The Gateway Trip

The planets were where you had to go, because they were the most likely places to look for the kind of precious thing the prospector could bring back and turn in to make his fortune—and, naturally, to add to the Corporation’s.

It was easy to describe the kind of planets they were looking for. They were looking for another Earth. Or something enough like Earth, anyway, to support some form of organic life, because inorganic processes hardly ever produced anything worth the carrying space it took to bring it home.

The most disappointing planets were the closest. When the Heechee came to Earth’s solar system they gave it a good looking-over, and some of the ships on the Gateway asteroid reflected that. They still had stored navigation codes for places so near that human beings could have visited them on their own—if they wanted to. Some of them in fact had already been reached by the crude human rockets—places like Venus, the Moon, Mars’s south polar ice cap. Some were hardly worth the trouble, like Saturn’s moon, Dione.

The prospectors were after bigger game than that. They wanted planets no man or woman had ever seen. They found a bewildering array of them.

The planets they reached in the Magic Mystery Bus Rides came in all shapes and sizes. There were two basic types. There were the orbiting rocks (like Earth; solid and landable-on), and then there were the would-be stars (like Jupiter; the gas giants, that were just a bit too small to start nuclear fusion in their cores and turn themselves into suns). No Gateway prospector ever landed on a gas giant, of course. They had nothing solid enough to land on. (That was a pity, for a few of them were interesting anyway . . . but that’s another story.) It was the orbiting rocks that were prospected as vigorously as a few thousand scared, hurried human beings could explore them. There were plenty of the solid planets. Most of them had no apparent life at all, unfortunately. They were too far from their sun, so they were eternally frozen, or they were too close, so they were as scorched as the planet Mercury. Many of them had too little atmosphere (or none at all), like Mars (or the Moon). Some of them had satellites of their own, like the Earth’s Moon. Some of the target objects were satellites, but big ones, big enough to retain atmospheres and to land on. There were something over two hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, and a hellish lot of them possessed planets of one kind or another. Even the Heechee ships weren’t programmed to set a course for all the possible planets to explore. There were hardly course settings for one planet in a hundred thousand, in fact. Still, that left plenty for the Gateway prospectors to visit—many more of them than a few thousand men and women could reach in the course of a few dozen years.

So the first discovery the Gateway prospectors made was that there were plenty of planets to choose from. Human astronomers were glad to know that, because they’d always wondered, and the Corporation didn’t even have to pay a discovery bonus to find it out: all they had to do was add up the findings of the returning explorers. It developed that binary stars didn’t ordinarily have planets. Solitary stars, on the other hand, generally did. Astronomers thought the reason for that probably had something to do with conserving rotational velocity. When two stars condensed together out of a single gas cloud they seemed to take care of each other’s excess rotational energy. Bachelor stars apparently had to dissipate it on smaller satellites.

Hardly any of the planets were really Earth-like, though.

There were a lot of tests for that sort of thing that could be applied from a considerable distance. Temperature sensing, for one. Organic life didn’t seem to develop except where water could exist in its liquid phase, which was to say in the narrow, 100-degree band between about 270 and 370 Kelvin. At lower temperatures the stuff was useless ice. At higher ones water wasn’t usually there at afl, because the heat vaporized it and the sunlight—from whatever sun was nearby—split the hydrogen out of the water molecule and it was lost into space.

That meant that each star had a quite narrow area of possible planetary orbits that might be worth investigating. As planets didn’t care whether or not they were going to be hospitable to life when they were condensing out of the interstellar gases, most of them took orbits inside that life zone, or in the cold spaces outside it.

