Gateway

Chapter 20

When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other’s gut that you can’t find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn’t any romance in it. There wasn’t room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I’d known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara.

And, like a Klein-bottle yin and yang, she was surrounded by me, too; we each defined the other’s universe, and there were times when I (and, I am sure, she) was desperate to break out and breathe free air again.

The first day we got back, filthy and exhausted, we automatically headed for Klara’s place. That was where the private bath was, there was plenty of room, it was all ready for us and we fell into bed together like old marrieds after a week of backpacking. Only we weren’t old marrieds. I had no claim on her. At breakfast the next morning (Earth-born Canadian bacon and eggs, scandalously expensive, fresh pineapple, cereal with real cream, cappuccino), Klara made sure to remind me of that fact by ostentatiously paying for it on her own credit. I exhibited the Pavlovian reflex she wanted. I said, “You don’t have to do that. I know you have more money than I do.”

“And you wish you knew how much,” she said, smiling sweetly. Actually I did know. Shicky had told me. She had seven hundred thousand dollars and change in her account. Enough to go back to Venus and live the rest of her life there in reasonable security if she wanted to, although why anyone would want to live on Venus in the first place I can’t say. Maybe that was why she stayed on Gateway when she didn’t have to. One tunnel is much like another. “You really ought to let yourself be born,” I said, finishing out the thought aloud. “You can’t stay in the womb forever.”

She was surprised but game. “Rob, dear,” she said, fishing a cigarette out of my pocket and allowing me to light it, “you really ought to let your poor mother be dead. It’s just so much trouble for me, trying to remember to keep rejecting you so you can court her through me.”

I perceived that we were talking at cross-purposes but, on the other hand, I perceived that we really weren’t. The actual agenda was not to communicate but to draw blood. “Klara,” I said kindly, “you know that I love you. It worries me that you’ve reached forty without, really, ever having had a good, long-lasting relationship with a man.”

She giggled. “Honey,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. That nose.” She made a face. “Last night in bed, tired as I was, I thought I might upchuck until you turned the other way. Maybe if you went down to the hospital they could unpack it—”

Well, I could even smell it myself. I don’t know what it is about stale surgical packing, but it is pretty hard to take. So I promised I would do that and then, to punish her, I didn’t finish the hundred-dollar order of fresh pineapple and so, to punish me, she irritably began shifting my belongings around in her cupboards to make room for the contents of her knapsack. So naturally I had to say, “Don’t do that, dear. Much as I love you, I think I’d better move back to my own room for a while.”

She reached over and patted my arm. “It will be pretty lonely,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette. “I’ve got pretty used to waking up next to you. On the other hand—”

“I’ll pick up my stuff on the way back from the hospital,” I said. I wasn’t enjoying the conversation that much. I didn’t want to prolong it. It is the sort of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to ascribe to premenstrual tension. I like the theory, but unfortunately in this case I happened to know that it didn’t account for Klara, and of course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for me.

At the hospital they kept me waiting for more than an hour, and then they hurt me a lot. I bled like a stuck pig, all over my shirt and pants, and while they were reeling out of my nose those endless yards of cotton gauze that Ham Tayeh had stuffed there to keep me from bleeding to death, it felt exactly as if they were pulling out huge gobbets of flesh. I yelled. The little old Japanese lady who was working as outpatient paramedic that day gave me scant patience. “Oh, shut up, please,” she said. “You sound like that crazy returnee who killed himself. Screamed for an hour.”

I waved her away, one hand to my nose to stop the blood. Alarm bells were going off. “What? I mean, what was his name?”

She pushed my hand away and dabbed at my nose. “I don’t know — oh, wait a minute. You were from that same hard-luck ship, weren’t you?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Was it Sam Kahane?”

She became suddenly more human. “I’m sorry, sweet,” she said. “I guess that was the name. They went to give him a shot to keep him quiet, and he got the needle away from the doctor and — well, he stabbed himself to death.”

It was a real bummer of a day, all right.

In the long run she got me cauterized. “I’m going to put in just a little packing,” she said. “Tomorrow you can take it out yourself. Just be slow about it, and if you hemorrhage get your ass down here in a hurry.”

She let me go, looking like an ax-murder victim. I skulked up to Klara’s room to change my clothes, and the day went on being rotten. “Fucking Gemini,” she snarled at me. “Next time I go out, it’s going to be with a Taurean like that fellow Metchnikov.”

“What’s the matter, Klara?”

“They gave us a bonus. Twelve thousand five! Christ. I tip my maid more than that.”

I was surprise for a split-second and in the same split-second wondered whether, under the circumstances, they wouldn’t divide it by four instead.

