Gateway

Chapter 10

Along about my fifth day on Gateway I got up early and splurged, breakfast out in the Heecheetown Arms, surrounded by tourists, bloody-eyed gamblers from the casino across the spindle, and liberty sailors from the cruisers. It felt luxurious, and cost luxurious, too. It was worth it because of the tourists. I could feel their eyes on me. I knew they were talking about me, particularly a smooth-faced but old African type, Dahomeyan or Ghanaian, I think, with his very young, very plump, very jeweled wife. Or whatever. As far as they could tell, I was a swashbuckling hero. True, I didn’t have any bangles on my arm, but some of the veterans didn’t wear them, either.

I basked. I considered ordering real eggs and bacon, but that was a little more than even my euphoria would let me go for, so I settled for orange juice (it turned out to be real, to my surprise) and a brioche and several cups of black Danish coffee. All I was really missing was a pretty girl across the armboard of the chair. There were two nice-looking women who seemed to be the liberty crew from the Chinese cruiser, neither of them unwilling to exchange a few radio messages by the glance of the eyes, but I decided to keep them as open prospects for some future date and paid my check (that was painful enough) and left for class.

On the way down I caught up with the Forehands. The man, whose name seemed to be Sess, dropped off the down-cable and waited to wish me a polite good morning. “We didn’t see you at breakfast,” his wife mentioned, so I told them where I had been. The younger daughter, Lois, looked faintly envious. Her mother caught the expression and patted her. “Don’t worry, hon. We’ll eat there before we go back to Venus.” To me: “We have to watch our pennies right now. But when we hit, we’ve got some pretty big plans for spending the profits.”

“Don’t we all,” I said, but something was turning over in my head. “Are you really going to go back to Venus?”

“Certainly,” they all said, in one way or another, and acted surprised at the question. Which surprised me. I hadn’t realized that tunnel rats could manage to think of that molten stinkpot as home. Sess Forehand must have read my expression, too. They were a reserved family, but they didn’t miss much. He grinned and said:

“It’s our home, after all. So is Gateway, in a way.”

That was astonishing. “Actually, we’re related to the first man to find Gateway, Sylvester Macklen. You’ve heard of him?”

“How could I not?”

“He was a sort of a cousin. I guess you know the whole story?” I started to say I did, but he obviously was proud of his cousin, and I couldn’t blame him, and so I heard a slightly different version of the familiar legend: “He was in one of the South Pole tunnels, and found a ship. God knows how he got it to the surface, but he did, and he got in and evidently squeezed the go-teat, and it went where it was programmed — here.”

“Doesn’t the Corporation pay a royalty?” I asked. “I mean, if they’re going to pay for discoveries, what discovery would be more worth paying for?”

“Not to us, anyway,” said Louise Forehand, somewhat somberly; money was a hard subject with the Forehands. “Of course, Sylvester didn’t set out to find Gateway. As you know from what we’ve been hearing in class, the ships have automatic return. Wherever you go, you just squeeze the go-teat and you come straight back here. Only that didn’t help Sylvester, because he was here. It was the return leg of a round trip with about a zillion-year stopover.”

“He was smart and strong.” Sess took up the story. “You have to be to explore. So he didn’t panic. But by the time anybody came out here to investigate he was out of life support. He could have lived a little longer. He could have used the lox and H-two from the lander tanks for air and water. I used to wonder why he didn’t.”

“Because he would have starved anyway,” Louise cut in, defending her relative.

“I think so. Anyway, they found his body, with his notes in his hand. He had cut his throat.”

They were nice people, but I had heard all this, and they were making me late for class.

Of course, class wasn’t all that exciting just at that point. We were up to Hammock Slinging (Basic) and Toilet Flushing (Advanced). You may wonder why they didn’t spend more time actually teaching us how to fly the ships. That’s simple. The things flew themselves, as the Forehands, and everybody else, had been telling me. Even the landers were no sweat to operate, although they did require a hand on the controls. Once you were in the lander all you had to do was compare a three-D sort of holographic representation of the immediate area of space with where you wanted to go, and maneuver a point of light in the tank to the point you wanted to reach. The lander went there. It calculated its own trajectories and corrected its own deviations. It took a little muscular coordination to get the hang of twisting that point of light to where you wanted it to go, but it was a forgiving system.