Most alien life, like most Earthly life, was based on the chemistry of the carbon atoms. Carbon was the best of all possible elements for forming useful long-chain compounds, and happily it is so frequently found that it is the fourth most common element in the universe. Most alien life had something like DNA, too. That wasn’t for any panspermian reason, but simply because systems like DNA provided a cheap and efficient way for organisms to replicate themselves. So most living things followed certain basic guidelines. That was probably because they all started in pretty much the same way, since there is a timetable to the development of life. The first step is just chemistry: inorganic chemicals get forced to react with each other, under the spur of some sort of externally supplied energy—usually the light from their nearby star. Then crude, single-celled little things appear. These are only factories whose raw materials are the other inorganic chemicals in the soup that surrounds them. They, too, use the energy of sunlight (or whatever) to process the inorganic chemicals into more of themselves, and that’s about all they do for a living. Since they are photosynthetic, you might call them plants.

Then these primitive “plants” themselves turn out to be pretty rich sources of assimilable chemicals. Since they’ve gone to the trouble of concentrating the more appetizing inorganic compounds into a preprocessed form, it is only a question of time until some of them learn a new diet. These new ones don’t eat the raw materials of the environment. They eat their own weaker, more primitive cousins. Call this new batch of creatures “animals.” The first animals aren’t usually much. They consist of a mouth at one end, an anus at the other, and some sort of processing system in between. That’s all they are. But then, that’s all they need to be to feast on their neighbors.

Then things get more complicated.

Evolution begins to happen. The fittest survive, pretty much the way Charles Darwin figured it out as he fondled his captive finches on board the Beagle. The plants go on making appetizing chemicals for the animals to feast on, and the animals go on feasting on the plants and on each other—but some plants accidentally develop traits that give their predators trouble, and so those plants survive; and some animals learn tricks to get around those defenses. Later generations of animals develop senses to locate their prey more efficiently, and musculatures to catch it, and ultimately complex behavioral systems (like the web of a spider or the stalking of a great cat) that make their predation more and more successful. (Then, of course, the plants, or the herbivores, or the less successful predators begin to develop defense mechanisms of their own: the poisons in a shrub’s leaf, the quills of a porcupine, the fleet legs of a gazelle. ) The competition never stops getting more intense, and more sophisticated on all parts—until, finally, some of the creatures become “intelligent.” But they take a lot longer to evolve . . . and it took the Gateway prospectors a lot longer to find any of them, too.

In the myriad worlds that the Heechee had explored—and to which the human Gateway prospectors followed them hundreds of thousands of years later—all those basics of the evolution of life were played out a thousand times, with a thousand variations. The variations were sometimes quite surprising. For instance, Earthly plants have one conspicuous trait in common: they don’t move. But there wasn’t any reason why that trait had to be universal, and in fact it wasn’t. The Gateway prospectors found bushes that rolled from place to place, setting roots down to one side and pulling them up on the other, like slow-motion tumble-weeds as they sought the richest soils and the best access to groundwater and the surest sunlight. Then, too, Earthly animals don’t normally bother with photosynthesis. But in the seas of other worlds there were things like jellyfish that floated to the surface by day to generate their own hydrocarbons from the sun and the air, and then sank down to feast on algal things at night. Earthly corals stay in one place. Prospectors found some unearthly ones—or, at least, some unearthly things that looked more or less like corals—that flew apart into their component little animals when the coast was clear, to eat and mate, and then returned to form collective rockhard fortresses when the prowling marine predators approached.

Most of these things were useless to any prospector whose big interest was in making a fortune. A few were not. There was one good feature to finding an organism that was worth something, and that was that it was an easy import. You didn’t have to bring tons of material back to Gateway. All you had to do was bring enough of some plant or animal back to breed others back on Earth, since living things were glad to reproduce themselves for you anywhere.

The zoos of Earth began to expand, and so did Earth’s aquaria, and its pet stores. Every fashionable family was sure to own its exotic windowbox of alien ferns, or its furry little pet from the planet of some other star.

