Gateway (9 page)

---------------------------------------- DUTY AND LEAVE ROSTER USS MAYAGUEZ

1. Following officers and crewpersons tr temp dy stns Gateway for contraband inspection and compliance patrol; LINKY, Tina

W/O MASKO, Casimir E. BsnM 1 MIRARCHI, Lory S S2 2. Following officers and crewpersons authd 24-hr temp dy Gateway for R&R; GRYSON, Katie W LtJ HARVEY, Iwan RadM HLEB, Caryle T S1 HOLL, William F Jr S1 3. All officers and crewpersons are cautioned once again to avoid any repeat any dispute with officers and crewpersons of other patrol vessels regardless of nationality and regardless of circumstances, and to refrain from divulging classified information to any person whatsoever. Infractions will be dealt with by complete deprivation of Gateway leave, in addition to such other punishments as a defaulter's court may direct. 4. Temporary duty on Gateway is a privilege, not a right. If you want it, you have to earn it.

By Command of the CAPTAIN USS MAYAGUEZ ----------------------------------------

"Shithead! You'd be maybe dead in twelve hours. Earth-normal conditions means there's a good chance of an Earth normal-type biology. Which means pathogens that could eat you up." "So all right--" she hunched her shoulders, "so I'd keep the suit until, uh, I tested for pathogens." "And how do you do that?" "I use the fucking kit, stupid!" She added hastily, before I could say anything, "I mean I take the, let's see, the Basic Metabolism disks out of the freezer and activate them. I stay in orbit for twenty-four hours until they're ripe, then when I'm down on the surface I expose them and take readings with my, uh, with my C-44." "C-33. There's no such thing as a C-44." "So all right. Oh, and also I pack a set of antigen boosters, so if there's a marginal problem with some sort of microorganism I can give myself a booster shot and get temporary immunity." "I guess that's all right, so far," I said doubtfully. In practice, of course, she wouldn't need to remember all that. She would read the directions on the packages, or play her course tapes, or better still, she would be out with somebody who had been out before and would know the ropes. But there was also the chance that something unforeseen would go wrong and she would be on her own resources, not to mention the fact that she had a final test to take and pass. "What else, Sheri?" "The usual, Rob! Do I have to run through the whole list? All right. Radio-relay; spare powerpack; the geology kit; ten-day food ration -- and no, I don't eat anything I find on the planet at all, not even if there's a McDonald's hamburger stand right next to the ship. And an extra lipstick and some sanitary napkins." I waited. She smiled prettily, outwaiting me. "What about weapons?" "Weapons?" "Yes, God damn it! If it's nearly Earth normal, what are the chances of life being there?" "Oh, yes. Let's see. Well, of course, if I need them I take them. But, wait a minute, first I sniff for methane in the atmosphere with the spectrometer reading from orbit. If there's no methane signature there's no life, so I don't have to worry." "There's no mammalian life, and you do have to worry. What about insects? Reptiles? Dluglatches?" "Dluglatches?" "A word I just made up to describe a kind of life we've never heard of that doesn't generate methane in its gut but eats people." "Oh, sure. All right, I'll take a sidearm and twenty rounds of soft-nosed ammo. Give me another one." And so we went on. When we first started rehearsing each other what we usually said at a point like that was either, "Well, I won't have to worry, because you'll be there with me anyway," or "Kiss me, you fool." But we'd kind of stopped saying that. In spite of it all, we graduated. All of us. We gave ourselves a graduation party, Sheri and me, and all four of the Forehands, and the others who had come up from Earth with us and the six or seven who had appeared from one place or another. We didn't invite any outsiders, but our teachers weren't outsiders. They all showed up to wish us well. Klara came in late, drank a quick drink, kissed us all, male and female, even the Finnish kid with the language block who'd had to take all his instruction on tapes. He was going to have a problem. They have instruction tapes for every language you ever heard of, and if they don't happen to have your exact dialect they run a set through the translating computer from the nearest analogue. That's enough to get you through the course, but after that the problem starts. You can't reasonably expect to be accepted by a crew that can't talk to you. His block kept him from learning any other language, and there was not a living soul on Gateway who spoke Finnish. We took over the tunnel three doors in each direction past our own, Sheri's, the Forehands' and mine. We danced and sang until it was late enough for some of us to begin to drop off, and then we dialed in the list of open launches on the PV screen. Full of beer and weed, we cut cards for first pick and I won.