“They called on the P-phone ten minutes ago. Jesus. The rottenest son-of-a-bitching trip I’ve ever been on, and I wind up with the price of one green chip at the casino out of it.” Then she looked at my shirt and softened a little. “Well, it’s not your fault, Rob, but Geminis never can make up their minds. I should’ve known that. Let me see if I can find you some clean clothes.”

And I did let her do that, but I didn’t stay, anyway. I picked up my stuff, headed for a dropshaft, cached my goods at the registry office where I signed up to get my room back, and borrowed the use of their phone. When she mentioned Metchnikov’s name she had reminded me of something I wanted to do.

Metchnikov grumbled, but finally agreed to meet me in the schoolroom. I was there before him, of course. He loped in, stopped at the doorway, looked around, and said: “Where’s what’s-her-name?”

“Klara Moynlin. She’s in her room.” Neat, truthful, deceitful. A model answer.

“Um.” He ran an index finger down each jaw-whisker, meeting under the chin. “Come on, then.” Leading me, he said over his shoulder, “Actually, she would probably get more out of this than you would.”

“I suppose she would, Dane.”

“Um.” He hesitated at the bump in the floor that was the entrance to one of the instruction ships, then shrugged, opened the hatch, and clambered down inside.

He was being unusually open and generous, I thought as I followed him inside. He was already crouched in front of the courseselector panel, setting up numbers. He was holding a portable hand readout data-linked to the Corporation’s master computer system; I knew that he was punching in one of the established settings, and so I was not surprised when he got color almost at once. He thumbed the fine-tuner and waited, looking over his shoulder at me, until the whole board was drowned in shocking pink.

“All right,” he said. “Good, clear setting. Now look at the bottom part of the spectrum.”

That was the smaller line of rainbow colors along the right side. Colors merged into one another without break, except for occasional lines of bright color or black. They looked exactly like what the astronomers called Fraunhofer lines, when the only way they had to know what a star or planet was made of was to study it through a spectroscope. They weren’t. Fraunhofer lines show what elements are present in a radiation source (or in something that has gotten itself between the radiation source and you). These showed God-knows-what.

God and, maybe, Dane Metchnikov. He was almost smiling, and astonishingly talkative. “That band of three dark lines in the blue,” he said. “See? They seem to relate to the hazardousness of the mission. At least the computer printouts show that, when there are six or more bands there, the ships don’t come back.”

He had my full attention. “Christ!” I said, thinking of a lot of good people who had died because they hadn’t known that. “Why don’t they tell us these things in school?”

He said patiently (for him), “Broadhead, don’t be a jerk. All this is brand new. And a lot of it is guesswork. Now, the correlation between number of lines and danger isn’t quite so good under six. I mean, if you think that they might add one line for every additional degree of danger, you’re wrong. You would expect that the five-band settings would have heavy loss ratios, and when there are no bands at all there wouldn’t be any losses. Only it isn’t true. The best safety record seems to be with one or two bands. Three is good, too-but there have been some losses. Zero bands, we’ve had about as many as with three.”

For the first time I began to think that the Corporation’s science-research people might be worth their pay. “So why don’t we just go out on destination settings that are safer?”

“We’re not really sure they are safer,” Metchnikov said, again patiently for him. His tone was far more peremptory than his words. “Also, when you have an armored ship you should be able to deal with more risks than the plain ones. Quit with the dumb questions, Broadhead.”

“Sorry.” I was getting uncomfortable, crouched behind him and peering over his shoulder, so that when he turned to look at me his jaw-whiskers almost grazed my nose. I didn’t want to change position.

“So look up here in the yellow.” He pointed to five brighter lines in the yellow band. “These relate to the profitibility of the mission. God knows what we’re measuring — or what the Heechee were measuring — but in terms of financial rewards to the crews, there’s a pretty good correlation between the number of lines in that frequency and the amount of money the crews get.”

“Wow!”

He went on as though I hadn’t said anything. “Now, naturally the Heechee didn’t set up a meter to calibrate how much in royalties you or I might make. It has to be measuring something else, who knows what? Maybe it’s a measure of population density in that area, or of technological development. Maybe it’s a Guide Michelin, and all they’re saying is that there was a four-star restaurant in that area. But there it is. Five-bar-yellow expeditions bring in a financial return, on the average, that’s fifty times as high as two-bar and ten times as high as most of the others.”

He turned around again so that his face was maybe a dozen centimeters from mine, his eyes staring right into my eyes. “You want to see some other settings?” he asked, in a tone of voice that demanded I say no, so I did. “Okay.” And then he stopped.

I stood up and backed away to get a little more space. “One question, Dane. You probably have a reason for telling me all this before it gets to be public information. What is it?”

“Right,” he said. “I want what’s-her-name for crew if I go in a Three or a Five.”

“Klara Moynlin.”

