Gateway (6 page)

---------------------------------------- WHAT DOES THE CORPORATION DO?

The purpose of the Corporation is to exploit the spacecraft left by the Heechee, and to trade in, develop, or otherwise utilize all artifacts, goods, raw materials, or other things of value discovered by means of these vessels. The Corporation encourages commercial development of Heechee technology, and grants leases on a royalty basis for this purpose. Its revenues are used to pay appropriate shares to limited partners, Such as you, who have been instrumental in discovering new things of value; to pay the costs of maintaining Gateway itself over and above the per-capita tax contribution; to pay to each of the general partners an annual sum sufficient to cover the cost of maintaining surveillance by means of the space cruisers you will have observed in orbit nearby; to create and maintain an adequate reserve for contingencies; and to use the balance of its income to subsidize research and development on the objects of value themselves. In the fiscal year ending February 30 last, the total revenues of the Corporation exceeded 3.7 x 10^12 dollars U.S. ----------------------------------------

says he's been all through the records since Orbit One, and the Ones aren't that bad." "Your father can have mine," said Gelle-Klara Moynlin. "It's not just statistics. Ones are lonesome. Anyway, one person can't really handle everything if you hit lucky, you need shipmates, one in orbit -- most of us keep one man in the ship, feels safer that way; at least somebody might get help if things go rancid. So two of you go down in the lander to look around. Of course, if you do hit lucky you have to split it three ways. If you hit anything big, there's plenty to go around. And if you don't hit, one-third of nothing is no less than all of it." "Wouldn't it be even better in a Five, then?" I asked. Klara looked at me and half-winked; I hadn't thought she remembered dancing the night before. "Maybe, maybe not. The thing about Fives is that they have almost unlimited target acceptance." "Please talk English," Sheri coaxed. "Fives will accept a lot of destinations that Threes and Ones won't. I think it's because some of those destinations are dangerous. The worst ship I ever saw come back was a Five. All scarred and seared and bent; nobody knows how it made it back at all. Nobody knows where it had been, either, but I heard somebody say it might've actually been in the photosphere of a star. The crew couldn't tell us. They were dead. "Of course," she went on meditatively, "an armored Three has almost as much target acceptance as a Five, but you take your chances any way you swing. Now let's get with it, shall we? You--" she pointed at Sheri, "sit down over there." The Forehand girl and I crawled around the mix of human and Heechee furnishings to make room. There wasn't much. If you cleared everything out of a Three you'd have a room about four meters by three by three, but of course if you cleared everything out it wouldn't go. Sheri sat down in front of the column of spoked wheels, wriggling her bottom to try to get a fit. "What kind of behinds did the Heechee have?" she complained. Teacher said, "Another good question, same no-good answer. If you find out, tell us. The Corporation puts that webbing in the seat. It isn't original equipment. Okay. Now, that thing you're looking at is the target selector. Put your hand on one of the wheels. Any one. Just don't touch any other. Now move it." She peered down anxiously as Sheri touched the bottom wheel, then thrust with her fingers, then laid the heel of her hand on it, braced herself against the V-shaped arms of the seat, and shoved. Finally it moved, and the lights along the row of wheels began to flicker. "Wow," said Sheri, "they must've been pretty strong!" We took turns trying with that one wheel -- Klara wouldn't let us touch any other that day -- and when it came my turn I was surprised to find that it took about as much muscle as I could bring to bear to make it move. It didn't feel rusted stuck; it felt as though it were meant to be hard to turn. And, when you think how much trouble you can get into if you turn a setting by accident in the middle of a flight, it probably was.

Of course, now I know more about that, too, than my teacher did then. Not that I'm so smart, but it has taken, and is still taking, a lot of people a hell of a long time to figure out what goes on just in setting up a target on the course director. What it is is a vertical row of number generators. The lights that show up display numbers; that's not easy to see, because they don't look like numbers. They aren't positional, or decimal. (Apparently the Heechee expressed numbers as sums of primes and exponents, but all that's way over my head.) Only the check pilots and the course programmers working for the Corporation really have to be able to read the numbers, and they don't do it directly, only with a computing translator. The first five digits appear to express the position of the target in space, reading from bottom to top. (Dane Metchnikov says the prime ordering isn't from bottom to top but from front to back, which says something or other about the Heechee. They were three-D oriented, like primitive man, instead of two-D oriented, like us.) You would think that three numbers would be enough to describe any position anywhere in the universe, wouldn't you? I mean, if you make a threedimensional representation of the Galaxy you can express any point in it by means of a number for each of the three dimensions. But it took the Heechee five. Does that mean there were five dimensions that were perceptible to the Heechee? Metchnikov says not. . . . Anyway. Once you get a lock on the first five numbers, the