Before the Gateway prospectors could make an honest buck in the pet trade, though, they had to find the living things in the first place. That wasn’t easy. Even when life was apparently possible, sometimes it was there, and sometimes it was not. The way to check for that was to look for chemical signatures in the atmosphere. (Oh, yes, the hopefully life-bearing planet had to possess an atmosphere, too, but that wasn’t a serious constraint. Most planets in the habitable zone did.) If the atmosphere turned out to contain reactive gases that hadn’t reacted—say, if it held free oxygen, with reducing substances like carbon or iron somewhere availably around—then it stood to reason that something must be continually replenishing those gases. That something was probably, in some sense, alive.

(Later on the prospectors found there were exceptions to these simple rules . . . but not many.)

The very first planet that turned out to have living things on it was a solid ten when studied from orbit. Almost everything was there: blue skies, blue seas, fleecy white clouds and plenty of oxygen—meaning some antientropic (i. e. living) thing to keep it that way.

Prospectors Anatol and Sherba Mirsky and their partner, Leonie Tilden, slapped each other’s backs in exultation as they prepared to land. It was their first mission—and they’d hit the jackpot right away.

Naturally they celebrated. They opened the one bottle of wine they’d brought along. Ceremonially they made a recording announcing their discovery, punctuating it with the pop of the wine cork. They called the planet New Earth. Everything was going their way. They even thought it likely that they could figure out just where they were in the galaxy (a kind of knowledge usually hidden from the early Gateway prospectors, because there weren’t any road signs on the way). But they had spotted the Magellanic Clouds in one direction and the Andromeda Nebula in another, and in still a third direction there was a tight, bright cluster that they were nearly sure was the Pleiades.

The celebration was a bit premature. It had not occurred to them that one interesting color was missing in their view of New Earth from space, and that color was green.

When Sherba Mirsky and Leonie Tilden went down to the surface of New Earth in the lander, what they landed on was bare rock. Nothing grew there. Nothing moved. Nothing flew in the sky. There were no flowering plants. There were no plants at all, at their elevation; there wasn’t any soil for them to grow in. Soil hadn’t reached those parts of the world yet.

It was only one more disappointment to find that there wasn’t much oxygen in its air, either—enough for a qualitative determination from orbit, yes, but nowhere near enough to breathe. For, although there certainly was life on New Earth, there just wasn’t much of it yet. Most of what there was lived in the coastal shallows, with a few hardy adventurers just making a start in colonizing the shores—simple prokaryotic and eukaryotic denizens of the sludgy seas, with a few scraggly, mossy things that had struggled out onto the littoral.

The trouble with New Earth was that it was a lot too new. It would take a billion years or so to get really interesting—or to pay Tilden, the Mirskys, and the Gateway Corporation back for the trouble of looking it over.

Although it was planets that offered profits, planets were also the places where it was easiest to get killed. As long as a Gateway prospector stayed inside his ship he was well protected against most of the dangers of star wandering. It was when he landed that he exposed himself to unknown environments . . . and often very hostile ones.

For example, there was:

MISSION PRETTY POISON

A fifty-year-old Venezuelan named Juan Mendoza Santamaria was the first Gateway prospector to discover a really nice-looking planet. It had taken him forty-three days to get there, all alone in a One. That was well within his margins. He was not likely to run out of air, food, or water. What he worried about running out of was money. Mendoza had spent the last of his credits on a farewell party before he left the asteroid. If he came back empty-handed to Gateway his future was bleak. So he crossed himself and whispered a prayer of gratitude as he stepped out of his lander onto the alien soil.

He was grateful, but he wasn’t stupid. Therefore he was also cautious. Mendoza knew very well that if anything went wrong he was in serious trouble. There was no one within many light-years who could help him—in fact, there wasn’t anybody, anywhere, who even knew where he was. So he wore his space suit at all times on the surface of the planet, and that turned out to be very fortunate for Juan Mendoza.