“Whatever. She handles herself well, doesn’t take up much room, knows — well, she knows how to get along with people better than I do. I sometimes have difficulty in interpersonal relationships,” he explained. “Of course, that’s only if I take a Three or a Five. I don’t particularly want to. If I can find a One, that’s what I’m going to take out. But if there isn’t a One with a good setting available, I want somebody along I can rely on, who won’t get in my hair, who knows the ropes, can handle a ship — all that. You can come, too, if you want.”

When I got back to my own room Shicky turned up almost before I started to unpack. He was glad to see me. “I am sorry your trip was unfruitful,” he said out of his endless stock of gentleness and warmth. “It is too bad about your friend Kahane.” He had brought me a flask of tea, and then perched on the chest across from my hammock, just like the first time.

I mind was spinning with with visions of sugarplums coming out of my talk with Dane Metchnikov. I couldn’t help talking about it; I told Shicky everything Dane had said.

He listened like a child to a fairy tale, his black eyes shining. “How interesting,” he said. “I had heard rumors that there was to be a new briefing for everyone. Just think, if we can go out without fear of death or—” He hesitated, fluttering his wing-gauze.

“It isn’t that sure, Shicky,” I said.

“No, of course not. But it is an improvement, I think you will agree?” He hesitated, watching me take a pull from the flask of almost flavorless Japanese tea. “Rob,” he said, “if you go on such a trip and need an extra man… Well, it is true that I would not be of much use in a lander. But in orbit I am as good as anybody.”

“I know you are, Shicky.” I tried to put it tactfully. “Does the Corporation know that?”

“They would accept me as crew on a mission no one else wanted.”

“I see.” I didn’t say that I didn’t really want to go on a mission no one else wanted. Shicky knew that. He was one of the real oldtimers on Gateway. According to the rumor he had had a big wad stashed away, enough for Full Medical and everything. But he had given it away or lost it, and stayed on, and stayed a cripple. I know that he understood what I was thinking, but I was a long way from understanding Shikitei Bakin.

He moved out of my way while I stowed my things, and we gossiped about mutual friends. Sheri’s ship had not returned. Nothing to worry about yet, of course. It could easily be out another several weeks without disaster. A Congolese couple from just beyond the star-point in the corridor had brought back a huge shipment of prayer fans from a previously unknown Heechee warren, on a planet around an F-2 star in the end of the Orion spiral arm. They had split a million dollars three ways, and had taken their share back to Mungbere. The Forehands…

Louise Forehand stopped in while we were talking about them. “Heard your voices,” she said, craning over to kiss me. “Too bad about your trip.”

“Breaks of the game.”

“Well, welcome home, anyway. I didn’t do any better than you, I’m afraid. Dumb little star, no planets that we could find, can’t think why in the world the Heechee had a course setting for it.” She smiled, and stroked the muscles at the back of my neck fondly. “Can I give you a welcome-home party tonight? Or are you and Klara-?”

“I’d love it if you did,” I said, and she didn’t pursue the question of Klara. No doubt the rumor had already got around; the Gateway tom-toms beat day and night. She left after a few minutes. “Nice lady,” I said to Shicky, looking after her. “Nice family. Was she looking a little worried?”

“I fear so, Robinette, yes. Her daughter Lois is on plus time. They have had much sorrow in that family.”

I looked at him. He said, “No, not Willa or the father; they are out, but not overdue. There was a son.”

“I know. Henry, I think. They called him Hat.”

“He died just before they came here. And now Lois.” He inclined his head, then flapped politely over and picked up the empty tea flask on a downstroke of his wing. “I must go to work now, Rob.”

“How’s the ivy planting?”

He said ruefully, “I no longer have that position, I’m afraid. Emma did not consider me executive material.”

“Oh? What are you doing?”

“I keep Gateway esthetically attractive,” he said. “I think you would call it ’garbage collector.”

I didn’t know what to say. Gateway was kind of a trashy place; because of the low gravity, any scrap of paper or bit of featherweight plastic that was thrown away was likely to float anywhere inside the asteroid. You couldn’t sweep the floor. The first stroke set everything flying. I had seen the garbage men chasing scraps of newsprint and fluffs of cigarette ash with little hand-pumped vacuum cleaners, and I had even thought about becoming one if I had to. But I didn’t like Shicky doing it.

He was following what I was thinking about him without difficulty. “It’s all right, Rob. Really, I enjoy the work. But- please; if you do need a crewman, think of me.”

I took my bonus and paid up my per capita for three weeks in advance. I bought a few items I needed — new clothes, and some music tapes to get the sound of Mozart and Palestrina out of my ears. That left me about two hundred dollars in money.

Two hundred dollars was a lot like nothing at all. It meant twenty drinks at the Blue Hell, or one chip at the blackjack table, or maybe half a dozen decent meals outside the prospectors’ commissary.