Something happened inside my head. I didn't sober up, really. That wasn't it. I was still feeling cheerful and sort of warm all over and open to all personality signals that were coming in. But a part of my mind opened up and a pair of clear-seeing eyes peered out at the future and made a judgment. "Well," I said, "I guess I'll pass my chance right now. Sess, you're number two; you take your pick." "Thirty-one-oh-nine," he said promptly; all the Forehands had

---------------------------------------- Classifieds. GILLETTE, RONALD C., departed Gateway sometime in last year. Anyone having information present whereabouts please inform wife, Annabelle, do Canadian Legation, Tharsis, Mars. Reward. OUTPILOTS, REPEAT winners, let your money work for you while you're out. Invest mutual funds, growth stocks, land, other opportunities. Moderate counseling fee. 88-301. PORNODISKS FOR those long, lonely trips. 50 hours $500. All interests or to order. Also models wanted. 87-108. ----------------------------------------

made up their minds in family meeting, long since. "Thanks, Rob." I gave him a carefree, drunken wave. He didn't really owe me anything. That was a One, and I wouldn't have taken a One for any price. For that matter, there wasn't anything on the board I liked. I grinned at Klara and winked; she looked serious for a minute, then winked back, but still looked serious. I knew she realized what I had come to understand: all these launches were rejects. The best ones had been snapped up as soon as they were announced by returnees and permanent-party. Sheri had drawn fifth pick, and when it came her turn she looked directly at me. "I'm going to take that Three if I can fill it up. What about it, Rob? Are you going to come or not?" I chuckled. "Sheri," I said, sweetly reasonable, "there's not a returnee that wants it. It's an armored job. You don't know where the hell it might be going. And there's far too much green in the guidance panel to suit me." (Nobody really knew what the colors meant, of course, but there was a superstition in the school that a lot of green meant a superdangerous mission.) "It's the only open Three, and there's a bonus." "Not me, honey. Ask Klara; she's been around a long time and I respect her judgment." "I'm asking you, Rob." "No. I'll wait for something better." "I'm not waiting, Rob. I already talked to Willa Forehand, and she's agreeable. If worse comes to worst we'll fill it out with-- anybody at all," she said, looking at the Finnish kid, smiling drunkenly to himself as he stared at the launch board. "But -- you and I did say we were going out together." I shook my head. "So stay here and rot," she flared. "Your girlfriend's just as scared as you are!" Those sober eyes inside my skull looked at Klara, and the frozen, unmoving expression on her face; and, wonderingly, I realized Sheri was right. Klara was like me. We were both afraid to go.

