Gateway

Chapter 6

Five permanent-party noncoms, one from each of the cruisers, patted us down, checked our IDs and turned us over to a Corporation screening clerk. Sheri giggled when the Russian’s pat hit a sensitive spot and whispered, “What do they think we’re smuggling in, Rob?”

I shushed her. The Corporation woman had taken our landing cards from the Chinese Spec/3 in charge of the detail and was calling out our names. There were eight of us altogether. “Welcome aboard,” she said. “Each one of you fish will get a proctor assigned to you. He’ll help you get straightened out with a place to live, answer your questions, let you know where to report for the medical and your classes. Also, he’ll give you a copy of the contract to sign. You’ve each had eleven hundred and fifty dollars deducted from your cash on deposit with the ship that brought you here; that’s your life-support tax for the first ten days. The rest you can draw on any time by writing a P-check. Your proctor will show you how. Linscott!”

The middle-aged black man from Baja California raised his hand. “Your proctor is Shota Tarasvili. Broadhead!”

“Here I am.”

“Dane Metchnikov,” said the Corporation clerk.

I started to look around, but the person who had to be Dane Metchnikov was already coming toward me. He took my arm very firmly, started to lead me away and then said, “Hi.”

I held back. “I’d like to say good-bye to my friend—”

“You’re all in the same area,” he grunted. “Come on.”

So within two hours of arriving on Gateway I had a room, a proctor, and a contract. I signed the articles of agreement right away. I didn’t even read them. Metchnikov looked surprised. “Don’t you want to know what they say?”

“Not right this minute.” I mean, what was the advantage? If I hadn’t liked what they said, I might have changed my mind, and what other options did I have, really? Being a prospector is pretty scary. I hate the idea of being killed. I hate the idea of dying at all, ever; not being alive anymore, having everything stop, knowing that all those other people would go on living and having sex and joy without me being there to share it. But I didn’t hate it as much as I hated the idea of going back to the food mines.

Metchnikov hung himself by his collar to a hook on the wall of my room, to be out of the way while I put away my belongings. He was a squat, pale man, not very talkative. He didn’t seem to be a very likable person, but at least he didn’t laugh at me because I was a clumsy new fish. Gateway is about as close to zero-G as you get. I had never experienced low-gravity before; you don’t get much of it in Wyoming, so I kept misjudging. When I said something, Metchnikov said, “You’ll get used to it. Have you got a toke?”

“Afraid not.”

He sighed, looking a little like somebody’s Buddha hung up on the wall, with his legs pulled up.

He looked at his time dial and said, “I’ll take you out for a drink later. It’s a custom. Only it’s not very interesting until about twenty-two hundred. The Blue Hell’ll be full of people then, and I’ll introduce you around. See what you can find. What are you, straight, gay, what?”

“I’m pretty straight.”

“Whatever. You’re on your own about that, though. I’ll introduce you to whoever I know, but then you’re on your own. You better get used to that right away. Have you got your map?”

“Map?”

“Oh, hell, man! It’s in that packet of stuff they gave you.”

I opened the lockers at random until I found where I had put the envelope. Inside it were my copy of the articles of agreement, a booklet entitled Welcome to Gateway, my room assignment, my health questionnaire that I would have to fill out before 0800 the next morning… and a folded sheet that, opened up, looked like a wiring diagram with names on it.

“That’s it. Can you locate where you are? Remember your room number: Level Babe, Quadrant East, Tunnel Eight, Room Fifty-one. Write it down.”

“It’s already written here, Dane, on my room assignment.”

“Well, don’t lose it.” Dane reached behind his neck and unhooked himself, let himself fall gently to the floor. “So why don’t you look around by yourself for a while. I’ll meet you here. Anything else you need to know right now?”

I thought, while he looked impatient. “Well — mind if I ask you a question about you, Dane? Have you been out yet?”

“Six trips. All right, I’ll see you at twenty-two hundred.” Then he pushed the flexible door open, slipped out into the jungly green of the corridor and was gone.

I let myself flop — so gently, so slowly — into my one real chair and tried to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.

I don’t know if I can make you feel it, how the universe looked to me from Gateway: like being young with Full Medical. Like a menu in the best restaurant in the world, when somebody else is going to pick up the check. Like a girl you’ve just met who likes you. Like an unopened gift.