The planet didn’t look threatening at all. The plants were an odd shade of orange, the distant trees (or were they simply very tall grasses?) looked harmless, and there were no obviously threatening large animals. On the other hand, there wasn’t much to be seen that looked immediately profitable, either. There weren’t any signs of civilization—no great abandoned cities, no friendly alien intelligences to welcome him, no Heechee artifacts lying about waiting to be picked up. There wasn’t even any kind of metallic structure, natural or otherwise, on the surface large enough to be detected by his lander’s sensors as he came down. But, Mendoza reassured himself, the fact that there was any kind of life ought to be worth at least a science bonus. He identified both “plant” and “animal” life—at least some of the things moved, and some of them were firmly rooted in the soil.

He took some samples of the plants, though they weren’t impressive. He trekked painfully over to the “trees” and found that they were soft-bodied, like mushrooms. There weren’t any large ferns or true grasses; but there was a kind of fuzzy moss that covered most of the soil, and there were things that moved on it. None of the moving things were very big. The largest life form Mendoza encountered was an “arthropod” about the size of his palm. The little beasts moved about in little herds, feeding on smaller beetly and buggy things, and they were covered with a dense “fur” of glassy white spicules, which made them look like herds of tiny sheep. Mendoza felt almost guilty as he trapped a few of the pretty little creatures, killed them, and put them, with samples of the smaller creatures they preyed on, in the sterile containers that would go back to Gateway.

There wasn’t anything else worth transporting. What the planet had that was really worthwhile was beauty. It had a lot of that.

It was quite near—Mendoza estimated thirty or forty light-years—a bright, active gas cloud that he thought might be the Orion Nebula. (It wasn’t, but like the one in Orion it was a nursery for bright young stars. ) Mendoza happened to land in the right season of the year to appreciate it best, for as the planet’s sun set on one horizon the nebula rose on the other. It came to fill the entire night sky, like a luminous, sea-green tapestry laced with diamonds, edged in glowing royal maroon. The “diamonds"—the brightest stars within the nebula—were orders of magnitude brighter even than Venus or Jupiter as seen from Earth, nearly as bright as Earth’s full Moon. But they were point sources, not disks like the Moon, and they were almost painful to look upon. It was the beauty that struck Mendoza. He was not an articulate man. When he got back and filed his report he referred to the planet as “a pretty place,” and so it was logged in the Gateway atlases as “Pretty Place.”

Mendoza got what he was after: a two-million-dollar science bonus for finding the planet at all, and the promise of a royalty share on whatever subsequent missions might discover on Pretty Place. That could have turned out to be really serious money. According to Gateway rules, if the planet was colonizable Mendoza would be collecting money from it for the rest of his life.

Almost at once two other missions, both Fives, copied his settings and made the same trip.

That was when they changed the name to Pretty Poison.

The follow-up parties were not as cautious as Mendoza. They didn’t keep their space suits on. They didn’t have the natural protections that had been developed by Pretty Poison’s own fauna, either. The local life had evolved to meet a real challenge; those furry silicon spikes were not for ornament. They were armor.

It was a pity Mendoza hadn’t completed his radiation checks, because those bright young stars in the nebula were not radiating visible light alone. They were powerful sources of ionizing radiation and hard ultraviolets. Four of the ten explorers came down with critical sunburn before they began to show signs of something worse. All of them, by the time they got back to Gateway, required total blood replacement, and two of them died anyway.

It was a good thing that Mendoza was a prudent man. He hadn’t spent his two million in wild carouse, expecting the vast royalties that might come as his percentage of all that colonizing his planet would bring about. The planet could not be inhabited by human beings. The royalties never came.

MISSION BURNOUT

Of the nearly thousand Heechee vessels found on Gateway, only a few dozen were armored, and most of those were Fives. An armored Three was a rarity, and when the crew of Felicia Monsanto, Greg Running Wolf, and Daniel Pursy set out in one they knew there was a certain element of danger; its course setting might take them to some really nasty place.

