Gateway

Chapter 8

“Good morning,” said somebody, speaking right into the middle of a dream about getting stuck in a sort of quicksand in the middle of the Orion Nebula. “I have brought you some tea.”

I opened an eye. I looked over the edge of the hammock into a nearby pair of coalsack-black eyes set into a sand-colored face. I was fully dressed and hung over; something smelled very bad, and I realized it was me.

“My name,” said the person with the tea, “is Shikitei Baldu. Please drink this tea. It will help rehydrate your tissues.”

I looked a little further and saw that he ended at the waist; he was the legless man with the strap-on wings whom I had seen in the tunnel the day before. “Uh,” I said, and tried a little harder and got as far as, “Good morning.” The Orion Nebula was fading back into the dream, and so was the sensation of having to push through rapidly solidifying gas clouds. The bad smell remained. The room smelled excessively foul, even by Gateway standards, and I realized I had thrown up on the floor. I was only millimeters from doing it again. Bakin, slowly stroking the air with his wings, dexterously dropped a stoppered flask next to me on the hammock at the end of one stroke. Then he propelled himself to the top of my chest of drawers, sat there, and said:

“I believe you have a medical examination this morning at oh eight hundred hours.”

“Do I?” I managed to get the cap off the tea and took a sip. It was very hot, sugarless, and almost tasteless, but it did seem to tip the scales inside my gut in the direction opposite to throwing up again.

“Yes. I think so. It’s customary. And in addition, your P-phone has rung several times.”

I went back to, “Uh?”

“I presume it was your proctor caffing you to remind you. It is now seven-fifteen, Mr.—”

“Broadhead,” I said thickly, and then more carefully: “My name is Rob Broadhead.”

“Yes. I took the liberty of making sure you were awake. Please enjoy your tea, Mr. Broadhead. Enjoy your stay on Gateway.”

He nodded, fell forward off the chest, swooped toward the door, handed himself through it, and was gone. With my head thudding at every change of attitude I got myself out of the hammock, trying to avoid the nastier spots on the floor, and somehow succeeded in getting reasonably clean. I thought of depilating, but I had about twelve days on a beard and decided to let it go for a while; it no longer looked unshaven, exactly, and I just didn’t have the strength.

When I wobbled into the medical examining room I was only about five minutes late. The others in my group were all ahead of me, so I had to wait and go last. They extracted three kinds of blood from me, fingertip, inside of the elbow, and lobe of the ear, I was sure they would all run ninety proof. But it didn’t matter. The medical was only a formality. If you could survive the trip up to Gateway by spacecraft in the first place; you could survive a trip in a Heechee ship. Unless something went wrong. In which case you probably couldn’t survive anyway, no matter how healthy you were.

I had time for a quick cup of coffee off a cart that someone was tending next to a dropshaft (private enterprise on Gateway? I hadn’t known that existed), and then I got to the first session of the class right on the tick. We met in a big room on Level Dog, long and narrow and low-ceilinged. The seats were arranged two on each side with a center aisle, sort of like a schoolroom in a converted bus. Sheri came in late, looking fresh and cheerful, and slipped in beside me; our whole group was there, all seven of us who had come up from Earth together, the family of four from Venus and a couple others I knew to be new fish like me. “You don’t look too bad,” Sheri whispered as the instructor pondered over some papers on his desk.

“Does the hangover show?”

“Actually not. But I assume it’s there. I heard you coming in last night. In fact,” she added thoughtfully, “the whole tunnel heard you.”

I winced. I could still smell myself, but most of it was apparently inside me. None of the others seemed to be edging away, not even Sheri.

The instructor stood up and studied us thoughtfully for a while. “Oh, well,” he said, and looked back at his papers. Then he shook his head. “I won’t take attendance,” he said. “I teach the course in how to run a Heechee ship.” I noticed he had a batch of bracelets; I couldn’t count them, but there were at least half a dozen. I wondered briefly about these people I kept seeing who had been out a lot of times and still weren’t rich. “This is only one of the three courses you get. After this you get survival in unfamiliar environments, and then how to recognize what’s valuable. But this one is in ship-handling, and the way we’re going to start learning it is by doing it. All of you come with me.”

So we all got up and gaggled after him, out of the room, down a tunnel, onto the down-cable of a dropshaft and past the guards — maybe the same ones who had chased me away the night before. This time they just nodded to the instructor and watched us go past. We wound up in a long, wide, low-ceilinged passage with about a dozen squared-off and stained metal cylinders sticking up out of the floor. They looked like charred tree stumps, and it was a moment before I realized what they were.

