Gateway (20 page)

22

I went back to my own room that night, but it took me a long time to get to sleep; and Shicky woke me up early to tell me what was happening. There had been only three survivors, and their base award had already been announced: seventeen million five hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Against royalties. That drove the sleepies out of my eyes. "For what?" I demanded. Shicky said, "For twenty-three kilograms of artifacts. They think it's a repair kit. Possibly for a ship, since that is where they found it, in a lander on the surface of the planet. But at least they are tools of some sort." "Tools." I got up, got rid of Shicky, and plodded down the tunnel to the community shower, thinking about tools. Tools could mean a lot. Tools could mean a way to open the drive mechanism in the Heechee ships without blowing up everything around. Tools could mean finding out how the drive worked and building our own. Tools could mean almost anything, and what they certainly meant was a cash award of seventeen million five hundred and fifty thousand dollars, not counting royalties, divided three ways. One of which could have been mine.

---------------------------------------- A NOTE ON NEUTRON STARS

Dr. Asmenion. Now, you get a star that has used up its fuel, and it collapses. When I say "collapses," I mean it's shrunk so far that the whole thing, that starts out with maybe the mass and volume of the sun, is squeezed into a ball maybe ten kilometers across. That's dense. If your nose was made out of neutron star stuff, Susie, it would weigh more than Gateway does. Question. Maybe even more than you do, Yuri? Dr. Asmenion. Don't make jokes in class. Teacher's sensitive. Anyway, good, close-in readings on a neutron star would be worth a lot, but I don't advise you to use your lander to get them. You need to be in a fully armored Five, and then I wouldn't come much closer than a tenth of an A.U. And watch it. It'll seem as if probably you could get closer, but the gravity shear is bad. It's practically a point source, you see. Steepest gravity gradient you'll ever see, unless you happen to get next to a black hole, God forbid. ----------------------------------------

It is hard to get a figure like $5,850,000 out of your mind (not to mention royalties) when you think that if you had been a little more foreseeing in your choice of girlfriends you could have had it in your pocket. Call it six million dollars. At my age and health I could have bought paid-up Full Medical for less than half of that, which meant all the tests, therapies, tissue replacements, and organ transplants they could cram into me for the rest of my life which would have been at least fifty years longer than I could expect without it. The other three million plus would have bought me a couple of homes, a career as a lecturer (nobody was more in demand than a successful prospector), a steady income for doing commercials on PV, women, food, cars, travel, women, fame, women . . . and, again, there were always the royalties. They could have come to anything at all, depending on what the R&D people managed to do with the tools. Sheri's find was exactly what Gateway was all about: the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It took an hour for me to get down to the hospital, three tunnel segments and five levels in the dropshaft. I kept changing my mind and going back. When I finally managed to purge my mind of envy (or at least to bury it where I didn't think it was going to show) and turned up at the reception desk, Sheri was asleep anyway. "You can go in," said the ward nurse. "I don't want to wake her up." "I don't think you could," he said. "Don't force it, of course. But she's allowed visitors." She was in the lowest of three bunks in a twelve-bed room. Three or four of the others were occupied, two of them behind the isolation curtains, milky plastic that you could see through only vaguely. I didn't know who they were. Sheri herself looked quite peacefully resting, one arm under her head, her pretty eyes closed and her strong, dimpled chin resting on her wrist. Her two companions were in the same room, one asleep, one sitting under a holoview of Saturn's rings. I had met him once or twice, a Cuban or Venezuelan or something like that from New Jersey. The only name I could remember for him was Manny. We chatted for a while, and he promised to tell Sheri I had been there. I left and went for a cup of coffee at the commissary, thinking about their trip. They had come out near a tiny, cold planet way out from a K-6 orange-red cinder of a star, and according to Manny, they hadn't even been sure it was worth the trouble of landing. The readings showed Heechee-metal radiation, but not much; and almost all of it, apparently, was buried under carbon-dioxide snow. Manny was the one who stayed in orbit. Sheri and the other three went down and found a Heechee dig, opened it with great effort and, as m found it empty. Then they tracked another trace and found the lander. They had had to blast to get it open, and in the process two of the prospectors lost integrity of their spacesuits -- too close to the blast, I guess. By the time they realized they were in trouble it was too late for them. They froze. Sheri and the other crewman tried to get them back into their own lander; it must have been pure misery and fear the whole time, and at the end they had to give up. The other man had made one more trip to the abandoned lander, found the tool kit in it, managed to get it back to their lander. Then they had taken off, leaving the two casualties fully frozen behind them. But they had overstayed their limit -- they were physical wrecks when they docked with the orbiter. Manny wasn't clear on what happened after that, but apparently they failed to secure the lander's air supply and had lost a good deal from it; so they were on short oxygen rations all the way home. The other man was worse off than Sheri. There was a good chance of residual brain damage, and his $5,850,000 might not do him any good. But Sheri, they said, would be all right once she recovered from plain exhaustion. I didn't envy them the trip. All I envied them was the results. I got up and got myself another cup of coffee in the commissary. As I brought it back to the corridor outside, where there were a few benches under the ivy planters, I became aware something was bugging me. Something about the trip. About the fact that it had been a real winner, one of the all-time greats in Gateway's history. . . I dumped the coffee, cup and all, into a disposal hole out the commissary and headed for the schoolroom. It was only a minutes walk away and there was no one else there. That was good because I wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet about what had occurred to me. I keyed the P-phone to information access and got the settings for Sheri's trip; they were, of course, a matter of public record. Then I went down to the practice capsule, again hitting lucky because there was no one around, and set them up on the course selector. Of course, I got good color immediately; and when I pressed the fine-tuner the whole board turned bright pink, except for the rainbow of colors along the side. There was only one dark line in the blue part of the spectrum. Well, I thought, so much for Metchnikov's theory about danger readings. They had lost forty percent of the crew on that mission, and that struck me as being quite adequately dangerous; but according to what he had told me, the really hairy ones showed six or seven of those bands. And in the yellow? According to Metchnikov, the more bright bands in the yellow, the more financial reward from a trip. Only in this one there were no bright bands in the yellow at all. There were two thick black "absorption" lines. That's all. I thumbed the selector off and sat back. So the great brains had labored and brought forth a mouse again: what they had interpreted as an indication of safety didn't really mean you were safe, and what they had interpreted as a promise of good results didn't seem to have any relevance to the first mission in more than a year that had really come up rich. Back to square one, and back to being scared.

