Gateway (23 page)

---------------------------------------- We sniff for your scent in the gas of Orion, We dig for your den with the dogs of Procyon, From Baltimore, Buffalo, Bonn, and Benares We seek you round Algol, Arcturus, Antares. We'll find you some day. Little lost Heechee, we're on our way! ----------------------------------------

"No. As a matter of fact, I haven't had any experience at all that counts for anything. One trip. Empty. I didn't even land.' "Pity," she said. "Still, there's not that much to learn. Do you know what Venus is like? Aphrodite's just a little bit worse. The primary's a flare star, and you don't want to be caught in the open. But the Heechee digs are all underground. If you find one, you're in." "What are the chances of finding one?" I asked. "Well," she said thoughtfully, pulling me off the cable and down a tunnel, "not all that good, maybe. After all, you're out in open when you're prospecting. On Venus they use armored bodies and they zap around anywhere they want to go, no trouble. Well, maybe a little trouble," she conceded. "But they don't lose very many prospectors anymore. Maybe one percent." "What percent do you lose on Aphrodite?" "More than that. Yes, I grant you, it's higher than that. You have to use the lander from your ship, and of course it's not mobile on the surface of a planet. Especially a planet with a face like molten sulfur and winds like hurricanes -- when the weather's mild." "It sounds charming," I said. "Why aren't you out there now?" "Me? I'm an out-pilot. I'm going back to Gateway in about ten days, soon as I get a cargo loaded, or somebody who comes in wants a ride back." "I want a ride back right now." "Oh, cripes, Broadhead! Don't you know what kind of trouble you're in? You broke regulations by messing with the control board. They'll throw the book at you." I thought it over carefully. Then I said, "Thanks, but I think I'll take my chances." "Don't you understand? Aphrodite has guaranteed Heeche remains. You could take a hundred trips without finding anything like this." "Sweetie," I said, "I couldn't take a hundred trips for anything, not now and not ever. I don't know if I can take one. I think I have the guts to get back to Gateway. Beyond that, I don't know."

I was on Gateway Two, all together, thirteen days. Hester Bergowiz, the out-pilot, kept trying to talk me into going to Aphrodite, I guess because she didn't want me taking up valuable cargo space on her return flight. The others didn't care. They only thought I was crazy. I was a problem for Ituno, who was loosely in charge of keeping things straight on Two. Technically I was an illegal entrant, without a dime's worth of per capita paid and with nothing to pay it with. He would have been within his rights to toss me out into space without a suit. He solved it by putting me to work loading low-priority cargo into Hester's Five, mostly prayer fans and samples for analysis from Aphrodite. That took two days, and then he designated me chief gofer for the three people who were rebuilding suits for the next batch of explorers of Aphrodite. They had to use Heechee torches to soften the metal enough to bend it onto the Suits, and I wasn't trusted with any of that. It takes two years to train a person to handle a Heechee torch in close quarters. But I was allowed to muscle the suits and sheets of Heechee metal into position for them, to fetch tools, to go for coffee. . . and to put the suits on when they were finished, and exit into space to make sure they didn't leak. None of them leaked. On the twelfth day, two Fives came in from Gateway, loaded with happy, eager prospectors bringing all the wrong equipment. The word about Aphrodite had not had time to get to Gateway and back, so the new fish didn't know what goodies were in store. Just by accident, one of them was a young girl on a science mission, a former student of Professor Hegramet's who was supposed to make anthropometric studies of Gateway Two. On his own authority Norio Ituno reassigned her to Aphrodite, and decreed a combination welcome and farewell party. The ten newcomers and I outnumbered our hosts; but what they lacked in numbers they made up in drinking, and it was a good party. I found myself a celebrity. The new fish couldn't get over the fact that I had slain a Heechee ship and survived. I was almost sorry to leave. . . not counting being scared. Ituno splashed three fingers of rice whiskey into a glass for me and offered me a toast. "Sorry to see you go, Broadhead," he said. "Sure you won't change your mind? We've got more armored ships and suits than we have prospectors right now, but I don't know how long that's going to last. If you change your mind after you get back--" "I'm not going to change my mind," I said.

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"Banzai," he said, and drank. "Listen, do you know an old guy named Bakin?" "Shicky? Sure. My neighbor." "Give him my regards," he said, pouring another drink for the purpose. "He's a great guy, but he reminds me of you. I was with him when he lost his legs: got caught in the lander when we had to jettison. Damn near died. By the time we got him to Gateway he was all swelled up and smelled like hell; we had to take the legs off, two days out. I did it myself." "He's a great person, all right," I said absently, finishing the drink and holding the glass out for more. "Hey. What do you mean, he reminds you of me?" "Can't make up his mind, Broadhead. He's got a stake that's enough to put him on Full Medical, and he can't make up his mind to spend it. If he spends it he can have his legs back and go out again. But then he'd be broke if he didn't score. So he just stays on, a cripple." I put the glass down. I didn't want any more to drink. "So long, Ituno," I said. "I'm going to bed."

