The Gateway Trip

PART FIVE: THE HOME PLANET

Homo sapiens evolved on the planet Earth, and the process of evolution made it certain that every human trait was custom-engineered to fit Earth’s conditions, like a key in a lock. With three billion years of Darwinian selection to make the fit perfect, life on Earth should have been pretty nearly heaven for its human inhabitants.

It wasn’t. Not anymore, for rich Earth was getting close to filing for bankruptcy. It had spent its wealth.

Oh, there were many millionaires on Earth. Billionaires, too; people with more money than they could spend, enough to hire a hundred servants, enough to own a county for a backyard, enough to pay for Full Medical insurance coverage, so that for all their long lives they would have at their command the most wonderful of all the wonderful medical, pharmaceutical, and surgical techniques to keep them healthy, and to make those lives very long. There were hundreds of thousands of the very rich, and many millions of the more or less well to do . . . But there were ten billion others.

There were the ones who scratched out a living by farming on Asian plains and African savannahs; they made a crop when rain fell and wars stayed away and marauding insect pests devoured some other countryside than their own, and when the crop failed they died. There were the ones who lived in the barricaded slums of the big cities (the word “ghetto” was no longer a metaphor), or the barrios outside Latin metropolises, or the teeming warrens of the urban areas of the Orient. These people worked when they could. They lived on charity when there was any charity to be had. They lived at the bottom of the food chain—rice and beans, yams and barley; or, if they had the money to pay for it, single-cell proteins from the fossil-fuel conversions of the food mines—and they were very likely to be hungry throughout every hour of every day of their lives. Which were short. The poor people couldn’t afford the medical plans. If they were very lucky there might be a free clinic, or a cheap doctor, to hand out pills and take out an appendix. But when one of their organs wore out they had only two alternatives. They managed to get along without it; or they died. The poor people could never afford organ transplants. They were lucky if they weren’t caught in a dark alley some night and themselves converted into transplants for some richer person, by some more desperate one. So there were two kinds of human beings on Earth. If you owned a few thousand shares of PetroFood or Chemways you didn’t lack for much—not even health, because then you could afford Full Medical. But if you didn’t, the next best thing was to have a job. Any kind of a job.

Having a job was a dream of Utopia for the billions who had none, but for those who did have employment their work was generally a demeaning kind of drudgery that drowned the spirit and damaged the health. The food mines employed many, dipping fossil fuels out of the ground and breeding edible single-cell protein creatures on their hydrocarbon content. But when you worked at a food mine you breathed those same hydrocarbons every day—it was like living in a closed garage, with motors running all the time—and you probably died young. Factory work was better, a little, although the safest and most challenging parts of it were generally done by automatic machines for economic reasons; because they were more expensive to acquire, and to replace when damaged, than people. There was even domestic service as a possible career. But to be a servant in the homes of the wealthy was to be a slave, with a slave’s intimate experience of luxury and plenty, and a slave’s despair at ever attaining those things for himself.

Still, the ones who had even those jobs were lucky, for family agriculture was just a way of slowing down starvation, and in the developed world unemployment was terribly high. Especially in the cities. Especially for the young. So if you were one of the really rich, or even just one of the well-to-do, splurging on a trip to New York or Paris or Beijing, you usually saw the poor ones only when you walked out of your hotel, between police barricades, and into your waiting taxi.

You didn’t have to do it that way. The police barricades were all one-way. If you chose to cross them the police would let you through. A grizzled old cop might try to warn you that going out among the crowds was a bad idea, if he happened to be charitably moved. But none of them would stop you if you insisted.

Then you were on your own. Which meant that you were immediately plunged into a noisy, smelly, dirty kind of unbarred zoo where you were immersed in a crowd of clamoring vendors: of drugs; of plastic reproductions of the Great Wall, the Eiffel Tower, or the New York Bubble; of handmade key charms and hand-carved trinkets; of guide services, or discount coupons to night clubs; or very often—themselves. That was a scary experience for any member of the privileged classes encountering it for the first time. It wasn’t necessarily very dangerous, though. The police wouldn’t actually let them murder you or snatch your wallet—as long as you were in sight, anyway.