I gulped.

“They’re ships,” I whispered to Sheri, louder than I intended. A couple of people looked at me curiously. One of them, I noticed, was a girl I had danced with the night before, the one with the dense black eyebrows. She nodded to me and smiled; I saw the bangles on her arm, and wondered what she was doing there — and how she had done at the gambling tables.

The instructor gathered us around him, and said, “As someone just said, these are Heechee ships. The lander part. This is the piece you go down to a planet in, if you’re lucky enough to find a planet. They don’t look very big, but five people can fit into each of those garbage cans you see. Not comfortably, exactly. But they can. Generally speaking, of course, you’ll always leave one person in the main ship, so there’ll be at most four in the lander.”

He led us past the nearest of them, and we all satisfied the impulse to touch, scratch, or pat it. Then he began to lecture:

“There were nine hundred and twenty-four of these ships docked at Gateway when it was first explored. About two hundred, so far, have proved nonoperational. Mostly we don’t know why; they just don’t work. Three hundred and four have actually been sent out on at least one trip. Thirty-three of those are here now, and available for prospecting trips. The others haven’t been tried yet.” He hiked himself up on the stumpy cylinder and sat there while he went on:

“One thing you have to decide is whether you want to take one of the thirty-three tested ones or one of the ones that has never been flown. By human beings, I mean. There you just pay your money and take your choice. It’s a gamble either way. A high proportion of the trips that didn’t come back were in first flights, so there’s obviously some risk there. Well, that figures, doesn’t it? After all, nobody has done any maintenance on them for God knows how long, since the Heechee put them there.

“On the other hand, there’s a risk in the ones that have been out and back safely, too. There’s no such thing as perpetual motion. We think some of the no-returns have been because the ships ran out of fuel. Trouble is, we don’t know what the fuel is, or how much there is, or how to tell when a ship is about to run out.”

He patted the stump. “This, and all the others you see here, were designed for five Heechees in the crews. As far as we can tell. But we send them out with three human beings. It seems the Heechee were more tolerant of each other’s company in confined spaces than people are. There are bigger and smaller ships, but the no-return rate on them has been very bad the last couple of orbits. It’s probably just a string of bad luck, but… Anyway, I personally would stick with a Three. You people, you do what you want.

“So you come to your second choice, which is who you go with. Keep your eyes open. Look for companions- What?”

Sheri had been semaphoring her hand until she got his attention. “You said ’very bad,” she said. “How bad is that?”

The instructor said patiently, “In the last fiscal orbit about three out of ten Fives came back. Those are the biggest ships. In several cases the crews were dead when we got them open, even so.”

“Yeah,” said Sheri, “that’s very bad.”

“No, that’s not bad at all, compared to the one-man ships. Two orbits ago we went a whole orbit and only two Ones came back at all. That’s bad.”

“Why is that?” asked the father of the tunnel-rat family. Their name was Forehand. The instructor looked at him for a moment.

“If you ever find out,” he said, “be sure and tell somebody. Now. As far as selecting a crew is concerned, you’re better off if you can get somebody who’s already been out. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. Prospectors who strike it rich generally quit; the ones that are still hungry may not want to break up their teams. So a lot of you fish are going to have to go out with other virgins. Umm.” He looked around thoughtfully. “Well, let’s get our feet wet. Sort yourselves out into groups of three — don’t worry about who’s in your group, this isn’t where you pick your partners — and climb into one of those open landers. Don’t touch anything. They’re supposed to be in deactive mode, but I have to tell you they don’t always stay deactive. Just go in, climb down to the control cabin and wait for an instructor to join you.”

That was the first I’d heard that there were other instructors. I looked around, trying to work out which were teachers and which were fish, while he said, “Are there any questions?”

Sheri again. “Yeah. What’s your name?”

“Did I forget that again? I’m Jimmy Chou. Pleased to meet you all. Now let’s go.”

Now I know a lot more than my instructor did, including what happened to him half an orbit later — poor old Jimmy Chou, he went out before I did, and came back while I was on my second trip, very dead. Flare burns, they say his eyes were boiled out of his bead. But at that time he knew it all, and it was all very strange and wonderful to me.

So we crawled into the funny elliptical hatch that let you slip between the thrusters and down into the landing capsule, and then down a peg-ladder one step further into the main vehicle itself.