Between the sessions of flushing practice and hammock drill we talked about what we were going to do when we graduated. The launch schedules were kept up to date and displayed on the PV monitor in our class whenever anyone pushed the button. Some of them had names attached to them, and one or two of the names I recognized. Tikki Trumbull was a girl I had danced with and sat next to in the mess hall once or twice. She was an out-pilot, and as she needed crew I thought of joining her. But the wiseheads told me that out-missions were a waste of time.

I should tell you what an out-pilot is. He’s the guy who ferries fresh crews to Gateway Two. There are about a dozen Fives that do that as a regular run. They take four people out (which would be what Tikki wanted people for), and then the pilot comes back alone, or with returning prospectors — if any — and what they’ve found. Usually there’s somebody.

The team who found Gateway Two are the ones we all dreamed about. They made it. Man, did they make it! Gateway Two was another Gateway, nothing more or less, except that it happened to orbit around a star other than our own. There was not much more in the way of treasure on Gateway Two than there was on our own Gateway; the Heechee had swept everything pretty clean, except for the ships themselves. And there weren’t nearly as many ships there, only about a hundred and fifty, compared to almost a thousand on our old original solar Gateway. But a hundred and fifty ships are worth finding all by themselves. Not to mention the fact that they accept some destinations that our local Gateway’s ships don’t appear to.

The ride out to Gateway Two seems to be about four hundred light-years and takes a hundred and nine days each way. Two’s principal star is a bright blue B-type. They think it is Alcyone in the Pleiades, but there is some doubt. Well, actually that’s not Gateway Two’s real star. It doesn’t orbit the big one, but a little cinder of a red dwarf nearby. They say the dwarf is probably a distant binary with the blue B, but they also say it shouldn’t be because of the difference in ages of the two stars. Give them a few more years to argue and they’ll probably know. One wonders why the Heechee would have put their spacelines junction in orbit around so undistinguished a star, but one wonders a lot about the Heechee.

However, all that doesn’t affect the pocketbook of the team who happened to find the place. They get a royalty on everything that any later prospector finds! I don’t know what they’ve made so far, but it has to be in the tens of millions apiece. Maybe the hundreds. And that’s why it doesn’t pay to go with an out-pilot; you don’t really have a much better chance of scoring, and you have to split what you get.

So we went down the list of upcoming launches and hashed them over in the light of our five-day expertise. Which wasn’t much. We appealed to Gelle-Klara Moynlin for advice. After all, she’d been out twice. She studied the list of flights and names, pursing her lips. “Terry Yakamora’s a decent guy,” she said. “I don’t know Parduk, but it might be worth taking a chance on that one. Lay off Dorlean’s flight. There’s a million-dollar bonus, but what they don’t tell you is that they’ve got a bastard control board in it. The Corporation’s experts have put in a computer that’s supposed to override the Heechee target selector, and I wouldn’t trust it. And, of course, I wouldn’t recommend a One in any circumstances.”

Lois Forehand asked, “Which one would you take if it was up to you, Klara?”

She scowled thoughtfully, rubbing that dark left eyebrow with the tips of her fingers. “Maybe Terry. Well, any of them. But I’m not going out again for a while.” I wanted to ask her why, but she turned away from the screen and said, “All right, gang, let’s get back to the drill. Remember, up for pee; down, close, wait ten and up for poo.”

I celebrated completing the week on ship-handling by offering to buy Dane Metchnikov a drink. That wasn’t my first intention. My first intention had been to buy Sheri a drink and drink it in bed, but she was off somewhere. So I worked the buttons on the piezophone and got Metchnikov.

He sounded surprised at my offer. “Thanks,” he said, and then considered. “Tell you what. Give me a hand carrying some stuff, and then I’ll buy you a drink.”

So I went down to his place, which was only one level below Babe; his room was not much better than my own, and bare, except for a couple of full carry-alls. He looked at me almost friendly. “You’re a prospector now,” he grunted.

“Not really. I’ve got two more courses.”