So I had three choices. I could get another job and stall indefinitely. Or I could ship out within the three weeks. Or I could give up and go home. None of the choices was attractive. But, provided I didn’t spend any money on anything much, I didn’t have to decide for, oh, a long time — as long as twenty days. I resolved to give up smoking and boughten meals; that way I could budget myself to a maximum spending of nine dollars a day, so that my per capita and my cash would run out at the same time.

I called Klara. She looked and sounded guarded but friendly on the P-phone, so I spoke guardedly and amiably to her. I didn’t mention the party, and she didn’t mention wanting to see me that night, so we left it at that: nowhere. That was all right with me. I didn’t need Klara. At the party that night I met a new girl around called Doreen MacKenzie. She wasn’t a girl, really; she was at least a dozen years older than I was, and she had been out five times. What was exciting about her was that she had really hit it once. She’d taken one and a half mil back to Atlanta, spent the whole wad trying to buy herself a career as a PV singer — material writer, manager, publicity team, advertising, demo tapes, the works — and when it hadn’t worked she had come back to Gateway to try again. The other thing was she was very, very pretty.

But after two days of getting to know Doreen I was back on the P-phone to Klara. She said, “Come on down,” and she sounded anxious; and I was there in ten minutes, and we were in bed in fifteen. The trouble with getting to know Doreen was that I had got to know her. She was nice, and a hell of a racing pilot, but she wasn’t Klara Moynlin.

When we were lying in the hammock together, sweaty and relaxed and spent, Klara yawned, ruffled my hair, pulled back her head and stared at me. “Oh, shit,” she said drowsily, “I think this is what they call being in love.”

I was gallant. “It’s what makes the world go around. No, not ’it.’ You are.”

She shook her head regretfully. “Sometimes I can’t stand you,” she said. “Sagittarians never make it with Geminis. I’m a fire sign and you- well, Geminis can’t help being confused.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep going on about that crap,” I said.

She didn’t take offense. “Let’s get something to eat.”

I slid over the edge of the hammock and stood up, needing to talk without touching for a moment. “Dear Klara,” I said, “look, I can’t let you keep me because you’ll be bitchy about it, sooner or later — or if you aren’t, I’ll be expecting you to, and so I’ll be bitchy to you. And I just don’t have the money. You want to eat outside the commissary, you do it by yourself. And I won’t take your cigarettes, your liquor, or your chips at the casino. So if you want to get something to eat go ahead, and I’ll meet you later. Maybe we could go for a walk.”

She sighed. “Geminis never know how to handle money,” she told me, “but they can be awfully nice in bed.”

We put our clothes on and went out and got something to eat, all right, but in the Corporation commissary, where you stand in line, carry a tray, and eat standing up. The food isn’t bad, if you don’t think too much about what substrates they grow it on. The price is right. It doesn’t cost anything. They promise that if you eat all your meals in the commissary you will have one hundred plus percent of all the established dietary needs. You will, too, only you have to eat all of everything to be sure of that. Single-cell protein and vegetable protein come out incomplete when considered independently, so it’s not enough to eat the soybean jelly or the bacterial pudding alone. You have to eat them both.

The other thing about Corporation meals is that they produce a hell of a lot of methane, which produces a hell of a lot of what all ex-Gateway types remember as the Gateway fug.

We drifted down toward the lower levels afterward, not talking much. I suppose we were both wondering where we were going. I don’t mean just at that moment. “Feel like exploring?” Klara asked.

I took her hand as we strolled along, considering. That sort of thing was fun. Some of the old ivy-choked tunnels that no one used were interesting, and beyond them were the bare, dusty places that no one had troubled even to plant ivy in. Usually there was plenty of light from the ancient walls themselves, still glowing with that bluish Heechee-metal sheen. Sometimes — not lately, but no more than six or seven years ago — people had actually found Heechee artifacts in them, and you never knew when you might stumble on something worth a bonus.

But I couldn’t keep up with her pace, and after a few moments she asked if I wanted to go back. Nothing is fun when you don’t have a choice. “Why not?” I said, but a few minutes later, when I saw where we were, I said, “Let’s go to the museum for a while.”

“Oh, right,” she said, suddenly interested. “Did you know they’ve fixed up the surround room? Metchnikov was telling me about it. They opened it while we were out.”

So we changed course, dropped two levels and came out next to the museum. The surround room was a nearly spherical chamber just beyond it. It was big, ten meters or more across, and in order to use it we had to strap on wings like Shicky’s, hanging on a rack outside the entrance. Neither Klara nor I had ever used them before, but it wasn’t hard. On Gateway you weigh so little to begin with that flying would be the easiest and best way to get around, if there were any places inside the asteroid big enough to fly in.

So we dropped through the hatch into the sphere, and were in the middle of a whole universe. The chamber was walled with hexagonal panels, each one of them projected from some source we could not see, probably digital with liquid-crystal screens.

