The Gateway Trip

Ultimately a couple of lucky breaks did begin to turn up a few such interesting discoveries, though they were very sparse and slow in coming. The first definite signs of an alien intelligence (not counting the Heechee themselves, of course) were detected by a three-person crew from Pasadena, California, Earth. They came out of faster-than-light drive in orbit around a promising-looking sun (it was identified as a G-4, pretty close to Earth’s own primary in type and suitability), and discovered quickly that there was a good-sized planet right in the middle of the habitability zone.

The trouble was, the planet was a mess. Most of one hemisphere was a patchwork of bare rock plains, punctuated with volcanoes, and the thing was hot. It didn’t have much in the way of oceans. It didn’t even have anything like as much of an atmosphere as its mass and constitution would have predicted. However, what it did have was a dam. A big one.

The dam was on the less ruined side of the planet. Even so, it was not at all in good shape. It wasn’t a very high-tech dam, for that matter—half a kilometer of rock piled across a valley. It had once been a river valley, no doubt, but there was nothing left of the river at all. There wasn’t much left of the dam, for that matter. But what there was could not have been natural. Someone had piled those rocks in that place for a definite purpose.

Martin Scranton and his two sisters tried to land on the planet. They made a landing, all right, but the heat sensors in their lander began to squawk warnings as soon as they touched down; the surface even around the dam was hotter than the boiling point of water. They did, they thought, see traces of what might have been other stone structures on a few mountaintops, but nothing in recognizable shape.

Back on the Gateway asteroid, the scientists decided that that planet had had some bad luck—bad enough to be struck by some wandering body, probably something the size of Callisto; the impact had boiled off the seas, buried much of the planet under molten rock, driven the atmosphere into space—and, oh, yes, certainly, killed every organic thing that had ever inhabited it.

So Scranton hadn’t found intelligent life. He did claim that he had at least found a place where intelligent life had once been. The Gateway Corporation couldn’t call it a success, in terms of the discovery bonus offered. But still. They took a long time to think it over, then paid half the bonus for a good try.

The first living nonhuman intelligent race the human explorers found didn’t count. They weren’t all that nonhuman, and they weren’t all that intelligent, either. (For that matter, they weren’t even discovered by a Gateway ship; the people who found them were moping around the extremes of Earth’s own solar system in a primitive Earth-designed rocket ship. ) What these particular “aliens” were were the remote descendants of a tribe of Earthly australopithecines, and the place they were found was on the big Heechee ship (or artifact), orbiting out in Sol’s Oort cloud of comets, called “Heechee Heaven.”

Of course, as we have seen, those old australopithecines hadn’t gotten there by themselves. The Heechee had taken them away for breeding stock, in that long-ago visit to prehuman Earth. Then they had left them to the care of machine nursemaids—for half a million years and more.

The second race of aliens was better. It took a long time before they were found, but they were clearly the real thing at last. They were definitely intelligent—they proved it by traveling through interstellar space on their own! But they were a bit of a disappointment, all the same. They certainly weren’t much fun to talk to.

They weren’t exactly found by a Gateway prospector, either—the whole Gateway Corporation was pretty nearly history by the time these folks got discovered. It still existed, of course. But Gateway no longer was where the action was, for by then human beings had learned to copy a lot of Heechee technology and were venturing into new areas of the galaxy on their own.

At that point, one interstellar ship, on what had become a fairly routine cruise, detected an unfamiliar vessel. It turned out to be a photon-sail ship, slowly chugging along between stars on a voyage of centuries.

That certainly was not Heechee technology! Nor was it human, not even australopithecine: the long-awaited truly alien race had at last been located!

But actually they had been discovered quite a while earlier, it turned out—by the Heechee themselves, in fact. The sailboat people were the descendants of what the Heechee had called the “Slow Swimmers” and human beings came to know as the “Sluggards.” They were definitely alien, and definitely not Heechee, and definitely intelligent.

That was all they had to recommend them, though. The Sluggards were sludge dwellers. They lived in wandering arcologies in a semifrozen mush of methane and other gases, and, although they had really and truly managed to launch those photon-sail spaceships, they didn’t have many other attractive qualities. The worst thing was that they were terribly slow. Their metabolisms ran at the pace of free-radical reactions in the icy slush they lived in, and so did their thoughts, and their speech. It took a long time before any human beings were able to establish any sort of useful communication with the snail’s-pace Sluggards . . . and by then, as it turned out, it didn’t really matter.

MISSION STINKPOT

The four people on this mission spent a lot of time, and a lot of money, in court. What they were doing there was trying to win a suit against the Gateway Corporation for that ten-million-dollar bonus. They thought they had a pretty good case.

They didn’t have a very good planet, though. Certainly it wasn’t an attractive one. It was small and it was hot; its sun was a red dwarf, only a quarter of an AU away. And the planet really stank. That was what gave it its name.

The planet was also largely covered with water—not sparkling tropical seas but a sluggish ocean that bubbled methane into an atmosphere that was already mostly methane. You couldn’t breathe the stuff. You wouldn’t have wanted to if you could, because of the stink, and there was absolutely nothing of interest anywhere on the planet’s few dry-land surfaces.

That wasn’t good news for the people in the ship, but it wasn’t absolutely crushing, either. As it happened, they had made some unusual preparations before they left Gateway, and thus they were equipped for more than the casual touchdown-and-lookaround of your average Gateway crew.

