Gateway

Chapter 25

There had been a lot of changes on Gateway while I was Out. The head tax had been raised. The Corporation wanted to get rid of some of the extra hangers-on, like Shicky and me; bad news meant that my prepaid per capita wasn’t good for two or three weeks, it was only good for ten days. They had imported a bunch of double-domes from Earth, astronomers, xenotechs, mathmaticians, even old Professor Hegramet was up from Earth, bruised from the lift-off deltas but hopping spryly around the tunnels.

One thing that hadn’t changed was the Evaluation Board, and I was impaled on the hot seat in front of it, squirming while my friend Emma told me what a fool I was. Mr. Hsien was actually doing the telling, Emma only translated. But she loved her voice: “I warned you you’d fuck up, Broadhead. You should have listened to me. Why did you change the setting?”

“I told you. When I found out I was at Gateway Two I couldn’t handle it. I wanted to go somewhere else.”

“Extraordinarily stupid of you, Broadhead.”

I glanced at Hsien. He had hung himself up on the wall by his rolled-up collar and was hanging there, beaming benignly, hands folded. “Emma,” I said, “do whatever you want to do, but get off my back.”

She said sunnily, “I am doing what I want to do, Broadhead, because it’s what I have to do. It’s my job. You knew it was against the rules to change the settings.”

“What rules? It was my ass that was on the line.”

“The rules that say you shouldn’t destroy a ship,” she explained. I didn’t answer, and she chirped some sort of a translation to Hsien, who listened gravely, pursed his lips and then delivered two neat paragraphs in Mandarin. You could hear the punctuation.

“Mr. Hsien says,” said Emma, “that you are a very irresponsible person. You have killed an irreplaceable piece of equipment. It was not your property. It belonged to the whole human race.” He lilted a few more sentences, and she finished: “We cannot make a final determination of your liability until we have further information about the condition of the ship you damaged. According to Mr. Ituno he will have a complete check made of the ship at the first opportunity. There were two xenotechs in transit for the new planet, Aphrodite, at the time of his report. They will have reached Gateway Two by now, and we can expect their findings, probably, with the next out-pilot. Then we will call you again.”

She paused, looking at me, and I took it the interview was over. “Thanks a lot,” I said, and pushed myself toward the door. She let me get all the way to it before she said:

“One more thing. Mr. Ituno’s report mentions that you worked on loading and fabricating suits on Gateway Two. He authorizes a per diem payment to you amounting to, let me see, twenty-five hundred dollars. And your out-captain, Hester Bergowiz, has authorized payment of one percent of her bonus to you for services during the return flight; so your account has been credited accordingly.”

“I didn’t have a contract with her,” I said, surprised.

“No. But she feels you should have a share. A small share, to be sure. Altogether—” she looked under a paper, “it comes to twenty-five hundred plus fifty-five hundred — eight thousand dollars your account has been credited with.”

Eight thousand dollars! I headed for a dropshaft, grabbed an up-cable and pondered. It was not enough to make any real difference. It certainly would not be enough to pay the damages they would soak me for messing up a ship. There wasn’t enough money in the universe to pay that, if they wanted to charge me full replacement cost; there was no way to replace it.

On the other hand, it was eight thousand dollars more than I’d had.

I celebrated by buying myself a drink at the Blue Hell. While I was drinking it, I thought about my options. The more I thought about them, the more they dwindled away.

They would find me culpable, no doubt about that, and the least they’d assess me would be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, I didn’t have it. It might be a lot more, but that didn’t make any difference; once they take away all you have, there isn’t anything left anyway.

So when you came right down to it, my eight thousand dollars was fairy gold. It could vanish with the morning dew. As soon as the xenotech’s report came in from Gateway Two the Board would reconvene and that would be the end of that.

So there was no particular reason to stretch my money. I might as well spend it.

There was no reason, either, to think about getting back my old job as an ivy-planter — even assuming I could get it, with Shicky fired from his job as straw-boss. The minute they made a judgment against me my credit balance would disappear. So would my prepaid per-capita payment. I would be subject to immediate defenestration.

If there happened to be an Earth-bound ship in port at the time I could just get on board, and sooner or later I would be back in Wyoming looking for my old job at the food mines. If there wasn’t a ship, then I was in trouble. I might be able to talk the American cruiser, or maybe the Brazilian one if Francy Hereira was in a position to pull strings for me, into taking me aboard for a while until a ship showed up. Or I might not.

Considered carefully, the chances were not very hopeful.

The very best thing I could do would be to act before the Board did, and there there were two choices.

I could take the next ship in port back to Earth and the food mines, without waiting for the Board’s decision.

Or I could ship out again.

They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever… and the other one scared me out of my mind.