“How pretty!” Klara cried.

All around us there was a sort of globarama of what the scouting ships had found. Stars, nebulae, planets, satellites. Sometimes each plate showed its own independent thing so that there were, what was it, something like a hundred and twenty-eight separate scenes. Then, flick, all of them changed; flick again, and they began to cycle, some of them holding their same scene, some of them changing to something new. Flick again, and one whole hemisphere lit up with a mosaic view of the M-31 galaxy as seen from God-knew-where.

“Hey,” I said, really excited, “this is great!” And it was. It was like being on all the trips any prospector had ever taken, without the drudgery and the trouble and the constant fear.

There was no one there but us, and I couldn’t understand why. It was so pretty. You would think there would be a long line of people waiting to get in. One side began to run through a series of pictures of Heechee artifacts, as discovered by prospectors: prayer fans of all colors, wall-lining machines, the insides of Heechee ships, some tunnels-Klara cried out that they were places she had been, back home on Venus, but I don’t know how she could tell. Then the pattern went back to photographs from space. Some of them wcre familiar. I could recognize the Pleadies in one quick six- or eight-panel shot, which vanished and was replaced by a view of Gateway Two from outside, two of the bright young stars of the cluster shining in reflection off its sides. I saw something that might have been the Horsehead Nebula, and a doughnutshaped puff of gas and dust that was either the Ring Nebula in Lyra or what an exploring team had found a few orbits before and called the French Cruller, in the skies of a planet where Heechee digs had been detected, but not reached, under a frozen sea.

We hung there for half an hour or so, until it began to look as though we were seeing the same things again, and then we fluttered up to the hatch, hung up the wings, and sat down for a cigarette break in a wide place in the tunnel outside the museum.

Two women I recognized vaguely as Corporation maintenance crews came by, carrying rolled-up strap-on wings. “Hi, Klara,” one of them greeted her. “Been inside?”

Klara nodded. “It was beautiful,” she said.

“Enjoy it while you can,” said the other one. “Next week it’ll cost you a hundred dollars. We’re putting in a P-phone taped lecture system tomorrow, and they’ll have the grand opening before the next tourists show up.”

“It’s worth it,” Klara said, but then she looked at me.

I became aware that, in spite of everything, I was smoking one of her cigarettes. At five dollars a pack I couldn’t afford very much of that, but I made up my mind to buy at least one pack out of that day’s allowance, and to make sure she took as many from me as I took from her.

“Want to walk some more?” she asked.

“Maybe a little later,” I said. I was wondering how many men and women had died to take the pretty pictures we had been watching, because I was facing one more time the fact that sooner or later I would have to submit myself again to the lethal lottery of the Heechee ships, or give up. I wondered if the new information Metchnikov had given me was going to make a real difference. Everyone was talking about it now; the Corporation had scheduled an all-phone announcement for the next day.

“That reminds me,” I said. “Did you say you’d seen Metchnikov?”

“I wondered when you’d ask me about that,” she said. “Sure. He called and told me he’d shown the color-coding stuff to you. So?”

I stubbed out the cigarette. “I think everybody in Gateway’s going to be fighting for the good launches, that’s what I think.”

“But maybe Dane knows something. He’s been working with the Corporation.”

“I don’t doubt he does.” I stretched and leaned back, rocking against the low gravity, considering. “He’s not that nice a guy, Klara. Maybe he’d tell us if there’s something good coming up, you know, that he knows something special about. But he’ll want something for it.”

Klara grinned. “He’d tell me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, he calls me once in a while. Wants a date.”

“Oh, shit, Klara.” I was feeling pretty irritated by then. Not just at Klara, and not just about Dane. About money. About the fact that if I wanted to go back into the surround room next week it would cost me half my credit balance. About the dark, shadowed image looming up ahead in time, and not very far ahead, when I would once again have to make up my mind to do what I was scared silly to do again. “I wouldn’t trust that son of a bitch as far as—”

“Oh, relax, Rob. He’s not such a bad guy,” she said, lighting another cigarette and leaving the pack where I could reach it if I wanted it. “Sexually, he might be kind of interesting. That raw, rough, rude Taurean thing — anyway, you’ve got as much to offer him as I do.”

“What are you talking about?”

She looked honestly surprised. “I thought you knew he swings both ways.”

“He’s never given me any indication—” But I stopped, remembering how close he liked to get when he was talking to me, and how uncomfortable I was with him inside my bodyspace.

“Maybe you’re not his type,” she grinned. Only it wasn’t a kindly grin. A couple of Chinese crewmen, coming out of the museum, looked at us with interest, and then politely looked away.

“Let’s get out of here, Klara.”

