Gateway

Chapter 24

I was just turning over, making up my mind to go to sleep, when I noticed that the colors on the Heechee guidance system were breaking up. It was the fifty-fifth day of my trip, the twenty seventh since turnover. The colors had been shocking pink for the whole fifty-five days. Now whorls of pure white formed, grew, flowed together.

I was arriving! Wherever it was going to turn out to be when I got there, I was arriving.

My little old ship — the smelly, hurtful, tedious coffin I had banging around in for nearly two months by myself, talking to myself, playing games with myself, tired of myself — was well below lightspeed. I leaned over to look at the viewscreen, now related “down” to me because I had been decelerating, and saw nothing that looked very exciting. Oh, there was a star, yes. There lots of stars in a scattering of groupings that in no way looked familiar; half a dozen blues ranging from bright to hurt-the-eye. One red one that stood out more for intensity of hue than luminosity was an angry-looking red coal, not much brighter than Mars from Earth, but a deeper, uglier red.

I made myself take an interest.

That was not really easy. After two months of rejecting close to everything around me because it was boring or threatening, it was tough for me to switch over to a welcoming, vulnerable mode. I switched on the spherical scan and peered out as the ship began to rotate its scanning pattern, slicing orange-peel strips of sky to capture for the cameras and analyzers.

And almost at once I got a huge, bright, nearby signal. Fifty-five days of boredom and exhaustion went right out of my mind. There was something either very big or very close. I forgot about being sleepy. I crouched over the viewscreen, holding onto it with hands and knees, and then I saw it: a squared-off object marching into the screen. Glowing all over. Pure Heechee metal. It was irregularly slab-sided, with rounded pimples studding it on the flat sides.

And the adrenalin began to flow, and visions of sugarplums danced in my head. I watched it out of sight, and then hauled myself over to the scan analyzer, waiting to see what would come out. There was no question that it was good, the only question was how good. Maybe extraordinarily good! Maybe a whole Peggy’s World all my own! — with a royalty in the millions of dollars every year for the rest of my life! Maybe only a vacant shell. Maybe. The squared-off shape suggested it was- maybe that wildest of dreams, a whole big Heechee ship that I could enter into and fly around; where I chose, big enough to carry a thousand people and a lion tons of cargo! All those dreams were possible; and even if they all failed, if it was just an abandoned shell, if all that it held was one thing inside it, one little doodad, one gadget, one whosis that nobody had ever found before that could be taken apart, reproduced and made to work on Earth. .

I stumbled and raked my knuckles against the spiral gaget now glowing soft gold. I sucked the blood off them and realized the ship was moving.

It shouldn’t have been moving! It wasn’t programmed to do that. It was meant to hang in whatever orbit it was programmed to find, and just stay there until I looked around and made my decisions.

I stared around, confused and baffled. The glowing slab was firmly in the middle of the viewscreen now, and it stayed there; ship had stopped its automatic spherical scan. Belatedly I heard the distant high yell of the lander motors. They were what was moving me; my ship was targeted for that slab.

And a green light was glowing over the pilot’s seat.

That was wrong! The green light was installed on Gateway by human beings. It had nothing to do with the Heechee; it was the plain old people’s radio circuit, announcing that someone was calling me. Who? Who could be anywhere near my brand-new discovery?

I thumbed on the TBS circuit and shouted, “Hello?”

There was an answer. I didn’t understand it; it seemed to be in some foreign language, perhaps Chinese. But it was human, all right. “Talk English!” I yelled. “Who the hell are you?”

Pause. Then another voice. “Who are you?”

“My name is Rob Broadhead,” I snarled.

“Broadhead?” Confused mumbling of a couple of voices. Then the English-speaking voice again: “We don’t have any record of a prospector named Broadhead. Are you from Aphrodite?”

“What’s Aphrodite?”

“Oh, Christ! Who are you? Listen, this is Gateway Two control and we don’t have time to screw around. Identify yourself!”

Gateway Two!

I snapped off the radio and lay back, watching the slab grow larger, ignoring the demand of the green light. Gateway Two? How ridiculous! If I had wanted to go to Gateway Two I would have signed up in the regular course and accepted the penalty of paying royalties on anything I might find. I would have flown out secure as any tourist, on a course that had been tested a hundred times. I hadn’t done that. I had picked a setting no one else had ever used and taken my risks. And I had felt every one of them, scared out of my brain for fifty-five bad days.