I spent most of the trip back writing letters to Klara that I didn't know if I would ever mail. There wasn't much else to do. Hester turned out to be surprisingly sexual, for a small plump lady of a certain age. But there's a limit to how long that is entertaining, and with all the cargo we had jammed in the ship, there wasn't room for much else. The days were all the same: sex, letter writing, sleeping . . . and worrying. Worrying about why Shicky Bakin wanted to stay a cripple; which was a way of worrying, in a way I could face, about why I did. Sigfrid says, "You sound tired, Rob." Well, that was understandable enough. I had gone off to Hawaii for the weekend. Some of my money was in tourism there, so was all tax deductible. It was a lovely couple of days on the Big Island, with a two-hour stockholders' meeting in the morning, at afternoons with one of those beautiful Island girls on the beach sailing in glass-bottomed catamarans, watching the big mantas glide underneath, begging for crumbs. But coming back, you fight time zones all the way, and I was exhausted. Only that is not the sort of thing that Sigfrid really wants to hear about. He doesn't care if you're physically exhausted. He doest care if you've got a broken leg; he only wants to know if you dream about screwing your mother. I say that. I say, "I'm tired, all right, Sigfrid, but why don't you stop making small talk? Get right into my Oedipal feelings about Ma." "Did you have any, Robby?" "Doesn't everybody?" "Do you want to talk about them, Robby?" "Not particularly." He waits, and I wait, too. Sigfrid has been being cute again, and now his room is fixed up like a boy's room from forty years ago. Crossed Ping-Pong paddles hologrammed on the wall. A fake window with a fake view of the Montana Rockies in a snowstorm. A hologrammed cassette shelf of boys' stories on tape, Tom Sawyer and Lost Race of Mars and-- I can't read the rest of the titles. It is all very homey, but not in the least like my own room as a boy, which was tiny, narrow, and almost filled by the old sofa I slept on. "Do you know what you want to talk about, Rob?" Sigfrid probes gently. "You bet." Then I reconsider. "Well, no. I'm not sure." Actually I do know. Something had hit me on the way back from Hawaii, very hard. It's a five-hour flight. Half the time I had spent drenched in tears. It was funny. There was this lovely hapi-haole girl flying east in the seat next to me, and I had decided right away to get to know her better. And the stewardess was the same one I'd had before, and she, I already knew better. So there I was, sitting at the very back of the first-class section of the SST, taking drinks from the stewardess, chatting with my pretty hapi-haole. And -- every time the girl was drowsing, or in the ladies' room, and the stewardess was looking the other way -- racked with silent, immense, tearful sobs. And then one of them would look my way again and I would be smiling, alert, and on the make. "Do you want to just say what you're feeling at this second, Rob?" "I would in a minute, Sigirid, if I knew what it was." "Don't you know, really? Can't you remember what was in your head while you weren't talking, just now?" "Sure I can!" I hesitate, then I say, "Oh, hell, Sigfrid, I guess I was just waiting to be coaxed. I had an insight the other day, and it hurt. Oh, wow, you wouldn't believe how it hurt. I was crying like a baby." "What was the insight, Robby?" "I'm trying to tell you. It was about -- well, it was partly about my mother. But it was also about, well, you know, Dane Metchnikov. I had these . . . I had--" "I think you're trying to say something about the fantasies you had of having anal sex with Dane Metchnikov, Rob. Is that right?"

---------------------------------------- MISSION REPORT

Vessel A3--77, Voyage 036D51. Crew T. Parreno, N. Ahoya, E. Nimkin. Transit time 5 days 14 hours. Position vicinity Alpha Centauri A. Summary. "The planet was quite Earth-like and heavily vegetated. The color of the vegetation was predominantly yellow. The atmosphere matched the Heechee mix closely. It is a warm planet with no polar ice caps and a temperature range similar to Earth tropics at the equator, Earth temperate extending almost to the poles. We detected no animal life or signatures (methane, etc.) thereof. Some of the vegetation predates at a very slow pace, advancing by uprooting portions of a vinelike structure, curling around and rerooting. Maximum velocity measured was approximately 2 kilometers per hour. No artifacts. Parreno and Nimkin landed and returned with samples of vegetation, but died of a toxicodendron-like reaction. Great blisters formed over their bodies. Then they developed pain, itching and apparent suffocation, probably due to fluids accumulating in the lung. I did not bring them aboard the vessel. I did not open the lander, or dock it to the vessel. I recorded personal messages for both, then jettisoned the lander and returned without it." Corporation assessment: No charge made against N. Ahoya in view of past record. ----------------------------------------