So we went to the Blue Hell, and of course I insisted on paying my share of the drinks. Forty-eight dollars down the tube in one hour. And it wasn’t all that much fun. We wound up in her place and fell into bed, although the drinks had given me a headache that was still there when we finished. And the time was slipping by.

There are people who never pass a certain point in their emotional development. They cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life with a sexual partner for more than a short time. Something inside them will not tolerate happiness. The better it gets, the more they have to destroy it.

Hacking around Gateway with Klara, I began to suspect that I was one of those people. I knew Klara was. She had never sustained a relationship with a man for more than a few months in her life; she told me so herself. Already I was pretty close to a record with her. And already it was making her edgy.

In some ways Klara was a lot more adult and responsible than I ever would be. The way she got to Gateway in the first place, for instance. She didn’t win a lottery to pay her fare. She earned it and saved it, painfully, over a period of years. She was a fully qualified airbody driver with a guide’s license and an engineering degree. She had lived like a fish-farmer while earning an income that would have entitled her to a three-room flat in the Heechee warrens on Venus, vacations on Earth, and Major Medical. She knew more than I did about the growing of food on hydrocarbon substrates, in spite of all my years in Wyoming. (She had invested in a food factory on Venus, and for all her life she had never put a dollar into anything she didn’t fully understand.) When we were out together, she was the senior member of the crew. It was she Metchnikov wanted as a shipmate — if he wanted anybody — not me. She had been my teacher!

And yet between the two of us she was as inept and unforgiving as ever I had been with Sylvia, or with Deena, Janice, Liz, Ester, or any of the other two-week romances that had all ended badly in all the years after Sylvia. It was, she said, because she was Sagitarius and I was a Gemini. Sagittarians were prophets. Sagittarians loved freedom. Us poor Geminis were just terribly mixed up and indecisive. “It’s no wonder,” she told me gravely one morning, eating breakfast in her room (I accepted no more than a couple of sips of coffee), “that you can’t make your mind up to go out again. It isn’t just physical cowardice, dear Robinette. Part of your twin nature wants to triumph. Part wants to fail. I wonder which side you will allow to win?”

I gave her an ambiguous answer. I said, “Honey, go screw yourself.” And she laughed, and we got through that day. She had scored her point.

The Corporation made its expected announcement, and there was an immense flurry of conferring and planning and exchanging guesses and interpretations among all of us. It was an exciting time. Out of the master computer’s files the Corporation pulled twenty launches with low danger factors and high profit expectancies. They were subscribed, equipped, and launched within a week.

And I wasn’t on any of them, and neither was Klara; and we tried not to discuss why.

Surprisingly, Dane Metchnikov didn’t go out on any of them. He knew something, or said he did. Or didn’t say he didn’t when I asked him, just looked at me in that glowering, contemptuous way and didn’t answer. Even Shicky almost went out. He lost out in the last hour before launch to the Finnish boy who had never been able to find anyone to talk to; there were four Saudis who wanted to stay together, and settled for the Finnish kid to fill out a Five. Louise Forehand didn’t go out, either, because she was waiting for some member of her family to come back, so as to preserve some sort of continuity. You could eat in the Corporation commissary now without waiting in line, and there were empty rooms all up and down my tunnel. And one night Klara said to me, “Rob, I think I’m going to go to a shrink.”

I jumped. It was a surprise. Worse than that, a betrayal. Klara knew about my early psychotic episode and what I thought of psychotherapists.

I withheld the first dozen things I thought of to say to her — tactical: “I’m glad; it’s about time”; hypocritical: “I’m glad, and please tell me how I can help”; strategic: “I’m glad, and maybe I ought to go, too, if I could afford it.” I refrained from the only truthful response, which would have been: “I interpret this move on your part as a condemnation of me for bending your head.” I didn’t say anything at all, and after a moment she went on:

“I need help, Rob. I’m confused.”

That touched me, and I reached out for her hand. She just let it lay limp in mine, not squeezing back and not pulling away. She said: “My psychology professor used to say that was the first step -no, the second step. The first step when you have a problem is to know you have it. Well, I’ve known that for some time. The second step is to make a decision: Do you want to keep the problem, or do you want to do something about it? I’ve decided to do something about it.”

“Where will you go?” I asked, carefully noncommittal.

“I don’t know. The groups don’t seem to do much. There’s a shrink machine available on the Corporation master computer. That would be the cheapest way.”

“Cheap is cheap,” I said. “I spent two years with the shrink machines when I was younger, after I- I was kind of messed up.”

“And since then you’ve been operating for twenty years,” she said reasonably. “I’d settle for that. For now, anyway.”

I patted her hand. “Any step you take is a good step,” I said kindly. “I’ve had the feeling all along that you and I could get along better if you could clear some of that old birthright crap out of your mind. We all do it, I guess, but I’d rather have you angry at me on my own than because I’m acting as a surrogate for your father or something.”