Quite often, the charging poor wouldn’t harm you even if they succeeded in luring you away from the police cordons, especially if you offered them some less chancy way of making money from you. But that was not guaranteed. Most of the poor people were desperate.

For the rich, of course, the world was quite different. It always is. The rich lived long, healthy lives with other people’s organs replacing any of their own that wore out. They lived those lives in balmy climates under the domes of major cities, if they chose, or cruising the warm and still-unpolluted southern seas, or even traveling in space for the pure joy of it. When there were wars (and there often were, frequent though small—though quite large enough, of course, to satisfy the people killed in them), the rich went elsewhere until the wars were over. They felt that was their due. After all, they were the ones who paid the taxes—as much as they couldn’t avoid, anyway.

The main trouble with being rich was that not all of the poor people acquiesced in being poor. Quite a few tried to find ways to better themselves, and sometimes they did so violently.

Kidnapping became a growth industry in America again. So did extortion. You paid what they demanded, or out of hiding someone would shoot away your kneecap (or torch your house, or boobytrap your flyer, or poison your pets). Few in the solvent classes would send their children to school without a bodyguard anymore. That did have a useful side effect. As it turned out, it helped ease the unemployment situation, a little, as some millions of the extortionists put on uniforms and began drawing salaries to protect their employers against extortion.

And, of course, there was political terror, too. It flourished in the same soil that nurtured kidnapping and extortion, and there was even more of it. Among the apathetic majority of the landless and the hungry, there were always a few who banded together to work the vengeance of the have-nots on the haves. Hostages were taken, officials were shot from ambush, aircraft were bombed out of the sky, reservoirs were poisoned, food supplies infected . . . oh, there were a thousand ingenious, injurious tricks the terror-wielders devised, and all of them devastating—at least, to those who had something to lose in the first place.

Nevertheless, in spite of all the fears and inconveniences, the haves had it made. And most other people didn’t even have hope.

Then, into the life of this seething, overfull planet, along came Gateway. For most of the ten billion people alive on the used-up planet of Earth, Gateway was an unexpected hope of paradise. Like the gold-rush miners of '49, like the hungry Irish fleeing their potato famine in the holds of immigrant ships, like the sod-busting pioneers of the American West and human emigrants everywhere, through all of history, the poverty-stricken billions were willing to take any risk for the sake of—well, wealth, if wealth could be had; but at least for a chance to feed and clothe and house their children.

Even the rich saw that this surprising new event might offer them a good chance to get even richer. That made for a serious problem, for a while. The national governments who had built the space rockets that first visited other planets and later supported the Gateway operation felt they were entitled to whatever profits came out of the Gateway discoveries. The rich people who owned the governments agreed. But they couldn’t all own it, after all.

So there was a certain amount of buying and selling and horse-trading (and some pretty cutthroat wheeling and dealing, too, with the stakes as high as they were). Compromises were made. Bargains were struck; and out of the competing greeds of all the claimants to the limitless wealth that the galaxy promised came the just, or fairly just, invention of the Gateway Corporation.

Was Gateway a benefit to Earth’s poor?

At first, not very much. It gave each of them a little hope—the hope of a lottery ticket, although few of them could raise the money even to buy that one-way ticket that might make them into winners. But it was a long time before any stay-at-home peasant or slum-dweller was a penny or a meal richer for anything the Heechee had left behind.

In fact, the knowledge that there were rich, empty planets out there was more tantalizing than useful to Earth’s teeming billions. The livable planets were too far away. They could only be reached by faster-than-light travel. Although human beings actually improved on some Heechee space—travel techniques (using Lofstrom loops to get into orbit instead of Heechee landers, for instance, and thus sparing further damage to the acidified lakes and the ozone layer), no one had the slightest idea of how to build a Heechee ship—and the ships on Gateway were far too few and much too small to carry sizable migrant populations to the new planets.

So a few prospectors got rich, when they didn’t get dead instead. A number of rich people got quickly richer. But most of the penniless billions stayed on Earth.