It wasn’t fair!

I lost my head. I lunged toward the Heechee course director and shoved the wheels around at random.

It was a failure I couldn’t accept. I was braced to find nothing. I was not braced to find I had done something easy, for no reward at all.

But what I produced was a bigger failure still. There was a bright yellow flash from the course board, and then all the colors went black.

The thin scream from the lander motors stopped.

The feeling of motion was gone. The ship was dead. Nothing was moving. Nothing worked in the Heechee complex; nothing, not even the cooling system.

By the time Gateway Two sent a ship out to haul me in I delirious with heatstroke, in an ambient temperature of 75.0 C.

Gateway was hot and dank. Gateway Two was cold enough that I had to borrow jacket, gloves, and heavy underwear. Gateway stank of sweat and sewers. Gateway Two tasted of rusty steel. Gateway was bright and loud and full of people. On Gateway Two there was almost no sound, and only seven human beings, counting myself, to make any. The Heechee had left Gateway Two not quite completed. Some of the tunnels ended in bare rock, there were only a few dozen of them. No one had got around to planting vegetation yet, and all the air there was came from chemical processors. The partial pressure of O₂ was under 150 millibars; and the rest of the atmosphere was a nitrogen-helium mix, much more than half earth-normal pressure altogether, that made the voices highpitched and left me gasping for the first few hours.

The man who helped me out of my lander and bundled me against the sudden cold was a dark, immense Martian-Japanese named Norio Ituno. He put me in his own bed, filled me with hot liquids and let me rest for an hour. I dozed, and when I woke he was sitting there, looking at me with amusement and respect. The respect was for someone who had slain a five-hundred million-dollar ship. The amusement was that I was idiot enough to do it.

“I guess I’m in trouble,” I said.

“I would say so, yes,” he agreed. “The ship is totally dead. Never saw anything like it before.”

“I didn’t know a Heechee ship could go dead like that.”

He shrugged. “You did something original, Broadhead. How are you feeling?” I sat up to answer him, and he nodded. “I’m pretty busy right now. I’m going to have to let you take can yourself for a couple of hours — if you can? — fine. Then we’ll have a party for you.”

“Party!” It was the farthest thing from my mind. “For who?”

“We don’t meet someone like you every day, Broadhead,’ said Ituno admiringly, and left me to my thoughts.

I didn’t like my thoughts very much, and after a while I got up, put on the gloves, buttoned up the jacket, and started exploring. It didn’t take long; there wasn’t much there. I heard sounds of a party from the lower levels, but the echoes traveled at queer as along the empty corridors, and I saw no one. Gateway Two didn’t have a tourist trade, and so there wasn’t any nightclub or casino or restaurant that I could find… not even a latrine. After a little while that question began to seem urgent. I reasoned that Ituno would have to have something like that near his room, and tried to retrace my steps to there, but that didn’t work, either. There were cubicles along some of the corridors, but they were unfinished. No one lived there, and no one had troubled to install plumbing.

It was not one of my better days.

When I finally found a toilet I puzzled over it for ten minutes and would guiltily have left it impolitely soiled if I had not heard a sound outside the cubicle. A plump little woman was standing there, waiting.

“I don’t know how to flush it,” I apologized.

She looked me up and down. “You’re Broadhead,” she stated, and then: “Why don’t you go to Aphrodite?”

“What’s Aphrodite — no, wait. First, how do you flush this thing? Then, what’s Aphrodite?”

She pointed to a button on the edge of the door; I had thought it was a light switch. When I touched it the whole bottom of the seamless bowl began to glow and in ten seconds there was nothing inside but ash, then nothing at all.

“Wait for me,” she commanded, disappearing inside. When she came out she said, “Aphrodite’s where the money is, Broadhead. You’re going to need it.”

I let her take my arm and pull me along. Aphrodite, I began understand, was a planet. A new one, that a ship from Gateway Two had opened up less than forty days earlier, and a big find. “You’d have to pay royalty, of course,” she said. “And so far haven’t found anything big, just the usual Heechee debris. But there’s thousands of square miles to explore, and it’ll be months before the first batch of prospectors starts coming out from Gateway. We only sent the word back forty days ago. Have you any hot-planet experience?”

“Hot-planet experience?”