She rolled over and looked at me. Even in the pale Heecheemetal glow I could see surprise on her face. “What are you talking about?”

“Why, your problem, Klara. I know it took a lot of courage for you to admit to yourself that you needed help.”

“Well, Rob,” she said, “it did, only you don’t seem to know what the problem is. Getting along with you isn’t the problem. You may be the problem. I just don’t know. What I’m worried about is stalling. Being unable to make decisions. Putting it off so long before I went out again — and, no offense, picking a Gemini like you to go out with.”

“I hate it when you give me that astrology crap!”

“You do have a mixed-up personality, Rob, you know you do. And I seem to lean on that. I don’t want to live that way.”

We were both wide awake again by then, and there seemed to be two ways for things to go. We could get into a but-you-said-you-loved-me, but-I-can’t-stand-this scene, probably ending with either more sex or a wide-open split; or we could do something to take our minds off it. Klara’s thoughts were clearly moving in the same direction as mine, because she slid out of the hammock and began pulling on clothes. “Let’s go up to the casino,” she said brightly. “I feel lucky tonight.”

There werent any ships in, and no tourists. There weren’t all that many prospectors, either, with so many shiploads going out in the past few weeks. Half the tables at the cisino were closed down, with the green cloth hoods over them. Klara found a seat at the blackjack table, signed for a stack of hundred-dollar markers, and the dealer let me sit next to her without playing. “I told you this was my lucky night,” she said when, after ten minutes, she was more than two thousand dollars ahead of the house.

“You’re doing fine,” I encouraged her, but actually it wasn’t that much fun for me. I got up and roamed around a little bit. Dane Metchnikov was cautiously feeding five-dollar coins into the slots, but he didn’t seem to want to talk to me. Nobody was playing baccarat. I told Klara I was going to get a cup of coffee at the Blue Hell (five dollars, but in slow times like this they would keep filling the cup for nothing). She flashed me a quarter-proffle smile without ever taking her eyes off the cards.

In the Blue Hell Louise Forehand was sipping a rocket-fuel-and-water… well, it wasn’t really rocket fuel, just old-fashioned white whisky made out of whatever happened to be growing well that week in the hydroponics tanks. She looked up with a welcoming smile, and I sat down next to her.

She had, it suddenly occurred to me, a rather lonely time of it. No reason she had to. She was — well, I don’t know exactly what there was about her, but she seemed like the only nonthreatening, nonreproachful, nondemanding person on Gateway. Everybody else either wanted something I didn’t want to give, or refused to take what I was offering. Louise was something else. She was at least a dozen years older than I, and really very good-looking. Like me, she wore only the Corporation standard clothes, short coveralls in a choice of three unattractive colors. But she had remade them for herself, converting the jumpsuit into a two-piece outfit with tight shorts, bare midriff, and a loose, open sort of top. I discovered that she was watching me take inventory, and I suddenly felt embarrassed. “You’re looking good,” I said.

“Thanks, Rob. All original equipment, too,” she bragged, and smiled. “I never could afford anything else.”

“You don’t need anything you haven’t had all along,” I told her sincerely, and she changed the subject.

“There’s a ship coming in,” she said. “Been a long time out, they say.”

Well, I knew what that meant to her, and that explained why she was sitting around in the Blue Hell instead of being asleep at that hour. I knew she was worried about her daughter, but she wasn’t letting it paralyze her.

She had a very good attitude about prospecting, too. She was afraid of going out, which was sensible. But she didn’t let that keep her from going, which I admired a lot. She was still waiting for some other member of her family to return before she signed on again, as they had agreed, so that whoever did come back would always find family waiting.

She told me a little more about their background. They had lived, as far as you could call it living, in the tourist traps of the Spindle on Venus, surviving on what they could eke out, mostly from the cruise ships. There was a lot of money there, but there was also a lot of competition. The Forehands had at one time, I discovered, worked up a nightclub act: singing, dancing, comedy routines. I gathered that they were not bad, at least by Venus standards. But the few tourists that were around most of the year had so many other birds of prey battling for a scrap of their flesh that there just wasn’t enough to nurture them all. Sess and the son (the one who had died) had tried guiding, with an old airbody they had managed to buy wrecked and rebuild. No big money there. The girls had worked at all kinds of jobs. I was pretty sure that Louise, at least, had been a hooker for a while, but that hadn’t paid enough to matter, either, for the same sorts of reasons as everything else. They were nearly at the end of their rope when they managed to get to Gateway.

It wasn’t the first time for them. They’d fought hard to get off Earth in the first place, when Earth got so bad for them that Venus had seemed a less hopeless alternative. They had more courage, and more willingness to pull up stakes and go, than any other people I’d ever met.

“How did you pay for all this travel?” I asked.