For the next couple of days I kept pretty much to myself. There are supposed to be eight hundred kilometers of tunnels inside Gateway. You wouldn't think there could be that many in a little chunk of rock that's only about ten kilometers across. But even so, only about two percent of Gateway is airspace; the rest is solid rock. I saw a lot of those eight hundred kilometers. I didn't cut myself off completely from human companionship, I just didn't seek it out. I saw Klara now and then. I wandered around with Shicky when he was off duty, although it was tiring for him. Sometimes I wandered by myself, sometimes with chancemet friends, sometimes tagging along after a tourist group. The guides knew me and were not averse to having me along (I had been out! even if I didn't wear a bangle), until they got the idea that I was thinking of guiding myself. Then they were less friendly. They were right. I was thinking of it. I was going to have to do something sooner or later. I would have to go out, or I would have to go home; and if I wanted to defer decision on either of those

---------------------------------------- A NOTE ON PRAYER FANS

Question. You didn't tell us anything about Heechee prayer fans, and we see more of them than anything else. Professor Hegramet. What do you want me to tell you, Susie? Question. Well, I know what they look like. Sort of like a rolled-up ice-cream cone made out of crystal. All different colors of crystal. If you hold one right and press on it with your thumb it opens up like a fan. Professor Hegramet. That's what I know, too. They've been analyzed, same as fire pearls and the blood diamonds. But don't ask me what they're for. I don't think the Heechee fanned themselves with them, and I don't think they prayed, either; that's just what the novelty dealers called them. The Heechee left them all over the place, even when they tidied everything else up. I suppose they had a reason. I don't have a clue what that reason was, but if I ever find out I'll tell you. ----------------------------------------

two equally frightening prospects, I would have to decide at least to try to make enough money to stay put. When Sheri got out of the hospital we had a hell of a party for her, a combination of welcome home, congratulations, and goodbye, Sheri, because she was leaving for Earth the next day. She was shaky but cheerful, and although she wasn't up to dancing she sat hugging me in the corridor for half an hour, promising to miss me. I got quite drunk. It was a good chance for it; the liquor was free. Shed and her Cuban friend were picking up the check. In fact, I got so drunk that I never did get to say good-bye to Shed, because I had to head for the toilet and chuck. Drunk as I was, that struck me as a pity; it was genuine scotch-from-Scotland Gleneagle, none of your local white lightning boiled out of God-knows-what. Throwing up cleared my head. I came out and leaned against a wall, my face buried in the ivy, breathing hard, and by and by enough oxygen got into my bloodstream that I could recognize Francy Hereira standing next to me. I even said, "Hello, Francy." He grinned apologetically. "The smell. It was a little strong." "Sorry," I said huffily, and he looked surprised. "No, what do you mean? I mean it is bad enough on the cruiser, but every time I come to Gateway I wonder how you live through it. And in those rooms -- phew!" "No offense taken," I said grandly, patting his shoulder. "I must say goodnight to Sheri." "She's gone, Rob. Got tired. They took her back to the hospital." "In that case," I said, "I will only say goodnight to you." I bowed and lurched down the tunnel. It is difficult being drunk in nearly zero gravity. You long for the reassurance of a hundred kilos of solid weight to hold you to the ground. I understand, from what was reported to me later, that I pulled a solid rack of ivy off the wall, and I know from what I felt the next morning that I bashed my head into something hard enough to leave a purplish bruise the size of my ear. I became conscious of Francy coming up behind me and helping me navigate, and about halfway home I became conscious that there was someone else on my other arm. I looked, and it was Klara. I have only the most confused recollection of being put to bed, and when I woke up the next morning,