---------------------------------------- GATEWAY'S SHIPS

The vessels available on Gateway are capable of interstellar flight at speeds greater than the velocity of light. The means of propulsion is not understood (see pilot manual). There is also a fairly conventional rocket propulsion system, using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for attitude control, and for propulsion of the landing craft which is docked into each interstellar vessel. There are three major classifications, designated as Class 1, Class 3, and Class 5, according to the number of persons they can carry. Some of the vessels are of particularly heavy construction and are designated "armored." Most of the armored class are Fives. Each vessel is programmed to navigate itself automatically to a number of destinations. Return is automatic, and is quite reliable in practice. Your course in ship-handling will adequately prepare you for all the necessary tasks in piloting your vessel safely; however, see pilot manual for safety regulations. ----------------------------------------

other seven can be turned to quite arbitrary settings and you'll still go when you squeeze the action teat. What you usually do -- or what the course programmers the Corporation keeps on the payroll to do this sort of thing for you usually do -- is pick four numbers at random. Then you cycle the fifth digit until you get a kind of warning pink glow. Sometimes it's faint, sometimes it's bright. If you stop there and press the flat oval part under the teat, the other numbers begin to creep around, just a couple of millimeters one way or another, and the pink glow gets brighter. When they stop it's shocking pink and shockingly bright. Metchnikov says that's an automatic fine-tuning device. The machine allows for human error -- sorry, I mean for Heechee error -- so when you get close to a real, valid target setting it makes the final adjustments for you automatically. Probably he's right. (Of course, learning every step of this cost a lot of time and money, and most of it cost some lives. It's dangerous being a prospector. But for the first few out, it was more like suicidal.) Sometimes you can cycle all the way through your fifth digit and get nothing at all. So what you do is, you swear. Then you reset one of the other four and go again. It only takes a few seconds to cycle, but check pilots have run up a hundred hours of new settings before they got good color. Of course, by the time I went out, the check pilots and the course programmers had worked out a couple hundred possible settings that had been logged as good color but not as yet used--as well as all the settings that had been used, and aren't worth going back to. Or that the crews didn't come back from. But all that I didn't know at the time, and when I sat down in that modified Heechee seat it was all new, new, new. And I don't know if I can make you understand what it felt like. I mean, there I was, in a seat where Heechee had sat half a million years ago. The thing in front of me was a target selector. The ship could go anywhere. Anywhere! If I selected the right target I could find myself around Sirius, Procyon, maybe even the Magellanic Clouds! Teacher got tired of hanging head-down and wriggled through, squeezing in behind me. "Your turn, Broadhead," she said, resting a hand on my shoulder and what felt like her breasts on my back. I was reluctant to touch. I asked, "Isn't there any way of telling where you're going to wind up?"

---------------------------------------- Classifieds. HOW DO you know you're not a Unitarian? Gateway Fellowship now forming. 87-539. BILITIS WANTED for Sappho and Lesbia, joint trips till we make it, then happily ever after in Northern Ireland. Permanent trimarriage only. 87-033 or 87-034. STORE YOUR effects. Save rent, avoid Corporation seizure while out. Fee includes disposal instructions if nonreturn. 88-125. ----------------------------------------

"Probably," she said, "providing you're a Heechee with pilot training." "Not even like one color means you're going farther from here than some other color?" "Not that anybody here has figured out. Of course, they keep trying. There's a whole team that spends its time programming returned mission reports against the settings they went out with. So far they've come up empty. Now let's get on with it, Broadhead. Put your whole hand on that first wheel, the one the others have used. Shove it. It'll take more muscle than you think." It did. In fact, I was almost afraid to push it hard enough to make it work. She leaned over and put her hand on mine, and I realized that that nice musk-oil smell that had been in my nostrils for the last little while was hers. It wasn't just musk, either; her pheromones were snuggling nicely into my chemoreceptors. It made a very nice change from the rest of the Gateway stink. But all the same, I didn't get even a show of color, although I tried for five minutes before she waved me away and gave Sheri another shot in my place.