The things that hit you first on Gateway are the tininess of the tunnels, feeling tinier even than they are because they’re lined with windowboxy things of plants; the vertigo from the low gravity, and the stink. You get Gateway a little bit at a time. There’s no way of seeing it all in one glance; it is nothing but a maze of tunnels in the rock. I’m not even sure they’ve all been explored yet. Certainly there are miles of them that nobody ever goes into, or not very often.

That’s the way the Heechees were. They grabbed the asteroid, plated it over with wall metal, drove tunnels into it, filled them with whatever sort of possessions they had — most were empty by the time we got there, just as everything that ever belonged to the Heechees is, all over the universe. And then they left it, for whatever reason they left.

The closest thing to a central point in Gateway is Heecheetown. That’s a spindle-shaped cave near the geometric center of the asteroid. They say that when the Heechees built Gateway they lived there. We lived there too, at first, or close to it, all of us new peopie off Earth. (And elsewhere. A ship from Venus had come in just before ours.) That’s where the company housing is. Later on, if we got rich on a prospecting trip, we could move out farther toward the surface, where there was a little more gravity and less noise. And above all, less smell. A couple thousand people had breathed the air I was breathing, one time or another, voided the water I drank and exuded their smells into the atmosphere. The people didn’t stay around very long, most of them. But the smells were still there.

I didn’t care about the smell. I didn’t care about any of it. Gateway was my big, fat lottery ticket to Full Medical, a nine-room house, a couple of kids, and a lot of joy. I had won one lottery already. It made me cocky about my chances of winning another.

It was all exciting, although at the same time it was dingy enough, too. There wasn’t much luxury around. For your $238,575 what you get is transportation to Gateway, ten days’ worth of food, lodging, and air, a cram course in ship handling, and an invitation to sign up on the next ship out. Or any ship you like. They don’t make you take any particular ship, or for that matter any ship at all.

The Corporation doesn’t make any profit on any of that. All the prices are fixed at about cost. That doesn’t mean they were cheap, and it certainly doesn’t mean that what you got was good. The food was just about what I had been digging, and eating, all my life. The lodging was about the size of a large steamer trunk, one chair, a bunch of lockers, a fold-down table, and a hammock that you could stretch across it, corner to corner, when you wanted to sleep.

My next-door neighbors were a family from Venus. I caught a glimpse through the part-opened door. Imagine! Four of them sleeping in one of those cubicles! It looked like two to a hammock, with two hammocks crisscrossed across the room. On the other side was Sheri’s room. I scratched at her door, but she didn’t answer. The door wasn’t locked. Nobody locks his door much on Gateway, because there’s nothing much worth stealing among other reasons. Sheri wasn’t there. The clothes she had been wearing on the ship were thrown all over.

I guessed that she had gone out exploring, and wished I had been a little earlier. I would have liked someone to explore with. I leaned against the ivy growing out of one wall of the tunnel and pulled out my map.

It did give me some idea of what to look for. There were things marked “Central Park” and “Lake Superior.” What were they? I wondered about “Gateway Museum,” which sounded interesting, and “Terminal Hospital,” which sounded pretty bad-I found out later that “terminal” meant as in end of the line, on your return trip from wherever you went to. The Corporation must have known that it had another sound to it, too; but the Corporation never went to much trouble to spare a prospector’s feelings.

What I really wanted was to see a ship!

As soon as that thought percolated out of my mind I realized that I wanted it a lot. I puzzled over how to get to the outer skin, where the ship docks were located of course. Holding onto a railing with one hand, I tried to keep the map open with the other. It didn’t take me long to locate myself. I was at a five-way intersection which seemed to be the one marked “East Star Babe G” on the map. One of the five tunnels out of it led to a dropshaft, but I couldn’t tell which.

I tried one at random, wound up in a dead end, and on the way back scratched on a door for directions. It opened. “Excuse me—” I said… and stopped.

The man who opened the door seemed as tall as I, but was not. His eyes were on a level with my own. But he stopped at the waist. He had no legs.

He said something, but I didn’t understand it; it wasn’t in English. It wouldn’t have mattered. My attention was taken up with him. He wore gauzy bright fabric strapped from wrists to waist, and he fluttered the wings gently to stay in the air. It wasn’t hard, in Gateway’s low-G. But it was surprising to see. I said, “I’m sorry. I just wanted to know how to get to Level Tanya.” I was trying not to stare, but I wasn’t succeeding.