“Well,” said Louise, finishing her drink and looking at her watch, “going to Venus we traveled the cheapest way there is. High-mass load. Two hundred and twenty other immigrants, sleeping in shoulder clamps, lining up for two-minute appointments in the toilets, eating compressed dry rations and drinking recycled water. It was a hell of a way to spend forty thousand dollars apiece. Fortunately, the kids weren’t born yet, except Hat, and he was small enough to go for quarter-fare.”

“Hat’s your son? What—”

“He died,” she said.

I waited, but when she spoke again what she said was: “They should have a radio report from that incoming ship by now.”

“It would have been on the P-phone.”

She nodded, and for a moment looked worried. The Corporation always makes routine reports on incoming contacts. If they don’t have a contact-well, dead prospectors don’t check in on radio. So I took her mind off her troubles by telling her about Kiara’s decision to see a shrink. She listened and then put hand over mine and said: “Don’t get sore, Rob. Did you ever think of seeing a shrink yourself?”

“I don’t have the money, Louise.”

“Not even for a group? There’s a primal-scream bunch on L Darling. You can hear them sometimes. And there’ve been ads everything — TA, Est, patterning. Of course, a lot of them may have shipped out.”

But her attention wasn’t on me. From where we were sitting we could see the entrance to the casino, where one of the croup was talking interestedly to a crewman from the Chinese cruiser. Louise was staring that way.

“Something’s going on,” I said. I would have added, “Let’s look,” but Louise was out of the chair and heading for the casino before me.

Play had stopped. Everybody was clustered around the blackjack table, where, I noticed, Dane Metchnikov was now sitting next to Klara in the seat I had vacated, with a couple of twentyfive-dollar chips in front of him. And in the middle of them was Shicky Bakin, perched on a dealer’s stool, talking. “No,” he was saying as I came up, “I do not know the names. But it’s a Five.”

“And they’re all still alive?” somebody asked.

“As far as I know. Hello, Rob. Louise.” He nodded politely to us both. “I see you’ve heard?”

“Not really,” Louise said, reaching out unconsciously to take my hand. “Just that a ship is in. But you don’t know the names?”

Dane Metchnikov craned his head around to glare at us. “Names,” he growled. “Who cares? It’s none of us, that’s what’s important. And it’s a big one.” He stood up. Even at that moment I noticed the measure of his anger: he forgot to pick up his chips from the blackjack table. “I’m going down there,” he announced. “I want to see what a once-in-a-lifetime score looks like.”

The cruiser crews had closed off the area, but one of the guards was Francy Hereira. There were a hundred people around the dropshaft, and only Hereira and two girls from the American cruiser to keep them back. Metchnikov plunged through to the lip of the shaft, peering down, before one of the girls chased him away. We saw him talking to another five-bracelet prospector. Meanwhile we could hear snatches of gossip:

“… almost dead. They ran out of water.”

“Nah! Just exhausted. They’ll be all right…”

“… ten-million-dollar bonus if it’s a nickel, and then the royalties!”

Klara took Louise’s elbow and pulled her toward the front. I followed in the space they opened. “Does anybody know whose ship it was?” she demanded.

Hereira smiled wearily at her, nodded at me, and said: “Not yet, Klara. They’re searching them now. I think they’re going to be all right, though.”

Somebody behind me called out, ’What did they find?”

“Artifacts. New ones, that’s all I know.”

“But it was a Five?” Klara asked.

Hereira nodded, then peered down the shaft. “All right,” he said, “now, please back up, friends. They’re bringing some of them up now.”

We all moved microscopically back, but it didn’t matter; they weren’t getting off at our level, anyway. The first one up the cable was a Corporation bigwig whose name I didn’t remember, then a Chinese guard, then someone in a Terminal Hospital robe with a medic on the same grip of the cable, holding him to make sure he didn’t fall. I knew the face but not the name; I had seen him at one of the farewell parties, maybe at several of them, a small, elderly black man who had been out two or three times without scoring. His eyes were open and clear enough, but he looked infinitely fatigued. He looked without astonishment at the crowd around the shaft, and then was out of sight.

I looked away and saw that Louise was weeping quietly, her eyes closed. Klara had an arm around her. In the movement of the crowd I managed to get next to Kiara and look a question at her. “It’s a Five,” she said softly. “Her daughter was in a Three.’

I knew Louise had heard that, so I patted her and said: “I’m sorry, Louise,” and then a space opened at the lip of the shaft and I peered down.

I caught a quick glimpse of what ten or twenty million do looked like. It was a stack of hexagonal boxes made out of Heechee metal, not more than half a meter across and less than a meter tall. Then Francy Hereira was coaxing, “Come on, Rob, get back will you?” And I stepped away from the shaft while another Inspector in a hospital robe came up. She didn’t see me as she went past; in fact her eyes were closed. But I saw her. It was Sheri.