They were a family, and they came from Singapore. They were Jimmy Oh Kip Fwa, his wife Daisy Mek Tan Dah, and their two young daughters, Jenny Oh Sing Dut and Rosemary Oh Ting Lu. The Oh family was very old in Singapore. They had once been very rich, with a family fortune that had been made out of underwater mining. When Malaysia took the island over and expropriated all its industries the Ohs stopped being rich, but they had wisely socked away enough in Switzerland and Jakarta to finance their fares to Gateway, with enough left over to bring along some extra equipment. It was gear for underwater exploration. As Jimmy Oh told his family, “The Ohs made a lot of money out of sea-bottoms once. Maybe we can do it again.”

Taking all that stuff with them meant that they could only fit four people in their Five, but then they didn’t much want anyone else along anyway. And when they saw what sort of planet they had reached through the luck of the draw, Madame Mek was blessedly silent—at last—and their daughter Jenny said, “Jesus, Pop, you’re not so dumb after all.”

Even the Ohs hadn’t brought along the kind of deep-sea diving gear and instrumentation that would let them make a systematic survey of Stinkpot’s sea bottom. There was just too much sea bottom to explore, and too little time. What they had was half a dozen instrumented neutral-buoyancy balls. They dropped them into the global ocean at half a dozen randomly chosen points. Then they went back to their orbiting ship and waited for transmissions.

As the buoys returned to the surface, the Ohs interrogated each one in turn about what it had found. That was disappointing. Of Heechee metal, the instruments had detected none at all. Of the kind of transuranic or other radioactive elements that might, just possibly, be worth mining and shipping back to Earth, also nothing.

But the instruments had picked up some electrical potentials that didn’t seem to have any identifiable source. They were regular, in a pleasingly irregular kind of way. They made nice, rounded waves on a CRT, and when Jenny Oh, who had majored in cetacean ethology in school, slowed the signals down and played them through a sound synthesizer, they sounded . . . alive.

Were the signals language? If so, of what sort of living thing?

That was when the lawsuits started.

The Oh family said that language definitely proved the existence of intelligent life. The Corporation’s lawyers said chirps and squeals weren’t language, even if they did happen to be electromagnetic instead of acoustical. (Actually the signals did sound more like cricket chirps or bird calls than any articulate tongue.) The Ohs said how could crickets communicate by electrical impulses unless they were smart enough to build something like radio sets? The Corporation’s lawyers said there wasn’t any radio involved, just electric fields, and maybe the creatures had current-producing organs like an electric eel. The Ohs said, aha, then you admit you owe us at least the alien-life-discovery bonus, so pay it up right away. The Corporation’s lawyers said, first show us your specimens. Or photographs. Or anything to prove these alien life forms are real.

Of course, all of this was in slow time. Each interchange in this dialogue took six or eight months of continuances and motion hearings and the taking of depositions. After three litigious years the Corporation grudgingly allowed a quarter-million-dollar settlement, which just about paid the Ohs’ lawyer bills. Then, years after that, someone else repeated their trip with better equipment. The new underwater probes had lights and cameras, and they found what was making the signals. It wasn’t intelligence. It was worms—ten meters long, eyeless, living on the sulfurous exudation of undersea thermal vents. The things turned out on dissection to have electrical systems, just as the Ohs had claimed. That was all they did have that was of any interest at all.

Nevertheless, at least the Ohs were clearly entitled to another couple of hundred thousand, now that their discovery of life was confirmed. They didn’t get it, though. They were no longer in any position to collect any further bonuses, having failed to return from their latest mission.

The intelligent-alien bonus didn’t go entirely unclaimed, though. Two other parties of Gateway explorers did, in fact, collect their ten million apiece. They found what the Corporation, with some charity, agreed to call “intelligent” aliens.

Everyone admitted that the Corporation was stretching a point here. Even the lucky explorers did, though that didn’t keep them from taking the money. The “Voodoo Pigs” looked like blue-skinned anteaters and wallowed in filth, like domesticated Earthly pigs. What made them “intelligent” was that they had developed an art form: they made little statuettes, nibbling them into shape with their teeth (well, the things they used for teeth), and that was more than any Earthly animal had ever done. So the Corporation philosophically paid off. Then there were the “Quancies.” They lived in the sea of a remote planet. They had tiny flippers, but no real hands; they weren’t any good at manufacturing things for that reason, and so no one considered them technological. What they did have was a definite, and even a more or less translatable, language. They were definitely smarter than, say, dolphins or whales or anything else on Earth but man himself—and there, too, the Corporation paid its bonus. (By then it was getting so rich that it was actually becoming generous, anyway. )

Those were all the live ones.

There were, to be sure, traces of other “civilizations” that were gone. A planet here and there had refined metal structures, not yet completely rusted away; others showed that somebody, sometime, had gone so far as to pollute its environment with certainly artificial radionuclides.

That was it.

And the more they found, the more the wonder grew. Where were the old civilizations? The ones who had reached Earth’s stage of culture a million or a billion years before? Why hadn’t they survived?

It was as though the first explorers into, say, the Amazon jungle had found huts, farms, villages, but instead of living denizens only corpses. The explorers would certainly wonder what had killed all the people off.

So wondered the Gateway prospectors. They could have accepted it if they had found no traces of any other intelligence (always, of course, not counting the Heechee themselves). Those members of the human race who cared about such things had been braced for that all along: the SETI searches and the cosmological estimates had prepared them for a lonely universe. But there had been other creatures that appeared to have been capable of as much technology and as much wisdom as the human race. They had existed, and now they were gone.

What had happened?

It was a long time before the human race found out the answer to that, and then they didn’t like it at all.