He smiled, white teeth in an unlined, old face. He had jet eyes under a crest of short white hair. He pushed past me out into the corridor and said in excellent English, “Certainly. Take the first turning on your right. Go to the next star, and take the second turning on your left. It’ll be marked.” He indicated with his chin the direction toward the star.

I thanked him and left him floating behind me. I wanted to turn back, but it didn’t seem good manners. It was strange. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be any cripples on Gateway.

That’s how naive I was then.

Having seen him, I knew Gateway in a way I had not known it from the statistics. The statistics are clear enough, and we all studied them, all of us who came up as prospectors, and all of that vastly larger number who only wished they could. About eighty percent of flights from Gateway come up empty. About fifteen percent don’t come back at all. So one person in twenty, on the average, comes back from a prospecting trip with something that Gateway — that mankind in general — can make a profit on. Most of even those are lucky if they collect enough to pay their costs for getting here in the first place.

And if you get hurt while you’re out… well, that’s tough. Terminal Hospital is about as well equipped as any anywhere. But you have to get there for it to do you any good. You can be months in transit. If you get hurt at the other end of your trip — and that’s where it usually happens — there’s not much that can be done for you until you get back to Gateway. By then it can be too late to make you whole, and likely enough too late to keep you alive.

There’s no charge for a return trip to where you came from, by the way. The rockets always come up fuller than they return. They call it wastage.

The return trip is free… but to what?

I let go the down-cable on Level Tanya, turned into a tunnel, and ran into a man with cap and armband. Corporation Police. He didn’t speak English, but he pointed and the size of him was convincing; I grabbed the up-cable, ascended one level, crossed to another dropshaft, and tried again.

The only difference was that this time the guard spoke English. “You can’t come through here,” he said.

“I just want to see the ships.”

“Sure. You can’t. You’ve got to have a blue badge,” he said, tapping his own. “That’s Corporation specialist, flight crew or maintenance.”

“I am flight crew.”

He grinned. “You’re a new fish off the Earth transport, aren’t you? Friend, you’ll be flight crew when you sign on for a flight and not before. Go on back up.”

I said reasonably, “You understand how I feel, don’t you? I just want to get a look.”

“You can’t, till you’ve finished your course, except they’ll bring you down here for part of it. After that, you’ll see more than you want.”

I argued a little more, but he had too many arguments on his side. But as I reached for the up-cable the tunnel seemed to lurch and a blast of sound hit my ears. For a minute I thought the asteroid was blowing up. I stared at the guard, who shrugged, in a not unfriendly way. “I only said you couldn’t see them,” he said. “I didn’t say you couldn’t hear them.”

I bit back the “wow” or “Holy God!” that I really wanted to say, and said, “Where do you suppose that one’s going?”

“Come back in six months. Maybe we’ll know by then.”

Well, there was nothing in that to feel elated about. All the same, I felt elated. After all those years in the food mines, here I was, not only on Gateway, but right there when some of those intrepid prospectors set out on a trip that would bring them fame and incredible fortune! Never mind the odds. This was really living on the top line.

So I wasn’t paying much attention to what I was doing, and as a result I got lost again on the way back. I reached Level Babe ten minutes late.

Dane Metchnikov was striding down the tunnel away from my room. He didn’t appear to recognize me. I think he might have passed me if I hadn’t put out my arm.

“Huh,” he grunted. “You’re late.”

“I was down on Level Tanya, trying to get a look at the ships.”

“Huh. You can’t go down there unless you have a blue badge or a bangle.”

Well, I had found that out already, hadn’t I? So I tagged along after him, without wasting energy on attempts at further conversation.

Metchnikov was a pale man, except for the marvelously ornate curled whisker that followed the line of his jaw. It seemed to be waxed, so that each separate curl stood out with a life of its own. “Waxed” was wrong. It had something in it besides hair, but whatever it was wasn’t stiff. The whole thing moved as he moved, and when he talked or smiled the muscles moored to the jawbone made the beard ripple and flow. He finally did smile, after we got to the Blue Hell. He bought the first drink, explaining carefully that that was the custom, but that the custom only called for one. I bought the second. The smile came when, out of turn, I also bought the third.