Gateway was like a gentlemen’s club in which you never knew what members were in town. Louise Forehand was gone; her husband, Sess, was patiently holding the fort, waiting for her or their remaining daughter to return before shipping out again himself. He helped me move back into my room, which had been temporarily occupied by three Hungarian women until they had shipped out together in a Three. Moving took no great effort; I didn’t own anything anymore, except what I had just bought in the commissary.

The only permanent feature was Shicky Bakin, unfailingly friendly and always there. I asked him if he had heard from Klara. He had not. “Go out again, Rob,” he urged. “it is the only thing to do.”

“Yeah.” I did not want to argue it; he was incontestably right. Maybe I would.… I said, “I wish I weren’t a coward, Shicky, but I am. I just don’t know how I can make myself get into a ship again. I don’t have the courage to face a hundred days of fearing death every minute.”

He chuckled, and hopped off the chest of drawers to pat my shoulder. “You don’t need so much courage,” he said, flapping back to the chest. “You only need courage for one day: just to get in the ship and go. Then you don’t have to have courage anymore, because you don’t anymore have a choice.”

“I think I could have done it,” I said, “if Metchnikov’s theories about the color codes had been right. But some of the ’safe’ ones are dead.”

“It was only a statistical matter, Rob. It is true that there is a better safety record now, and a better success record, too. Only marginal, yes. But better.”

“The ones that died are just as dead,” I said. “Still — perhaps I’ll talk to Dane again.”

Shicky looked surprised. “He’s out.”

“When?”

“Around when you left. I thought you knew.”

I had forgotten. “Wonder if he found the soft touch he was looking for.”

Shicky scratched his chin with his shoulder, keeping himself balanced with lazy wing strokes. Then he hopped off the chest and fluttered over to the piezophone. “Let’s see,” he said, punched buttons. The locator board jumped into view on the screen. “Launch 88-173,” he read. “Bonus, $150,000. That’s not much, is it?”

“I thought he was going for something bigger.”

“Well,” said Shicky, reading, “he didn’t get it. Says he came back last night.”

Since Metchnikov had halfway promised to share his apt with me, it made sense for me to talk to him; but I wasn’t so sensible. I got as far as checking out that he had returned with a find and with nothing to show for his efforts but the bonus; didn’t go to see him.

I didn’t do much of anything, in fact. I hung around.

Gateway is not the most amenity-filled place to live in the universe, but I found things to do. It beat the food mines. Each passing hour brought me an hour closer to the time when the tech’s report would arrive, but I managed not to think about that most of the time. I nursed drinks in the Blue Hell, making friends with the tourists, the visiting cruiser crews, the returnees, the fish that kept coming up from the sweltering planets, looking I guess, for another Klara. None showed up.

I read over the letters I had written her on the trip back from Gateway Two, and then I tore them up. Instead I wrote a silly short note to apologize and tell her that I loved her and took it down to radio it off to her on Venus. But she wasn’t there. I’d forgotten how long the slow Hohmann orbits took. The flight office identified the ship she had left on easily enough; it was a right-angle orbiter, which spent its whole life changing delta to rendezvous with plane-of-the-ecliptic flights between the planets. According to the records, her ship had made a rendezvous with a Mars-bound freighter, and then a Venus-bound high-G liner; she had presumably transferred to one of them, but didn’t know which, and neither one of them would reach its destination for a month or more yet.

I sent duplicate copies to each ship, but there wasn’t any answer.

The closest I came to a new girlfriend was a Gunner Third from the Brazilian cruiser. Francy Hereira brought her around. “This is Susie, my cousin,” he said, introducing us; and then, privately, later, “You should know, Rob, that I do not have family feelings about cousins.” All the crews got shore leave on Gateway from time to time, and while, as I have said, Gateway wasn’t Waikiki or Cannes, it beat the bare bones of a combat vessel. Susie Hereira was very young. She said she was nineteen and was supposed to be at least seventeen to be in the Brazilian Navy at all, but she didn’t look it. She did not speak much English, but we did not need much language in common to drink at the Blue Hell; and whe went to bed we discovered that although we had very little conversation in a verbal sense we communicated beautifully with bodies.

But Susie was only there one day a week, and that left a deal of time which needed destroying.

I tried everything: a reinforcement group, group-hugging, working out loves and hostilities on each other. Old Hegrai lecture series on the Heechee. A program of talks on astrophysics with a slant toward earning science bonuses from the Corporation. By careful budgeting of my time I managed to use it all up, decision was postponed day by day.