---------------------------------------- CORPORATION REPORT; ORBIT 37

74 vessels returned from launches during this period, with a total crew of 216. 20 additional vessels were judged lost, with a total crew of 54. In addition 19 crew members were killed or died of injuries, although the vessels returned. Three returning vessels were damaged past the point of feasible repair. Landing reports: 19. Five of the surveyed planets had life at the microscopic level or higher; one possessed structured plant or animal life, none intelligent. Artifacts: Additional samples of usual Heechee equipment were returned. No artifacts from other sources. No previously unknown Heechee artifacts. Samples: Chemical or mineral, 145. None adjudged of sufficient value to justify exploitation. Living organic, 31. Three of these were judged hazardous and disposed of in space. None found of exploitable value. Science awards in period: $8,754,500. Other cash awards in period, including royalties: $357,856,000. Awards and royalties arising from new discoveries in period (other than science awards): 0. Personnel grounded or exiting Gateway in period: 151. Lost operationally: 75 (including 2 lost in lander exercises). Medically unfit at end of year: 84. Total losses: 310. New personnel arriving in period: 415. Returned to duty: 66. Total increment during period: 481. Net gain in personnel: 171. ----------------------------------------

desperately hung over, I was astonished to find that Klara was in it, too. I got up as inconspicuously as I could and headed for the bathroom, needing a lot to throw up some more. It took quite a while, and I topped it off with another shower, my second in four days and a wild extravagance, considering my financial state. But I felt a little better, and when I got back to my room Klara had got up, fetched tea, probably from Shicky, and was waiting for me. "Thanks," I said, meaning it. I was infinitely dehydrated. "A sip at a time, old horse," she said anxiously, but I knew enough not to force much into my stomach. I managed two swallows and stretched out in the hammock again, but by then I was pretty sure I would live. "I didn't expect to see you here," I said. "You were, ah, insistent," she told me. "Not much on performance. But awfully anxious to try." "Sorry about that." She reached over and squeezed my foot. "Not to worry. How've things been, anyway?" "Oh, all right. It was a nice party. I don't remember seeing you there?" She shrugged. "I came late. Wasn't invited, as a matter of fact." I didn't say anything; I had been aware Klara and Shed were not very friendly, and assumed it was because of me. Klara, reading my mind, said, "I've never cared for Scorpios, especially unevolved ones with that awful huge jaw. Never get an intelligent, spiritual thought from one of them." Then she said, to be fair, "But she has courage, you have to give her that." "I don't believe I'm up to this argument," I said. "Not an argument, Rob." She leaned over, cradling my head. She smelled sweaty and female; rather nice, in some circumstances, but not quite what I wanted right then. "Hey," I said. "What ever became of musk oil?" "What?" "I mean," I said, suddenly realizing something that had been true for quite a while, "you used to wear that perfume a lot. That was the first thing I remember noticing about you." I thought of Francy Hereira's remark about the Gateway smell and realized it had been a long time since I had noticed Klara smelling particularly nice. "Honey-Rob, are you trying to start an argument with me?" "Certainly not. But I'm curious. When did you stop wearing it?" She shrugged and didn't answer, unless looking annoyed is an answer. It was enough of an answer for me, because I'd told her often enough that I liked the perfume. "So how are you doing with your shrink?" I asked, to change the subject. It didn't seem to be any improvement. Kiara said, without warmth, "I guess you're feeling pretty rotten with that remark. I think I'll go home now." "No, I mean it," I insisted. "I'm curious about your progress." She hadn't told me a word, though I knew she had signed up weeks before. She seemed to spend two or three hours a day with him. Or it -- she had elected to try the machine service from the Corporation puter, I knew. "Not bad," she said distantly. "Get over your father fixation yet?" I inquired. Klara said, "Rob, did it ever occur to you that you might get some good out of a little help yourself?" "Funny you should say that. Louise Forehand said the same thing to me the other day." "Not funny. Think about it. See you later." I dropped my head back after she had gone and closed my eyes. Go to a shrink! What did I need with that? All I needed was one lucky find like Shed's. . . And all I needed to make that was-- was--- Was the guts to sign up for another trip. But that kind of guts, for me, seemed to be in very short supply.