"Yeah. You remember good, Sigfrid. When I was crying, it was about my mother. Partly . . ." "You told me that, Rob." "Right." And I close up. Sigfrid waits. I wait, too. I suppose I want to be coaxed some more, and after a while Sigfrid obliges me: "Let's see if I can help you, Rob," he says. "What do crying about your mother, and your fantasies about anal sex with Dane, have to do with each other?" I feel something happening inside of me. It feels as though the soft, wet inside of my chest is starting to bubble into my throat. I can tell that when my voice comes out, it is going to be tremulous and desperately forlorn if I don't control it. So I try to control it, although I know perfectly well that I have no secrets of this sort from Sigfrid; he can read his sensors and know what is going on inside me from the tremble of a triceps or the dampness of a palm. But I make the effort anyway. In the tones of a biology instructor explaining a prepared frog I say: "See, Sigfrid, my mother loved me. I knew it. You know it. It was a logical demonstration; she had no choice. And Freud said once that no boy who is certain he was his mother's favorite ever grows up to be neurotic. Only--" "Please, Robbie, that isn't quite right, and besides you're intellectualizing. You know you really don't want to put in all these preambles. You're stalling, aren't you?" Other times I would tear the circuits out of his chips for that, but this time he has my mood gauged correctly. "All right. But I did know that my mother loved me. She couldn't help it! I was her only son. My father was dead -- don't clear your throat, Sigfrid, I'm getting to it. It was a logical necessity that she loved me, and I understood it that way with no doubt at all in my mind, but she never said so. Never once." "You mean that never, in your whole life, did she say to you, 'I love you, son?'" "No!" I scream. Then I get control again. "Or not directly, no. I mean, once when I was like eighteen years old and going to sleep in the next room, I heard her to say to one of her friends -- girlfriends, I mean -- that she really thought I was a tremendous kid. She was proud of me. I don't remember what I'd done, something, won a prize or got a job, but she right that minute was proud of me and loved me, and said so. . . . But not to me." "Please go on, Rob," Sigfrid says after a moment. "I am going on! Give me a minute. It hurts; I guess it's what you call primal pain." "Please don't diagnose yourself, Rob. Just say it. Let it come out." "Oh, shit." I reach for a cigarette and then stop the motion. That's usually a good thing to do when things get tight with Sigfrid, because it will almost always distract him into an argument about whether I am trying to relieve tension instead of dealing with it; but this time I am too disgusted with myself, with Sigfrid, even with my mother. I want to get it over with. I say, "Look, Sigfrid, here's how it was. I loved my mother a lot, and I know -- knew! -- she loved me. I knew she wasn't very good at showing it." I suddenly realize I have a cigarette in my hands, and rolling it around without lighting it and, wondrous to say, Sigfrid hasn't even commented on it. I plunge right on: "She didn't say the words to me. Not only that. It's funny, Sigfrid, but, you know I can't remember her ever touching me. I mean, not really. She would kiss me good night, sometimes. On the top of the head. And I remember she told me stories. And she was always there when needed her. But--" I have to stop for a moment, to get control of my voice again, so I inhale deeply and evenly through my nose, concentrating breath flow. "But you see, Sigfrid," I say, rehearsing the words ahead of time and pleased with the clarity and balance with which I deliver them, "she didn't touch me much. Except for one way. She was very good to me when I was sick. I was sick a lot. Everybody around the food mines has runny noses, skin infections -- you know. She got me everything I needed. She was there, God knows how, holding down a job and taking care of me, all at once. And when I was sick she . . ." After a moment Sigfrid says, "Go on, Robbie. Say it." I try, but I am still stuck, and he says: "Just say it the fastest way you can. Get it out. Don't worry if you understand, or if it makes sense. Just get rid of the words." "Well, she would take my temperature," I explain. "You know, stick a thermometer into me. And she'd hold me for, you know, whatever it is, three minutes or so. And then she'd take the thermometer out and read it." I am right on the verge of bawling. I'm willing to let it happen, but first I want to follow this thing through; it is almost a sexual thing, like when you are getting right up to the moment of decision with some person and you don't think you really want to let her be that much a part of you but you go ahead anyhow. I save up voice control, measuring it out so that I won't run out before I finish. Sigfrid doesn't say anything, and after a moment I manage the words: "You see how it is, Sigfrid? It's funny. All my life now -- what is it, maybe forty years since then? And I still have this crazy notion that being loved has something to do with having things stuck up my ass."