I do not want to give the impression that destroying time was a conscious plan in my mind; I was living from day to day, and day was full. On a Thursday Susie and Francy Hereira would check in, and the three of us might have lunch at the Blue Hell. Then Francy would go off to roam by himself, or pick up a girl to take a swim in Lake Superior, while Susie and I would retire to my room and my dope sticks to swim on those warmer waters of a bed. After dinner, some sort of entertainment. Thursday was the night the astrophysics lectures took place, and we would hear all about the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, or red giants and blue dwarfs or neutron stars, or black holes. The professor was a fat old grabber from some jerkwater college near Smolensk, but through the dirty jokes there was poetry and beauty in what he talked about. He dwelt on the old stars that gave birth to us, spitting silicates and magnesium carbonate into space to form planets, hydrocarbons to form ourselves. He talked about the neutron stars that bent the gravity well around them; we knew them, because two launches had killed themselves, sheared rubble, by entering normal space too close to one of those highly dense dwarfs. He told us about the black holes that were places where a dense star had been, now detectable only by the observable fact that they swallowed everything nearby, even light; they had not merely bent the gravity well, they had wrapped it around themselves like a blanket. He described stars as thin as air, immense clouds of glowing gas; told us about the prestars of the Orion Nebula, just now blossoming into loose knots of warm gas that might in a million years be suns. His lectures were very popular; even old hands like Shicky and Dane Metchnikov showed up. While I listened to the professor I could feel the wonder and beauty of space. It was too immense and glorious to be frightening, and it was not until later that I would relate those sinks of radiation and swamps of thin gas to me, to the frail, frightened, pain-sensitive creation that was the body I inhabited. And then I would think about going out among those remote titans and my soul curled up inside me.

After one of those meetings I said good-bye to Susie and Francy and sat in an alcove near the lecture room, half hidden by the ivy, and despondently smoked a joint. Shicky found me there, and halted just in front of me, supporting himself on his wings. “I was looking for you, Rob,” he said, and stopped.

The grass was just beginning to hit me. “Interesting lecture,” I said absently, reaching for the good feeling that I wanted from the joint and not really very interested in whether Shicky was there or not.

“You missed the most interesting part,” said Shicky.

It occurred to me that he was looking both fearful and hopeful; there was something on his mind. I took another hit, and offered him the joint; he shook his head. “Rob,” he said, “I think there is something worth having coming up.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really, Rob! Something quite good. And soon.”

I was not ready for this. I wanted to go on smoking my joint until the temporary thrill of the lecture had worn off, so that I could go back to destroying the days. The last thing I wanted was to hear about some new mission that my guilt would make me want to sign on for, and my fear would abort.

Shicky caught the shelf of ivy and held himself up by it, looking at me curiously. “Rob-friend,” he said, “if I can find something out for you will you help me?”

“Help you how?”

“Take me with you!” he cried. “I can do everything but go in the lander. And this mission, I think, is one where it does not so much matter. There is a bonus for everyone, even for someone who must remain in orbit.”

“What are you talking about?” The grass was hitting me now; I could feel the warmth behind my knees and the gentle blur all around me.

“Metchnikov was talking to the lecturer,” Shicky said. “I think from what he said that he knows of a new mission. Only — they spoke in Russian, and I did not understand very well. But it is the one he has been waiting for.”

I said reasonably, “The last one he went out on wasn’t much, was it?”

“This is different!”

“I don’t think he would really cut me in on anything good—”

“Certainly not, if you don’t ask.”

“Oh, hell,” I grumbled. “All right. I’ll talk to him.”

Shicky beamed. “And then, Rob, please — take me with you?”

I stubbed out the joint, less than half smoked; I felt as though I wanted what was left of my wits about me. “I’ll do what I can,” I said, and headed back for the lecture room just as Metchnikov was coming out.

We had not spoken since he had returned. He looked as solid and broad as ever, and his fringe of chin whiskers was neatly trimmed. “Hello, Broadhead,” he said suspiciously.

I didn’t waste words. “I hear you’ve got something good coming up. Can I go along?”

He didn’t waste words, either. “No.” He looked at me with frank dislike. Partly that was what I had expected from him all along, but I was pretty sure part of it was because he had heard about me and Klara.

“You are going out,” I persisted. “What is it, a One?” He stroked his whiskers. “No,” he said reluctantly, “it isn’t a One. It’s two Fives.”

“Two Fives?”

He stared at me suspiciously for a moment, and then almost grinned; I did not like him when he smiled, it was always a question in my mind what he was smiling about.

“All right,” he said. “You want in, you can have it, for all of me. It’s not up to me, of course. You’ll have to ask Emma; she’s doing a briefing tomorrow morning. But she might let you go a science mission, with a minimum million-dollar bonus. You’re involved.”

“I’m involved?” That was something out of an unexpected rection! “Involved how?”

“Ask Emma,” he said, and brushed past me.