But when they came out of FTL and looked around they had a moment of total rapture. The star they were near was quite sunlike, a G-2 the same size as Earth’s Sol; they were orbiting a planet within the livable zone from the star, and their detectors showed Heechee metal in large quantities!

The biggest concentration was not on the planet. It was an asteroid in an out-of-ecliptic orbit—a lot like Gateway—and it had to be another of those abandoned parking garages for Heechee ships! When they approached it they saw that the guess was correct. But they also saw that the asteroid was empty. There were no ships. There were no artifacts at all. It was riddled with tunnels, just like Gateway, but the tunnels were vacant. Worse than that, the whole asteroid seemed in very bad shape, as though it were far older, and had had a far harder life, than Gateway itself.

That puzzle cleared itself up when, with the last of their resources, two of the crew ventured down to the planet itself.

It had been a living planet once. It had life now, in fact, but in scant numbers and only in its seas—algae and sea-bottom invertebrates, nothing more. Somehow or other the planet had been seared and ravaged . . . and the culprit was in view.

Six and a half light-years away from that system they discovered a neutron star. Like most neutron stars, it was a pulsar, but as their ship was nowhere near its axis of radiation they could hardly detect its jets. But it was a radio source, and their instruments showed that it was there, the remnant of a supernova.

The rest of the story the experts on Gateway filled in for them when they returned. That solar system had been visited by the Heechee, but it was in a bad neighborhood. After the Heechee left—probably knowing what was about to happen—the supernova exploded. The planet had been baked. Its gases had been driven off, and most of its seas boiled away. As the hellish heat died away a thin new atmosphere was cooked out of the planet’s crust, and the remaining water vapor had come down in incredible torrents of rain, scouring away mountain valleys, burying plains in silt, leaving nothing . . . and all of that had happened hundreds of thousands of years before.

Monsanto, Running Wolf, and Pursy got a science bonus for their mission—a small one, a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to be divided among the three of them. By Gateway standards, that wasn’t serious money. It was enough to pay their bills on Gateway for a few extra weeks. It was not nearly enough to retire on. All three of them shipped out again as soon as they found another berth, and from their next voyage none of them ever returned.

Probably the Gateway prospectors should have taken it for granted that hospitable, Earth-like planets were bound to be a lot rarer than malignant ones. Their own solar system made that much clear. Anyway, all those years of listening to Project Ozma radio signals should have taught them that much. What they found out was that there was a myriad different kinds of hostile environments. There was Eta Carina Seven; it was the right size, it had air, it even had water—when it wasn’t frozen, anyway. But Eta Carina Seven had a highly eccentric orbit. It was pretty well iced over, though still on its way to its frigid aphelion, and there were terrible storms. One lander never came back at all. Three of the others were damaged, or lost at least one crew member.

Mendoza was not the only one to find a planet that looked nice but turned out to be poison. One pleasing-looking planet was well vegetated, but the vegetation was all toxicodendrons. They were far worse than Earth’s poison ivy. The slightest touch meant blisters, agonizing itching pain, and anaphylactic shock. On the first mission to it everyone who landed on its surface died of allergic reactions, and only the crew member who stayed with the ship in orbit was able to get back to Gateway.

But once in a while—oh, very seldom—there was a good one.

The happiest of all, in the first decade of Gateway’s operation, was the mission of Margaret Brisch, usually called “Peggy.”

Peggy Brisch went out in a One. She found what was really another Earth. In fact, in some ways it was nicer than Earth ever was. Not only were there no toxicodendrons to kill anyone who touched, or any nearby star with lethal radiation, there were not even any large, dangerous animals.

There was only one thing wrong with Peggy’s Planet. It would have been an ideal place to take Earth’s overflow population, if only it hadn’t been located a good nineteen hundred light-years away.

There was no way to get to it except on a Heechee ship. And the largest Heechee ship carried only five people.

The colonization of Peggy’s Planet would have to wait.