And in the cities like Calcutta, with its two hundred million paupers, and on the starved farms and paddies of Africa and the Orient, hunger remained a fact of life, and terrorism and poverty got worse instead of better.

As our teachers keep telling us, the longest journey begins with a single step. That first step for the Gateway asteroid—the first voyage of exploration any human being ever took in a Heechee spaceship—wasn’t planned in advance. It wasn’t even authorized. And it certainly wasn’t prudent.

The name of the man who took that first trip into the unknown was Lieutenant Senior Grade Ernest T. Kaplan. He was a marine officer from the U. S. Space Navy cruiser Roanoke. Kaplan wasn’t a scientist. He was so far from being a scientist that he had been given strict orders not to touch anything, but anything, on the Gateway asteroid. The only reason he was on the asteroid in the first place was that he had been ordered there as a guard, to keep anyone else from touching anything while the scientists who came hurrying up from Earth tried to figure out just what the devil they had here.

But Kaplan had a mind full of itchy curiosity, and what’s more, he had access to the parked ships. And one day, for lack of anything better to do, he sat down in the one ship that happened to have been equipped with food lockers and air and water tanks, just in case anyone got the locks closed and was trapped inside. Kaplan thought for a while about old Sylvester Macklin. Just for the fun of it, he practiced opening and closing the locks a few times. Then he played with the knurled wheels for a while, watching the changing colors.

Then he squeezed the funny-looking little thing at the base.

That was what later, more expert pilots would call “the launch teat,” and as soon as he squeezed it Lieutenant Senior Grade Kaplan became the second human being to fly a Heechee ship. He was gone.

Ninety-seven days later he was back at the Gateway asteroid.

It was a miracle that he’d managed to return; it was even a bigger miracle that he was still alive. The supplies in the ship had been meant to last for a few days, not for months. For drinking water he had been reduced to catching the condensation from his own sweat and emanations as it beaded the lander port. For the last five weeks he hadn’t eaten anything at all. He was scrawny and filthy and half out of his mind, but he had been there. His ship had orbited a planet far out from a small, reddish star; a planet that had so little light that it seemed only grayish, with swirling yellow clouds—a little the way Jupiter or Saturn or Uranus might have appeared, if their orbits had been as far from the Sun as the twilit Pluto. The first reaction of the United States government was to courtmartial him. He certainly deserved it. He even expected it.

But before the court was convened the news services carried the word that the Brazilian parliament, carried away at the thought of sharing in the exploration of the galaxy, had voted Kaplan a million-dollar cash bonus. Then the Soviets not only made him an honorary citizen but invited him to Moscow to receive the Order of Lenin. The dam had burst. Every talk show on every television network in the world was begging him to be a guest.

You couldn’t court-martial a hero.

So the American president jumped Lieutenant Kaplan to full colonel and then to general, in the same orders that grounded Colonel (or General) Kaplan forever. Then the president called all the spacefaring nations together to decide just how to handle this situation.

The result was the Gateway Corporation.

Colonel Kaplan, like everyone before him, had failed to make one vital discovery, and that was that each one of the Heechee ships was actually two ships. Part One was the interstellar vessel that traveled faster than light to a programmed destination. Part Two was the smaller, simpler landing craft that nestled into the base of the ship itself.

The interstellar ships themselves, with their unreproducible faster-than-light drives, were totally beyond the understanding of human scientists. It was a long time before any Earth person knew how they worked. Those who tried too hard to find out generally died because their drive engines blew up. The landers were much simpler. Basically, they were ordinary rockets. True, the guidance system was Heechee, but fortunately for the Gateway prospectors the controls turned out to be even simpler to operate than the faster-than-light vessels. The prospectors could use the lander successfully, even if they didn’t know exactly how it worked, just as any average seventeen-year-old can learn to drive a car without any comprehension of the geometry of steering linkages or gear chains.

So when any Gateway prospector came out of FTL drive and found himself in the vicinity of an interesting-looking planet, he could use the lander for the purpose for which it was designed: to go down to the surface of the planet and see what it had to offer.

That was what Gateway was all about.