Over the noise in the Blue Hell talk wasn’t easy, but I told him about hearing a launch. “Right,” he said, lifting his glass. “Hope they have a good trip.” He wore six blue-glowing Heechee metal bracelets, hardly thicker than wire. They tinkled faintly as he swallowed half the drink.

“Are they what I think they are?” I asked. “One for every trip out?”

He drank the other half of the drink. “That’s right. Now I’m going to dance,” he said. My eyes followed his back as he lunged toward a woman in a luminous pink sari. He wasn’t much of a talker, that was sure.

On the other hand, at that noise level you couldn’t talk much anyhow. You couldn’t really dance much, either. The Blue Hell was up in the center of Gateway, part of the spindle-shaped cave. Rotational G was so low that we didn’t weigh more than two or three pounds; if anyone had tried to waltz or polka he would have gone flying. So they did those no-touching junior-high-school sort of dances that appear to be designed so fourteen-year-old boys won’t have to look up at too sharp an angle to the fourteen-year-old girls they’re dancing with. You pretty much kept your feet in place, and your head and arms and shoulders and hips went where they wanted to. Me, I like to touch. But you can’t have everything. I like to dance, anyway.

I saw Sheri, way across the room, with an older woman I took to be her proctor, and danced one with her. “How do you like it so far?” I shouted over the tapes. She nodded and shouted something back, I couldn’t say what. I danced with an immense black woman who wore two blue bracelets, then with Sheri again, then with a girl Dane Metchnikov dropped on me, apparently because he wanted to be rid of her, then with a tall, strong-faced woman with the blackest, thickest eyebrows I had ever seen under a female hairdo. (She wore it pulled back in two pigtails that floated around behind her as she moved.) She wore a couple of bracelets, too. And between dances I drank.

They had tables that were meant for parties of eight or ten, but there weren’t any parties of eight or ten. People sat where they wanted to, and took each other’s seats without worrying about whether the owner was coming back. For a while there were half a dozen crewmen in Brazilian Navy dress whites sitting with me, talking to each other in Portuguese. A man with one golden earring joined me for a while, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying, either. (I did, pretty well, understand what he meant.)

There was that trouble all the time I was in Gateway. There always is. Gateway sounds like an international conference when the translation equipment has broken down. There’s a sort of lingua franca you hear a lot, pieces of a dozen different languages thrown together, like, “Ecoutez, gospodin, tu es verreckt.” I danced twice with one of the Brazilians, a skinny, dark little girl with a hawk nose but sweet brown eyes, and tried to say a few simple words. Maybe she understood me. One of the men she was with, though, spoke fine English, introduced himself and the others all around. I didn’t catch any of the names but his, Francesco Hereira. He bought me a drink, and let me buy one for the crowd, and then I realized I’d seen him before: He was one of the detail that searched us on the way in.

While we were commenting on that, Dane leaned over me and grunted in my ear, “I’m going to gamble. So long, unless you really want to come.”

It wasn’t the warmest invitation I’d ever had, but the noise in the Blue Hell was getting heavy. I tagged after him and discovered a full-scale casino just next to the Blue Hell, with blackjack tables, poker, a slow-motion roulette with a big, dense ball, craps with dice that took forever to stop, even a roped-off section for baccarat. Metchnikov headed for the blackjack tables and drummed his fingers on the back of a player’s chair, waiting for an opening. Around then he noticed I had come with him.

“Oh.” He looked around the room. “What do you like to play?”

“I’ve played it all,” I said, slurring the words a little. Bragging a little, too. “Maybe a little baccarat.”

He looked at me first with respect, then amusement. “Fifty’s the minimum bet.”

I had five or six thousand dollars left in my account. I shrugged.

“That’s fifty thousand,” he said.

I choked. He said absently, moving over behind a player whose chip stack was running out, “You can get down for ten dollars at roulette. Hundred minimum for most of the others. Oh, there’s a ten-dollar slot machine around somewhere, I think.” He dived for the open chair and that was the last I saw of him.

I watched for a moment and realized that the black-eyebrowed girl was at the same table, busy studying her cards. She didn’t look up.

I could see I wasn’t going to be able to afford much gambling here. At that point I realized I couldn’t really afford all the drinks I’d been buying, either, and then my interior sensory system began to make me realize just how many of those drinks I had had. The last thing I realized was that I had to get back to my room, pretty fast.