First and last, the Gateway prospectors found more than two hundred planets with significant life. It drove the taxonomists happily crazy. Generations of doctoral candidates had dissertation material that could not fail to win their degrees, and hard work simply to find names for the thirty or forty million new species the prospectors found for them.

They didn’t have that many names to spare, of course. The best they could do was assign classification numbers and note the descriptions. There was no hope of establishing genera or even families, although all the descriptions were fed into the databanks and a lot of computer time went into trying to discover relationships. The best descriptions were generic; DNA, or something like it, was pretty nearly universal. The next best were morphological. Most living things on Earth share such common architectural features as the rod (indispensable for limbs and bones in general) and the cylinder (internal organs, torsos, and so on), because they provide the most strength and carrying capacity you can get for the money. For the same reasons, so did most of the galaxy’s bestiary. Not always, though. Arcangelo Pelieri’s crew found a mute world, full of soft-bodied things that had never developed bones or chitin, soundless as earthworms or jellyfish. Opal Cudwallader reached a planet where, the scientists deduced, repeated extinctions had kept knocking off land animals as they developed. Its principal creature, like Earthly pinnipeds and cetaceans, was a former land-dweller returned to the sea, and nearly everything else was related. It was as though Darwin’s finches had colonized an entire planet.

And so on and so on, until the explorers began to think they had found every possible variation on water-based, oxygen-breathing life.

Perhaps they almost had.

But then they found the Sluggards—the same race the Heechee had known as the Slow Swimmers—and took another look at the hitherto unimagined possible flora and fauna of the gas giants.

So they had been wrong in their basic assumption that life required the chemistry of a solid planet to evolve. That was a shock to their scientists . . . but not nearly the shock that came a bit later, when they discovered that life didn’t require chemistry at all.

Planets were nice, and pictures of stars were nice, but what everyone really wanted were some more samples of Heechee technology. There wasn’t any doubt that there was some of the stuff waiting to be found—somewhere. The ships proved that. The little morsels picked up in the tunnels of Venus had proved it even earlier. But they just whetted the human appetite for more of these wonders.

Fourteen months after the program officially started, a mission got lucky. Their ship was what was generally called a Five, but the system had not yet begun to operate in a standardized way. This time only four volunteers went along. They were officially chosen by the four Earth powers that had established the Gateway Corporation (the Martians took an interest later), and so they were an American, a Chinese, a Soviet, and a Brazilian. They had learned from the experience of Colonel Kaplan and others who had gone before. They brought along enough food, water, and oxygen to last them for six months; they were taking no chances this time.

As it happened, they didn’t need all those provisions. Their ship brought them back in forty-nine days, and they didn’t come back empty-handed. Their destination had turned out to be an orbit around a planet about the size of the Earth. They had managed to make the lander work, and three of them had actually used it to set foot on the surface of the planet.

For the first time in human history, men walked on the surface of a heavenly body that was not part of the Sun’s entourage.

First impressions were a bit disappointing. The four-power party discovered quickly enough that the planet had had some bad times. Its surface was seared, as though by great heat, and parts of it made their radiation detectors squeal. They knew they could not stay there long. But a mile or less from the lander, down a barren slope from the mountaintop mesa where they had landed, they found some rock and metal formations that looked artificial, and poking around them they dug up three items they thought worth bringing home. One was a flat tile with a triangular design still visible on its glazed surface. The second was a ceramic object about the size of a cigar, with thread markings—a bolt? The third was a yard-long metal cylinder, made of chromium and pierced with a couple of holes; it could have been a musical instrument, or part of a machine—even a Hilsch tube.

Whatever they were, they were artifacts.

When the four-power crew proudly displayed their trophies back on the Gateway asteroid, they created an immense stir. None of the three looked like a major technological breakthrough. Nevertheless, if such things could be found, then there were certainly others—and no doubt things that would be of a lot more practical value.

That was when the interstellar gold rush began in earnest.