“I mean,” she explained, pulling me down a dropshaft and closing up to me, “have you ever explored a planet that’s hot?”

“No. As a matter of fact, I haven’t had any experience at all that counts for anything. One trip. Empty. I didn’t even land.’

“Pity,” she said. “Still, there’s not that much to learn. Do you know what Venus is like? Aphrodite’s just a little bit worse. The primary’s a flare star, and you don’t want to be caught in the open. But the Heechee digs are all underground. If you find one, you’re in.”

“What are the chances of finding one?” I asked.

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, pulling me off the cable and down a tunnel, “not all that good, maybe. After all, you’re out in open when you’re prospecting. On Venus they use armored bodies and they zap around anywhere they want to go, no trouble. Well, maybe a little trouble,” she conceded. “But they don’t lose very many prospectors anymore. Maybe one percent.”

“What percent do you lose on Aphrodite?”

“More than that. Yes, I grant you, it’s higher than that. You have to use the lander from your ship, and of course it’s not mobile on the surface of a planet. Especially a planet with a face like molten sulfur and winds like hurricanes — when the weather’s mild.”

“It sounds charming,” I said. “Why aren’t you out there now?”

“Me? I’m an out-pilot. I’m going back to Gateway in about ten days, soon as I get a cargo loaded, or somebody who comes in wants a ride back.”

“I want a ride back right now.”

“Oh, cripes, Broadhead! Don’t you know what kind of trouble you’re in? You broke regulations by messing with the control board. They’ll throw the book at you.”

I thought it over carefully. Then I said, “Thanks, but I think I’ll take my chances.”

“Don’t you understand? Aphrodite has guaranteed Heeche remains. You could take a hundred trips without finding anything like this.”

“Sweetie,” I said, “I couldn’t take a hundred trips for anything, not now and not ever. I don’t know if I can take one. I think I have the guts to get back to Gateway. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

I was on Gateway Two, all together, thirteen days. Hester Bergowiz, the out-pilot, kept trying to talk me into going to Aphrodite, I guess because she didn’t want me taking up valuable cargo space on her return flight. The others didn’t care. They only thought I was crazy. I was a problem for Ituno, who was loosely in charge of keeping things straight on Two. Technically I was an illegal entrant, without a dime’s worth of per capita paid and with nothing to pay it with. He would have been within his rights to toss me out into space without a suit. He solved it by putting me to work loading low-priority cargo into Hester’s Five, mostly prayer fans and samples for analysis from Aphrodite. That took two days, and then he designated me chief gofer for the three people who were rebuilding suits for the next batch of explorers of Aphrodite. They had to use Heechee torches to soften the metal enough to bend it onto the Suits, and I wasn’t trusted with any of that. It takes two years to train a person to handle a Heechee torch in close quarters. But I was allowed to muscle the suits and sheets of Heechee metal into position for them, to fetch tools, to go for coffee… and to put the suits on when they were finished, and exit into space to make sure they didn’t leak.

None of them leaked.

On the twelfth day, two Fives came in from Gateway, loaded with happy, eager prospectors bringing all the wrong equipment. The word about Aphrodite had not had time to get to Gateway and back, so the new fish didn’t know what goodies were in store. Just by accident, one of them was a young girl on a science mission, a former student of Professor Hegramet’s who was supposed to make anthropometric studies of Gateway Two. On his own authority Norio Ituno reassigned her to Aphrodite, and decreed a combination welcome and farewell party. The ten newcomers and I outnumbered our hosts; but what they lacked in numbers they made up in drinking, and it was a good party. I found myself a celebrity. The new fish couldn’t get over the fact that I had slain a Heechee ship and survived.

I was almost sorry to leave… not counting being scared.

Ituno splashed three fingers of rice whiskey into a glass for me and offered me a toast. “Sorry to see you go, Broadhead,” he said. “Sure you won’t change your mind? We’ve got more armored ships and suits than we have prospectors right now, but I don’t know how long that’s going to last. If you change your mind after you get back—”

“I’m not going to change my mind,” I said.

“Banzai,” he said, and drank. “Listen, do you know an old guy named Bakin?”

“Shicky? Sure. My neighbor.”

“Give him my regards,” he said, pouring another drink for the purpose. “He’s a great guy, but he reminds me of you. I was with him when he lost his legs: got caught in the lander when we had to jettison. Damn near died. By the time we got him to Gateway he was all swelled up and smelled like hell; we had to take the legs off, two days out. I did it myself.”