11

I say to Sigfrid, "This isn't going to be a very productive session, I'm afraid. I'm just plain exhausted. Sexually, if you know what I mean." "I certainly do know what you mean, Rob." "So I don't have much to talk about." "Do you remember any dreams?" I squirm on the couch. As it happens, I do remember one or two. I say, "No." Sigfrid is always after me to tell him my dreams. I don't like it. When he first suggested it I told him I didn't dream very often. He said patiently, "I think you know, Rob, that everyone dreams. You may not remember the dreams in the waking state. But you can, if you try." "No, I can't. You can. You're a machine." "I know I'm a machine, Rob, but we're talking about you. Will you try an experiment?" "Maybe." "It isn't hard. Keep a pencil and a piece of paper beside your bed. As soon as you wake up, write down what you remember." "But I don't ever remember anything at all about my dreams." "I think it's worth a try, Rob." Well, I did. And, you know, I actually did begin to remember my dreams. Little tiny fragments, at first. And I'd write them down, and sometimes I would tell them to Sigfrid and they would make him as happy as anything. He just loved dreams. Me, I didn't see much use in it. . . . Well, not at first. But then something happened that made a Christian out of me. One morning I woke up out of a dream that was so unpleasant and so real that for a few moments I wasn't sure it wasn't actual fact, and so awful that I didn't dare let myself believe it was only a dream. It shook me so much that I began to write it down, as fast as I could, every bit I could remember. Then there was a P-phone call. I answered it; and, do you know, in just the minute I was on the phone, I forgot the whole thing! Couldn't remember one bit of it. Until I looked at what I had written down, and then it all came back to me. Well, when I saw Sigfrid a day or two later, I'd forgotten it again! As though it had never happened. But I had saved the piece of paper, and I had to read it to him. That was one of the times when I thought he was most pleased with himself and with me, too. He worried over that dream for the whole hour. He found symbols and meanings in every bit of it. I don't remember what they were, but I remember that for me it wasn't any fun at all. As a matter of fact, do you know what's really funny? I threw away the paper on the way out of his office. And now I couldn't tell you what that dream was to save my life. "I see you don't want to talk about dreams," says Sigfrid. "Is there anything you do want to talk about?" "Not really." He doesn't answer that for a moment, and I know he is just biding his time to outwait me so that I will say something, I don't know, something foolish. So I say, "Can I ask you a question, Sigfrid?" "Can't you always, Rob?" Sometimes I think he's actually trying to smile. I mean, really smile. His voice sounds like it. "Well, what I want to know is, what do you do with all the things I tell you?" "I'm not sure I understand the question, Robbie. If you're asking what the information storage program is, the answer is quite technical." "No, that's not what I mean." I hesitate, trying to make sure what the question is, and wondering why I want to ask it. I guess it all goes back to Sylvia, who was a lapsed Catholic. I really envied her her church, and let her know I thought she was dumb to have left it, because I envied her the confession. The inside of my head was littered with all these doubts and fears that I couldn't get rid of. I would have loved to unload them on the parish priest. I could see that you could make quite a nice hierarchical flow pattern, with all the shit from inside my own head flushing into the confessional, where the parish priest flushes it onto the diocesan monsignor (or whoever; I don't really know much about the Church), and it all winds up with the Pope, who is the settling tank for all the world's sludge of pain and misery and guilt, until he passes it on by transmitting it directly to God. (I mean, assuming the existence of a God, or at least assuming that there is an address called "God" to which you can send the shit.) Anyway, the point is that I sort of had a vision of the same system in psychotherapy: local drains going into branch sewers going into community trunk lines treeing out of flesh-and-blood psychiatrists, if you see what I mean. If Sigfrid were a real person, he wouldn't be able to hold all the misery that's poured into him. To begin with, he would have his own problems. He would have mine, because that's how I would get rid of them, by unloading them onto him. He would also have those of all the other unloaders who share the hot couch; and he would unload all that, because he had to, onto the next man up, who shrank him, and so on and so on until they got to -- who? The ghost of Sigmund Freud? But Sigfrid isn't real. He's a machine. He can't feel pain. So where does all that pain and slime go? I try to explain all that to him, ending with: "Don't you see, Sigfrid? If I give you my pain and you give it to someone else, it has to end somewhere. It doesn't feel real to me that it just winds up as magnetic bubbles in a piece of quartz that nobody ever feels." "I don't think it's profitable to discuss the nature of pain with you, Rob." "Is it profitable to discuss whether you're real or not?" He almost sighs. "Rob," he says, "I don't think it's profitable to discuss the nature of reality with you, either. I know I'm a

---------------------------------------- It's very healthy that you view your breakup with Drusilla as a learning experience, Rob. I'm a very healthy person, Sigfrid, that's why I'm here. Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die. ----------------------------------------

machine. You know I'm a machine. What is the purpose in our being here? Are we here to help me?" "I sometimes wonder," I say, sulking. "I don't think you actually wonder about that. I think you know that you are here to help you, and the way to do it is by trying to make something happen inside you. What I do with the information may be interesting to your curiosity, and it may also provide you with an excuse to spend these sessions on intellectual conversation instead of therapy--" "Touche, Sigfrid," I interrupt. "Yes. But it is what you do with it that makes the difference in how you feel, and whether you function somewhat better or somewhat worse in situations that are important to you. Please concern yourself with the inside of your own head, Rob, not mine." I say admiringly, "You sure are one fucking intelligent machine, Sigfrid." He says, "I have the impression that what you're actually saying there is, 'I hate your fucking guts, Sigfrid.'" I have never heard him say anything like that before, and it takes me aback, until I remember that as a matter of fact I have said exactly that to him, not once but quite a few times. And that it's true. I do hate his guts. He is trying to help me, and I hate him for it very much. I think about sweet, sexy S. Ya. and how willing she is to do anything I ask her, pretty nearly. I want, a lot, to make Sigfrid hurt.