“Well, this is the last you see of me, anyway. I’m shipping out with Terry Yakamora tomorrow.”

I was surprised. “Didn’t you just get back, like ten days ago?”

“You can’t make any money hanging around here. All I was waiting for was the right crew. You want to come to my farewell party? Terry’s place. Twenty hundred.”

“That sounds fine,” I said. “Can I bring Sheri?”

“Oh, sure, she’s coming anyway, I think. Buy you the drink there, if you don’t mind. Give me a hand and we’ll get this stuff stored.”

He had accumulated a surprising amount of goods. I wondered how he had managed to stash them all away in a room as tiny as my own: three fabric carriers all stuffed full, holodisks and a viewer, book tapes and a few actual books. I took the carriers. On Earth they would have weighed more than I could handle, probably fifty or sixty kilos, but of course on Gateway lifting them was no problem; it was only tugging them through the corridors and jockeying them down the shafts that was tricky. I had the mass, but Metchnikov had the problems, since what he was carrying was in odd shapes and varying degrees of fragility. It was about an hour’s haul, actually. We wound up in a part of the asteroid I’d never seen before, where an elderly Pakistani woman counted the pieces, gave Metchnikov a receipt and began dragging them away down a thickly vine-grown corridor.

“Whew,” he grunted. “Well, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” We started back toward a dropshaft, and making conversation, I assume out of some recognition that he owed me a social favor and should practice some social skills, he said:

“So how was the course?”

“You mean apart from the fact that I’ve just finished it and still don’t have any idea how to fly those goddamned ships?”

“Well, of course you don’t,” he said, irritably. “The course isn’t going to teach you that. It just gives you the general idea. The way you learn, you do it. Only hard part’s the lander, of course. Anyway, you’ve got your issue of tapes?”

“Oh, yes.” There were six cassettes of them. Each of us had been given a set when we completed the first week’s course. They had everything that had been said, plus a lot of stuff about different kinds of controls that the Corporation might, or might not, fit on a Heechee board and so on.

“So play them over,” he said. “If you’ve got any sense you’ll take them with you when you ship out. Got plenty of time to play them then. Mostly the ships fly themselves anyway.”

“They’d better,” I said, doubting it. “So long.” He waved and dropped onto the down-cable without looking back. Apparently I had agreed to take the drink he owed me at the party. Where it wouldn’t cost him anything.

I thought of looking for Sheri again, and decided against it. I was in a part of Gateway I didn’t know, and of course I’d left my map back in my room. I drifted along, more or less at random, past star-points where some of the tunnels smelled musty and dusty and there weren’t many people, then through an inhabited section that seemed to be mostly Eastern European. I didn’t recognize the languages, but there were little notes and wall signs hanging from the everywhere-growing ivy that were in alphabets that looked Cyrillic or even stranger. I came to a dropshaft, thought for a moment, and then caught hold of the up-cable. The easy way not to be lost on Gateway is to go up until you get to the spindle, where “up” ends.

But this time I found myself passing Central Park and, on impulse, dropped off the up-cable to sit by a tree for a while.

Central Park isn’t really a park. It’s a large tunnel, not far from the center of rotation of the asteroid, which has been devoted to vegetation. I found orange trees there (which explained the juice), and grape vines; and ferns and mosses, but no grass. I am not sure why. Probably it has something to do with planting only varieties that are sensitive to the available light, mostly the blue gleam from the Heechee metal all around, and perhaps they couldn’t find a grass that could use it efficiently for its photochemistry. The principal reason for having Central Park in the first place was to suck up CO2 and give back oxygen; that was before they spread planting all over the tunnels. But it also killed smells, or anyway it was supposed to, a little, and it grew a certain amount of food. The whole thing was maybe eighty meters long and twice as tall as I was. It was broad enough to have room for some winding paths. The stuff they grew in looked a lot like good old genuine Earthside dirt. What it was, really, was a humus made out of the sewage sludge from the couple of thousand people who had used Gateway toilets, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at it, or by smelling it, either.

The first tree big enough to sit by was no good for that purpose; it was a mulberry, and under it were spread out sheets of fine netting to catch the dropping fruit. I walked past it, and down the path there were a woman and a child.