“He’s a great person, all right,” I said absently, finishing the drink and holding the glass out for more. “Hey. What do you mean, he reminds you of me?”

“Can’t make up his mind, Broadhead. He’s got a stake that’s enough to put him on Full Medical, and he can’t make up his mind to spend it. If he spends it he can have his legs back and go out again. But then he’d be broke if he didn’t score. So he just stays on, a cripple.”

I put the glass down. I didn’t want any more to drink. “So long, Ituno,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

I spent most of the trip back writing letters to Klara that I didn’t know if I would ever mail. There wasn’t much else to do. Hester turned out to be surprisingly sexual, for a small plump lady of a certain age. But there’s a limit to how long that is entertaining, and with all the cargo we had jammed in the ship, there wasn’t room for much else. The days were all the same: sex, letter writing, sleeping… and worrying.

Worrying about why Shicky Bakin wanted to stay a cripple; which was a way of worrying, in a way I could face, about why I did.

Sigfrid says, “You sound tired, Rob.”

Well, that was understandable enough. I had gone off to Hawaii for the weekend. Some of my money was in tourism there, so was all tax deductible. It was a lovely couple of days on the Big Island, with a two-hour stockholders’ meeting in the morning, at afternoons with one of those beautiful Island girls on the beach sailing in glass-bottomed catamarans, watching the big mantas glide underneath, begging for crumbs. But coming back, you fight time zones all the way, and I was exhausted.

Only that is not the sort of thing that Sigfrid really wants to hear about. He doesn’t care if you’re physically exhausted. He doest care if you’ve got a broken leg; he only wants to know if you dream about screwing your mother.

I say that. I say, “I’m tired, all right, Sigfrid, but why don’t you stop making small talk? Get right into my Oedipal feelings about Ma.”

“Did you have any, Robby?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Do you want to talk about them, Robby?”

“Not particularly.”

He waits, and I wait, too. Sigfrid has been being cute again, and now his room is fixed up like a boy’s room from forty years ago. Crossed Ping-Pong paddles hologrammed on the wall. A fake window with a fake view of the Montana Rockies in a snowstorm. A hologrammed cassette shelf of boys’ stories on tape, Tom Sawyer and Lost Race of Mars and- I can’t read the rest of the titles. It is all very homey, but not in the least like my own room as a boy, which was tiny, narrow, and almost filled by the old sofa I slept on.

“Do you know what you want to talk about, Rob?” Sigfrid probes gently.

“You bet.” Then I reconsider. “Well, no. I’m not sure.” Actually I do know. Something had hit me on the way back from Hawaii, very hard. It’s a five-hour flight. Half the time I had spent drenched in tears. It was funny. There was this lovely hapi-haole girl flying east in the seat next to me, and I had decided right away to get to know her better. And the stewardess was the same one I’d had before, and she, I already knew better.

So there I was, sitting at the very back of the first-class section of the SST, taking drinks from the stewardess, chatting with my pretty hapi-haole. And — every time the girl was drowsing, or in the ladies’ room, and the stewardess was looking the other way — racked with silent, immense, tearful sobs.

And then one of them would look my way again and I would be smiling, alert, and on the make.

“Do you want to just say what you’re feeling at this second, Rob?”

“I would in a minute, Sigirid, if I knew what it was.”

“Don’t you know, really? Can’t you remember what was in your head while you weren’t talking, just now?”

“Sure I can!” I hesitate, then I say, “Oh, hell, Sigfrid, I guess I was just waiting to be coaxed. I had an insight the other day, and it hurt. Oh, wow, you wouldn’t believe how it hurt. I was crying like a baby.”

“What was the insight, Robby?”

“I’m trying to tell you. It was about — well, it was partly about my mother. But it was also about, well, you know, Dane Metchnikov. I had these… I had—”

“I think you’re trying to say something about the fantasies you had of having anal sex with Dane Metchnikov, Rob. Is that right?”

“Yeah. You remember good, Sigfrid. When I was crying, it was about my mother. Partly…”

“You told me that, Rob.”