We looked around, three Ali Babas staring at the treasure cave. We heard a scratching above us, and a head poked in. It had shaggy eyebrows and pretty eyes, and it belonged to the girl I had been dancing with the night before. “Having fun?” she inquired. We were clinging together as far from anything that looked movable as we could get, and I doubt we really looked at ease. “Never mind,” she said, “just look around. Get familiar with it. You’ll see a lot of it. That vertical line of wheels with the little spokes sticking out of them? That’s the target selector. That’s the most important thing not to touch for now — maybe ever. That golden spiral thing over next to you there, the blond girl? Anybody want to guess what that’s for?”

You-there-blond-girl, who was one of the Forehand daughters, shrank away from it and shook her head. I shook mine, but Sheri hazarded, “Could it be a hatrack?”

Teacher squinted at it thoughtfully. “Hmm. No, I don’t think so, but I keep hoping one of you fish will know the answer. None of us here do. It gets hot sometimes in flight; nobody knows why. The toilet’s in there. You’re going to have a lot of fun with that. But it does work, after you learn how. You can sling your hammocks and sleep there — or anywhere you want to, actually. That corner, and that recess are pretty dead space. If you’re in a crew that wants some privacy, you can screen them off. A little bit, anyway.”

Sheri said, “Don’t any of you people like to tell your names?” Teacher grinned. “I’m Gelle-Klara Moynlin. You want to know the rest about me? I’ve been out twice and didn’t score, and I’m killing time until the right trip comes along. So I work as assistant instructor.”

“How do you know which is the right trip?” asked the Forehand girl.

“Bright fellow, you. Good question. That’s another of those questions that I like to hear you ask, because it shows you’re thinking, but if there’s an answer I don’t know what it is. Let’s see. You already know this ship is a Three. It’s done six round trips already, but it’s a reasonable bet that it’s got enough reserve fuel for a couple more. I’d rather take it than a One. That’s for long-shot gamblers.”

“Mr. Chou said that,” said the Forehand girl, “but my father says he’s been all through the records since Orbit One, and the Ones aren’t that bad.”

“Your father can have mine,” said Gelle-Klara Moynlin. “It’s not just statistics. Ones are lonesome. Anyway, one person can’t really handle everything if you hit lucky, you need shipmates, one in orbit — most of us keep one man in the ship, feels safer that way; at least somebody might get help if things go rancid. So two of you go down in the lander to look around. Of course, if you do hit lucky you have to split it three ways. If you hit anything big, there’s plenty to go around. And if you don’t hit, one-third of nothing is no less than all of it.”

“Wouldn’t it be even better in a Five, then?” I asked.

Klara looked at me and half-winked; I hadn’t thought she remembered dancing the night before. “Maybe, maybe not. The thing about Fives is that they have almost unlimited target acceptance.”

“Please talk English,” Sheri coaxed.

“Fives will accept a lot of destinations that Threes and Ones won’t. I think it’s because some of those destinations are dangerous. The worst ship I ever saw come back was a Five. All scarred and seared and bent; nobody knows how it made it back at all. Nobody knows where it had been, either, but I heard somebody say it might’ve actually been in the photosphere of a star. The crew couldn’t tell us. They were dead.

“Of course,” she went on meditatively, “an armored Three has almost as much target acceptance as a Five, but you take your chances any way you swing. Now let’s get with it, shall we? You—” she pointed at Sheri, “sit down over there.”

The Forehand girl and I crawled around the mix of human and Heechee furnishings to make room. There wasn’t much. If you cleared everything out of a Three you’d have a room about four meters by three by three, but of course if you cleared everything out it wouldn’t go.

Sheri sat down in front of the column of spoked wheels, wriggling her bottom to try to get a fit. “What kind of behinds did the Heechee have?” she complained.

Teacher said, “Another good question, same no-good answer. If you find out, tell us. The Corporation puts that webbing in the seat. It isn’t original equipment. Okay. Now, that thing you’re looking at is the target selector. Put your hand on one of the wheels. Any one. Just don’t touch any other. Now move it.” She peered down anxiously as Sheri touched the bottom wheel, then thrust with her fingers, then laid the heel of her hand on it, braced herself against the V-shaped arms of the seat, and shoved. Finally it moved, and the lights along the row of wheels began to flicker.

“Wow,” said Sheri, “they must’ve been pretty strong!”

We took turns trying with that one wheel — Klara wouldn’t let us touch any other that day — and when it came my turn I was surprised to find that it took about as much muscle as I could bring to bear to make it move. It didn’t feel rusted stuck; it felt as though it were meant to be hard to turn. And, when you think how much trouble you can get into if you turn a setting by accident in the middle of a flight, it probably was.

Of course, now I know more about that, too, than my teacher did then. Not that I’m so smart, but it has taken, and is still taking, a lot of people a hell of a long time to figure out what goes on just in setting up a target on the course director.

