatures." That was a new one on me. "What's an anomalous time-variant temperature?" I asked. "Like if something gets warmer when the sun sets," said Klara impatiently. "Well?" But that line was flat, too. "None of them, either," said Ham. "High-albedo surface metal?" Slow sine wave, then nothing. "Hum," said Ham. "Ha. Well, the rest of the signatures don't apply; there won't be any methane, because there isn't any atmosphere, and so on. So what do we do, boss?" Sam opened his lips to speak, but Klara was ahead of him. "I beg your pardon," she said tightly, "but who do you mean when you say 'boss'?" "Oh, shut up," Ham said impatiently. "Sam?" Kahane gave Klara a slight, forgiving smile. "If you want to say something, go ahead and say it," he invited. "Me, I think we ought to orbit the moon." "Plain waste of fuel!" Klara snapped. "I think that's crazy." "Have you got a better idea?" "What do you mean, 'better'? What's the point?" "Well," said Sam reasonably, "we haven't looked all over the moon. It's rotating pretty slow. We could take the lander and look all around; there might be a whole Heechee city on the far side." "Fat chance," Klara sniffed, almost inaudibly, thus clearing up the question of who had said it before. The boys weren't listening. All three of them were already on their way down into the lander, leaving Klara and me in sole possession of the capsule. Klara disappeared into the toilet. I lit a cigarette, almost the last I had, and blew smoke plumes through the expanding smoke plumes before them, hanging motionless in the unmoving air. The capsule was tumbling slightly, and I could see the distant brownish disk of the planet's moon slide upward across the viewscreen, and a minute later the tiny, bright hydrogen flame of the lander heading toward it. I wondered what I would do if they ran out of fuel, or crashed, or suffered some sort of malfunction. What I would have to do in that case was leave them there forever. What I wondered was whether I would have the nerve to do what I had to do. It did seem like a terrible, trivial waste of human lives. What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts? I found that I was holding my chest, as though the metaphor were real. I spat on the end of the cigarette to put it out and folded it into a disposal bag. Little crumbs of ash were floating around where I had flicked them without thinking, but I didn't feel like chasing them. I watched the big mottled crescent of the planet swing into view in the corner of the screen, admiring it as an art object: yellowish green on the daylight side of the terminator, an amorphous black that obscured the stars on the rest of it. You could see where the outer, thinner stretches of the atmosphere began by the few bright stars that peeped twinklingly through it, but most of it was so dense that nothing came through. Of course, there was no question of landing on it. Even if it had a solid surface, it would be buried under so much dense gas that we could never survive there. The Corporation was talking about designing a special lander that could penetrate the air of a Jupiter-like planet, and maybe someday they would; but not in time to help us now. Klara was still in the toilet. I stretched my sling across the cabin, pulled myself into it, put down my head, and went to sleep.

Four days later they were back. Empty. Dred and Ham Tayeh were glum, dirty, and irritable; Sam Kahane looked quite cheerful. I wasn't fooled by it; if he had found anything worth having they would have let us know by radio. But I was curious. "What's the score, Sam?" "Batting zero," he said. "It's just rock, couldn't get a flicker of anything worth going down for. But I have an idea." Klara came up beside me, looking curiously at Sam. I was looking at the other two; they looked as though they knew what Sam's idea was, and didn't like it. "You know," he said, "that star's a binary." "How can you tell?" I asked. "I put the scanners to work. You've seen that big blue baby out--" He looked around, then grinned. "Well, I don't know which direction it is now, but it was near the planet when we first took the pictures. Anyway, it looked close, so I put the scanners on it, and they gave a proper motion I couldn't believe. It has to be binary with the primary here, and not more than half a light-year away." "It could be a wanderer, Sam," said Ham Tayeh. "I told you that. Just a star that passes in the night." Kahane shrugged. "Even so. It's close." Klara put in, "Any planets?" "I don't know," he admitted. "Wait a minute -- there it is, I think." We all looked toward the viewscreen. There was no question which star Kahane was talking about. It was brighter than Sirius as seen from Earth, minus-two magnitude at least. Klara said gently, "That's interesting, and I hope I don't know what you're thinking, Sam. Half a light-year is at best maybe two years' travel time at top lander speed, even if we had the fuel for it. Which we don't, boys." "I know that," Sam insisted, "but I've been thinking. If we could just give a little nudge on the main capsule drive--" I astounded myself by shouting, "Stop that!" I was shaking all over. I couldn't stop. Sometimes it felt like terror, and sometimes it felt like rage. I think if I had had a gun in my hand at that moment I could have shot Sam without a thought. Klara touched me to calm me down. "Sam," she said, quite gently for her, "I know how you feel." Kahane had come up empty on five straight trips. "I bet it's possible to do that." 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.

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!"

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.