When I got back to my room somebody had cleaned it up. I wondered gratefully who that had been, but I was too tired to wonder very long. Until you get used to it, low gravity can be exhausting; you find yourself overusing all your muscles because you have to relearn a whole pattern of economies. I slung my hammock and was just dozing off when I heard a scratching at the lattice of my door and Sheri's voice: "Rob?" "What?" "Are you asleep?" Obviously I wasn't, but I interpreted the question the way she had intended it. "No. I've been lying here thinking." "So was I. . . . Rob?" "Yeah?" "Would you like me to come into your hammock?" I made an effort to wake myself up enough to consider the question on its merits. "I really want to," she said. "All right. Sure. I mean, glad to have you." She slipped into my room, and I slid over in the hammock, which swung slowly as she crawled into it. She was wearing a knitted T-shirt and underpants, and she felt warm and soft against me when we rolled gently together in the hollow of the hammock. "It doesn't have to be sex, stud," she said. "I'm easy either way." "Let's see what develops. Are you scared?" Her breath was the sweetest-smelling thing about her; I could feel it on my cheek. "A lot more than I thought I would be." "Why?" "Rob--" she squirmed herself comfortable and then twisted her neck to look at me over her shoulder, "you know, you say kind of asshole things sometimes?" "Sorry." "Well, I mean it. I mean, look what we're doing. We're going to get into a ship that we don't know if it's going to get where it's supposed to go, and we don't even know where it's supposed to go. We go faster than light, nobody knows how. We don't know how long we'll be gone, even if we knew where we were going. So we could be traveling the rest of our lives and die before we got there, even if we didn't run into something that would kill us in two seconds. Right? Right. So how come you ask me why I'm scared?" "Just making conversation." I curled up along her back and cupped a breast, not aggressively but because it felt good. "And not only that. We don't know anything about the people who built these things. How do we know this isn't all a practical joke on their part? Maybe their way of luring fresh meat into Heechee heaven?" "We don't," I agreed. "Roll over this way." "And the ship they showed us this morning doesn't hardly look like I thought it was going to be, at all," she said, doing as I told her and putting a hand on the back of my neck. There was a sharp whistle from somewhere, I couldn't tell where. "What's that?" "I don't know." It came again, sounding both out in the tunnel and, louder, inside my room. "Oh, it's the phone." What I was hearing was my own piezophone and the ones on either side of me, all ringing at once. The whistle stopped and there was a voice: "This is Jim Chou. All you fish who want to see what a ship looks like when it comes back after a bad trip, come to Docking Station Four. They're bringing it in now." I could hear a murmuring from the Forehands' room next door, and I could feel Sheri's heart pounding. "We'd better go," I said. "I know. But I don't think I want to -- much."

The ship had made it back to Gateway, but not quite all the way. One of the orbiting cruisers had detected it and closed in on it. Now a tug was bringing it in to the Corporation's own docks, where usually only the rockets from the planets latched in. There was a hatch big enough to hold even a Five. This was a Three, what there was left of it. "Oh, sweet Jesus," Sheri whispered. "Rob, what do you suppose happened to them?" "To the people? They died." There was not really any doubt of that. The ship was a wreck. The lander stem was gone, just the interstellar vehicle itself, the mushroom cap, was still there, and that was bent out of shape, split open, seared by heat. Split open! Heechee metal, that doesn't even soften under an electric arc! But we hadn't seen the worst of it. We never did see the worst of it, we only heard about it. One man was still inside the ship. All over the inside of the ship. He had been literally spattered around the control room, and his remains had been baked onto the walls. By what? Heat and acceleration, no doubt. Perhaps he had found himself skipping into the upper reaches of a sun, or in tight orbit around a neutron star. The differential in gravity might have shredded ship and crew like that. But we never knew. The other two persons in the crew were not there at all. Not that it was easy to tell; but the census of the organs revealed only one jaw, one pelvis, one spine -- though in many short pieces. Perhaps the other two had been in the lander? "Move it, fish!" Sheri caught my arm and pulled me out of the way. Five uniformed crewmen from the cruisers came through, in American and Brazilian blue, Russian beige, Venusian work white and Chinese all-purpose black-and-brown. The American and the Venusian were female; the faces were all different, but the expressions were all the same mixture of discipline and distaste. "Let's go." Sheri tugged me away. She didn't want to watch the crewmen poke through the remnants, and neither did I. The whole class, Jimmy Chou, Klara and the other teachers and all, began to straggle back to our rooms. Not quite quick enough. We had been looking through the ports into the lock; when the patrol from the cruisers opened it, we got a whiff of the air inside. I don't know how to describe it. A little bit like overripe garbage being cooked to swill to pigs. Even in the rank air of Gateway, that was hard to take. Teacher dropped off at her own level -- down pretty low, in the high-rent district around Easy Level. When she looked up after me as I said goodnight I observed for the first time that she was crying. Sheri and I said goodnight to the Forehands at their door, and I turned to her, but she was ahead of me. "I think I'll sleep this one out," she said. "Sorry, Rob, but, you know, I just don't feel like it anymore."