What it is is a vertical row of number generators. The lights that show up display numbers; that’s not easy to see, because they don’t look like numbers. They aren’t positional, or decimal. (Apparently the Heechee expressed numbers as sums of primes and exponents, but all that’s way over my head.) Only the check pilots and the course programmers working for the Corporation really have to be able to read the numbers, and they don’t do it directly, only with a computing translator. The first five digits appear to express the position of the target in space, reading from bottom to top. (Dane Metchnikov says the prime ordering isn’t from bottom to top but from front to back, which says something or other about the Heechee. They were three-D oriented, like primitive man, instead of two-D oriented, like us.) You would think that three numbers would be enough to describe any position anywhere in the universe, wouldn’t you? I mean, if you make a threedimensional representation of the Galaxy you can express any point in it by means of a number for each of the three dimensions. But it took the Heechee five. Does that mean there were five dimensions that were perceptible to the Heechee? Metchnikov says not…

Anyway. Once you get a lock on the first five numbers, the other seven can be turned to quite arbitrary settings and you’ll still go when you squeeze the action teat.

What you usually do — or what the course programmers the Corporation keeps on the payroll to do this sort of thing for you usually do — is pick four numbers at random. Then you cycle the fifth digit until you get a kind of warning pink glow. Sometimes it’s faint, sometimes it’s bright. If you stop there and press the flat oval part under the teat, the other numbers begin to creep around, just a couple of millimeters one way or another, and the pink glow gets brighter. When they stop it’s shocking pink and shockingly bright. Metchnikov says that’s an automatic fine-tuning device. The machine allows for human error — sorry, I mean for Heechee error — so when you get close to a real, valid target setting it makes the final adjustments for you automatically. Probably he’s right.

(Of course, learning every step of this cost a lot of time and money, and most of it cost some lives. It’s dangerous being a prospector. But for the first few out, it was more like suicidal.)

Sometimes you can cycle all the way through your fifth digit and get nothing at all. So what you do is, you swear. Then you reset one of the other four and go again. It only takes a few seconds to cycle, but check pilots have run up a hundred hours of new settings before they got good color.

Of course, by the time I went out, the check pilots and the course programmers had worked out a couple hundred possible settings that had been logged as good color but not as yet used-as well as all the settings that had been used, and aren’t worth going back to. Or that the crews didn’t come back from.

But all that I didn’t know at the time, and when I sat down in that modified Heechee seat it was all new, new, new. And I don’t know if I can make you understand what it felt like.

I mean, there I was, in a seat where Heechee had sat half a million years ago. The thing in front of me was a target selector. The ship could go anywhere. Anywhere! If I selected the right target I could find myself around Sirius, Procyon, maybe even the Magellanic Clouds!

Teacher got tired of hanging head-down and wriggled through, squeezing in behind me. “Your turn, Broadhead,” she said, resting a hand on my shoulder and what felt like her breasts on my back.

I was reluctant to touch. I asked, “Isn’t there any way of telling where you’re going to wind up?”

“Probably,” she said, “providing you’re a Heechee with pilot training.”

“Not even like one color means you’re going farther from here than some other color?”

“Not that anybody here has figured out. Of course, they keep trying. There’s a whole team that spends its time programming returned mission reports against the settings they went out with. So far they’ve come up empty. Now let’s get on with it, Broadhead. Put your whole hand on that first wheel, the one the others have used. Shove it. It’ll take more muscle than you think.”

It did. In fact, I was almost afraid to push it hard enough to make it work. She leaned over and put her hand on mine, and I realized that that nice musk-oil smell that had been in my nostrils for the last little while was hers. It wasn’t just musk, either; her pheromones were snuggling nicely into my chemoreceptors. It made a very nice change from the rest of the Gateway stink.

But all the same, I didn’t get even a show of color, although I tried for five minutes before she waved me away and gave Sheri another shot in my place.

When I got back to my room somebody had cleaned it up. I wondered gratefully who that had been, but I was too tired to wonder very long. Until you get used to it, low gravity can be exhausting; you find yourself overusing all your muscles because you have to relearn a whole pattern of economies.

I slung my hammock and was just dozing off when I heard a scratching at the lattice of my door and Sheri’s voice: “Rob?”

“What?”

“Are you asleep?”

Obviously I wasn’t, but I interpreted the question the way she had intended it. “No. I’ve been lying here thinking.”

“So was I… Rob?”

“Yeah?”

“Would you like me to come into your hammock?”

I made an effort to wake myself up enough to consider the question on its merits.

“I really want to,” she said.