“Right.” And I close up. Sigfrid waits. I wait, too. I suppose I want to be coaxed some more, and after a while Sigfrid obliges me:

“Let’s see if I can help you, Rob,” he says. “What do crying about your mother, and your fantasies about anal sex with Dane, have to do with each other?”

I feel something happening inside of me. It feels as though the soft, wet inside of my chest is starting to bubble into my throat. I can tell that when my voice comes out, it is going to be tremulous and desperately forlorn if I don’t control it. So I try to control it, although I know perfectly well that I have no secrets of this sort from Sigfrid; he can read his sensors and know what is going on inside me from the tremble of a triceps or the dampness of a palm.

But I make the effort anyway. In the tones of a biology instructor explaining a prepared frog I say: “See, Sigfrid, my mother loved me. I knew it. You know it. It was a logical demonstration; she had no choice. And Freud said once that no boy who is certain he was his mother’s favorite ever grows up to be neurotic. Only—”

“Please, Robbie, that isn’t quite right, and besides you’re intellectualizing. You know you really don’t want to put in all these preambles. You’re stalling, aren’t you?”

Other times I would tear the circuits out of his chips for that, but this time he has my mood gauged correctly. “All right. But I did know that my mother loved me. She couldn’t help it! I was her only son. My father was dead — don’t clear your throat, Sigfrid, I’m getting to it. It was a logical necessity that she loved me, and I understood it that way with no doubt at all in my mind, but she never said so. Never once.”

“You mean that never, in your whole life, did she say to you, ’I love you, son?’”

“No!” I scream. Then I get control again. “Or not directly, no. I mean, once when I was like eighteen years old and going to sleep in the next room, I heard her to say to one of her friends — girlfriends, I mean — that she really thought I was a tremendous kid. She was proud of me. I don’t remember what I’d done, something, won a prize or got a job, but she right that minute was proud of me and loved me, and said so… But not to me.”

“Please go on, Rob,” Sigfrid says after a moment.

“I am going on! Give me a minute. It hurts; I guess it’s what you call primal pain.”

“Please don’t diagnose yourself, Rob. Just say it. Let it come out.”

“Oh, shit.”

I reach for a cigarette and then stop the motion. That’s usually a good thing to do when things get tight with Sigfrid, because it will almost always distract him into an argument about whether I am trying to relieve tension instead of dealing with it; but this time I am too disgusted with myself, with Sigfrid, even with my mother. I want to get it over with. I say, “Look, Sigfrid, here’s how it was. I loved my mother a lot, and I know — knew! — she loved me. I knew she wasn’t very good at showing it.”

I suddenly realize I have a cigarette in my hands, and rolling it around without lighting it and, wondrous to say, Sigfrid hasn’t even commented on it. I plunge right on: “She didn’t say the words to me. Not only that. It’s funny, Sigfrid, but, you know I can’t remember her ever touching me. I mean, not really. She would kiss me good night, sometimes. On the top of the head. And I remember she told me stories. And she was always there when needed her. But—”

I have to stop for a moment, to get control of my voice again, so I inhale deeply and evenly through my nose, concentrating breath flow.

“But you see, Sigfrid,” I say, rehearsing the words ahead of time and pleased with the clarity and balance with which I deliver them, “she didn’t touch me much. Except for one way. She was very good to me when I was sick. I was sick a lot. Everybody around the food mines has runny noses, skin infections — you know. She got me everything I needed. She was there, God knows how, holding down a job and taking care of me, all at once. And when I was sick she…”

After a moment Sigfrid says, “Go on, Robbie. Say it.”

I try, but I am still stuck, and he says:

“Just say it the fastest way you can. Get it out. Don’t worry if you understand, or if it makes sense. Just get rid of the words.”

“Well, she would take my temperature,” I explain. “You know, stick a thermometer into me. And she’d hold me for, you know, whatever it is, three minutes or so. And then she’d take the thermometer out and read it.”

I am right on the verge of bawling. I’m willing to let it happen, but first I want to follow this thing through; it is almost a sexual thing, like when you are getting right up to the moment of decision with some person and you don’t think you really want to let her be that much a part of you but you go ahead anyhow. I save up voice control, measuring it out so that I won’t run out before I finish. Sigfrid doesn’t say anything, and after a moment I manage the words:

“You see how it is, Sigfrid? It’s funny. All my life now — what is it, maybe forty years since then? And I still have this crazy notion that being loved has something to do with having things stuck up my ass.”