A child! I hadn’t known there were any children on Gateway. She was a little bit of a thing, maybe a year and a half, playing with a ball so big, and so lazy in the light gravity, that it was like a balloon.

“Hello, Rob.”

That was the other surprise; the woman who greeted me was Gelle-Klara Moynlin. I said without thinking, “I didn’t know you had a little girl.”

“I don’t. This is Kathy Francis, and her mother lets me borrow her sometimes. Kathy, this is Rob Broadhead.”

“Hello, Rob,” the little thing called, studying me from three meters away. “Are you a friend of Klara’s?”

“I hope so. She’s my teacher. Do you want to play catch?”

Kathy finished her study of me and said precisely, each word separate from the one before it and as clearly formed as an adult’s, “I don’t know how to play catch, but I will get six mulberries for you. That’s all you can have.”

“Thank you.” I slumped down next to Klara, who was hugging her knees and watching the child. “She’s cute.”

“Well, I guess so. It’s hard to judge, when there aren’t very many other children around.”

“She’s not a prospector, is she?”

I wasn’t exactly joking, but Klara laughed warmly. “Her parents are permanent-party. Well, most of the time. Right now her mother’s off prospecting; they do that sometimes, a lot of them. You can spend just so much time trying to figure out what the Heechee were up to before you want to try your own solutions to the puzzles.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

She shushed me. Kathy came back, with three of my mulberries in each open hand, so as not to crush them. She had a funny way of walking, which didn’t seem to use much of the thigh and calf muscles; she sort of pushed herself up on the ball of each foot in turn, and let herself float to the next step. After I figured that out I tried it for myself, and it turned out to be a pretty efficient way of walking in near-zero gravity, but my reflexes kept lousing it up. I suppose you have to be born on Gateway to come by it naturally.

Klara in the park was a lot more relaxed and feminine than Klara the teacher. The eyebrows that had looked masculine and angry became outdoorsy and friendly. She still smelled very nice.

It was pretty pleasant, chatting with her, while Kathy stepped daintily around us, playing with her ball. We compared places we’d been, and didn’t find any in common. The one thing we did find in common was that I was born almost the same day as her two-year-younger brother.

“Did you like your brother?” I asked, a gambit played for the hell of it.

“Well, sure. He was the baby. But he was an Aries, born under Mercury and the Moon. Made him fickle and moody, of course. I think he would have had a complicated life.”

I was less interested in asking her about what happened to him than in asking if she really believed in that garbage, but that didn’t seem tactful, and anyway she went on talking. “I’m a Sagittarius, myself. And you — oh, of course. You must be the same as Davie.”

“I guess so,” I said, being polite. “I, uh, don’t go much for astrology.”

“Not astrology, genethlialogy. One’s superstition, the other’s science.”

She laughed. “I can see you’re a scoffer. Doesn’t matter. If you believe, all right; if you don’t — well, you don’t have to believe in the law of gravity to get mashed when you fall off a two-hundred story building.”

Kathy, who had sat down beside us, inquired politely, “Are you having an argument?”

“Not really, honey.” Klara stroked her head.

“That’s good, Klara, because I have to go to the bathroom now and I don’t think I can, here.”

“It’s time to go anyway. Nice to see you, Rob. Watch out for melancholy, hear?” And they went away hand in hand, Klara trying to copy the little girl’s odd walk. Looking very nice… for a flake.

That night I took Sheri to Dane Metchnikov’s going-away party. Klara was there, looking even nicer in a bare-midriff pants suit. “I didn’t know you knew Dane Metchnikov,” I said.

“Which one is he? I mean, Terry’s the one who invited me. Coming inside?”

The party had spilled out into the tunnel. I peered through the door and was surprised to find how much room there was inside; Terry Yakamora had two full rooms, both more than twice the size of mine. The bath was private and really did contain a bath, or at least a showerhead. “Nice place,” I said admiringly, and then discovered from something another guest said that Klara lived right down the tunnel. That changed my opinion of Klara: if she could afford the high-rent district, why was she still on Gateway? Why wasn’t she back home spending her money and having fun? Or contrariwise, if she was still on Gateway, why was she fooling around keeping barely even with the head tax by working as an assistant instructor, instead of going out for another killing? But I didn’t get a chance to ask her. She did most of her dancing that night with Terry Yakamora and the others in the outgoing crew.