“All right. Sure. I mean, glad to have you.” She slipped into my room, and I slid over in the hammock, which swung slowly as she crawled into it. She was wearing a knitted T-shirt and underpants, and she felt warm and soft against me when we rolled gently together in the hollow of the hammock.

“It doesn’t have to be sex, stud,” she said. “I’m easy either way.”

“Let’s see what develops. Are you scared?”

Her breath was the sweetest-smelling thing about her; I could feel it on my cheek. “A lot more than I thought I would be.”

“Why?”

“Rob—” she squirmed herself comfortable and then twisted her neck to look at me over her shoulder, “you know, you say kind of asshole things sometimes?”

“Sorry.”

“Well, I mean it. I mean, look what we’re doing. We’re going to get into a ship that we don’t know if it’s going to get where it’s supposed to go, and we don’t even know where it’s supposed to go. We go faster than light, nobody knows how. We don’t know how long we’ll be gone, even if we knew where we were going. So we could be traveling the rest of our lives and die before we got there, even if we didn’t run into something that would kill us in two seconds. Right? Right. So how come you ask me why I’m scared?”

“Just making conversation.” I curled up along her back and cupped a breast, not aggressively but because it felt good.

“And not only that. We don’t know anything about the people who built these things. How do we know this isn’t all a practical joke on their part? Maybe their way of luring fresh meat into Heechee heaven?”

“We don’t,” I agreed. “Roll over this way.”

“And the ship they showed us this morning doesn’t hardly look like I thought it was going to be, at all,” she said, doing as I told her and putting a hand on the back of my neck.

There was a sharp whistle from somewhere, I couldn’t tell where.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know.” It came again, sounding both out in the tunnel and, louder, inside my room. “Oh, it’s the phone.” What I was hearing was my own piezophone and the ones on either side of me, all ringing at once. The whistle stopped and there was a voice:

“This is Jim Chou. All you fish who want to see what a ship looks like when it comes back after a bad trip, come to Docking Station Four. They’re bringing it in now.”

I could hear a murmuring from the Forehands’ room next door, and I could feel Sheri’s heart pounding. “We’d better go,” I said.

“I know. But I don’t think I want to — much.”

The ship had made it back to Gateway, but not quite all the way. One of the orbiting cruisers had detected it and closed in on it. Now a tug was bringing it in to the Corporation’s own docks, where usually only the rockets from the planets latched in. There was a hatch big enough to hold even a Five. This was a Three, what there was left of it.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Sheri whispered. “Rob, what do you suppose happened to them?”

“To the people? They died.” There was not really any doubt of that. The ship was a wreck. The lander stem was gone, just the interstellar vehicle itself, the mushroom cap, was still there, and that was bent out of shape, split open, seared by heat. Split open! Heechee metal, that doesn’t even soften under an electric arc!

But we hadn’t seen the worst of it.

We never did see the worst of it, we only heard about it. One man was still inside the ship. All over the inside of the ship. He had been literally spattered around the control room, and his remains had been baked onto the walls. By what? Heat and acceleration, no doubt. Perhaps he had found himself skipping into the upper reaches of a sun, or in tight orbit around a neutron star. The differential in gravity might have shredded ship and crew like that. But we never knew.

The other two persons in the crew were not there at all. Not that it was easy to tell; but the census of the organs revealed only one jaw, one pelvis, one spine — though in many short pieces. Perhaps the other two had been in the lander?

“Move it, fish!”

Sheri caught my arm and pulled me out of the way. Five uniformed crewmen from the cruisers came through, in American and Brazilian blue, Russian beige, Venusian work white and Chinese all-purpose black-and-brown. The American and the Venusian were female; the faces were all different, but the expressions were all the same mixture of discipline and distaste.

“Let’s go.” Sheri tugged me away. She didn’t want to watch the crewmen poke through the remnants, and neither did I. The whole class, Jimmy Chou, Klara and the other teachers and all, began to straggle back to our rooms. Not quite quick enough. We had been looking through the ports into the lock; when the patrol from the cruisers opened it, we got a whiff of the air inside. I don’t know how to describe it. A little bit like overripe garbage being cooked to swill to pigs. Even in the rank air of Gateway, that was hard to take.

Teacher dropped off at her own level — down pretty low, in the high-rent district around Easy Level. When she looked up after me as I said goodnight I observed for the first time that she was crying.

Sheri and I said goodnight to the Forehands at their door, and I turned to her, but she was ahead of me.

“I think I’ll sleep this one out,” she said. “Sorry, Rob, but, you know, I just don’t feel like it anymore.”