I lost track of Sheri until she came over to me after a slow, almost unmoving fox-trot, bringing her partner. He was a very young man — a boy, actually; he looked about nineteen. He looked familiar: dark skin, almost white hair, a wisp of a jaw-beard that drew an arc from sideburn to sideburn by way of the underside of his chin. He hadn’t come up from Earth with me. He wasn’t in our class. But I’d seen him somewhere.

Sheri introduced us. “Rob, you know Francesco Hereira?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He’s from the Brazilian cruiser.” Then I remembered. He was one of the inspectors who had gone in to fish through the baked gobbets of flesh on the shipwreck we’d seen a few days earlier. He was a torpedoman, according to his cuff stripes. They give the cruiser crews temporary duty as guards on Gateway, and sometimes they give them liberty there, too. He’d come in in the regular rotation about the time we arrived. Somebody put on a tape for a hora just then, and after we were through dancing, a little out of breath, Hereira and I found ourselves leaning against the wall side by side, trying to stay out of the way of the rest of the party. I told him I had just remembered seeing him at the wreck.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Broadhead. I recall.”

“Tough job,” I said, for something to say. “Isn’t it?”

He had been drinking enough to answer me, I guess. “Well, Mr. Broadhead,” he said analytically, “the technical description of that part of my job is ’search and registry.’ It is not always tough. For instance, in a short time you will no doubt go out, and when you come back I, or someone else in my job, will poke into your holes, Mr. Broadhead. I will turn out your pockets, and weigh and measure and photograph everything in your ship. That is to make sure you do not smuggle anything of value out of your vessel and off Gateway without paying the Corporation its due share. Then I register what I have found; if it is nothing, I write ’nil’ on the form, and another crewman from another cruiser chosen at random does the same thing exactly. So you will have two of us prying into you.”

It didn’t sound like a lot of fun for me, but not as bad as I had thought at first. I said so.

He flashed small, very white teeth. “When the prospector to be searched is Sheri or Gelle-Klara over there, no, not bad at all. One can quite enjoy it. But I have not much interest in searching males, Mr. Broadhead. Especially when they are dead. Have you ever been in the presence of five human bodies that have been dead, but not embalmed, for three months? That was what it was like on the first ship I inspected. I do not think anything will be that bad ever again.”

Then Sheri came up and demanded him for another dance, and the party went on.

There were a lot of parties. It turned out there always had been, it was just that we new fish hadn’t been part of the network, but as we got nearer graduating we got to know more people. There were farewell parties. There were welcome-back parties, but not nearly as many of those. Even when crews did come back, there was not always any reason to celebrate. Sometimes they had been gone so long they had lost touch with all their friends. Sometimes, when they had hit fairly lucky, they didn’t want anything but to get off Gateway on the way home. And sometimes, of course, they couldn’t have a party because parties aren’t permitted in the intensive care rooms at Terminal Hospital.

It wasn’t all parties; we had to study. By the end of the course we were supposed to be fully expert in ship-handling, survival techniques and the appraisal of trade goods. Well, I wasn’t. Sheri was even worse off than I. She took to the ship-handling all right, and she had a shrewd eye for detail that would help her a lot in appraising the worth of anything she might find on a prospecting trip. But she didn’t seem able to get the survival course through her head.

Studying with her for the final examinations was misery:

“Okay,” I’d tell her, “this one’s a type-F star with a planet with point-eight surface G, a partial pressure of oxygen of 130 millibars, mean temperature at the equator plus forty Celsius. So what do you wear to the party?”

She said accusingly, “You’re giving me an easy one. That’s practically Earth.”

“So what’s the answer, Sheri?”

She scratched reflectively under her breast. Then she shook her head impatiently. “Nothing. I mean, I wear an airsuit on the way down, but once I get to the surface I could walk around in a bikini.”

“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 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.