“Congratulations,” Stan said. Experimentally he released himself from the sleep sack, grabbing a holdfast. Weightlessness was not permanently unbearable, he discovered, but there was another problem. “Have you also discovered where I can pee?” he asked.
“Of course. I’ll show you. Then we can start studying the list of missions. There is no sense hanging around here when we could be making our fortunes.”
Time was, Stan knew, when any brave or desperate volunteer who got to Gateway could have his choice of a score of the cryptic Heechee ships. You got into the one you had picked. You set the funny-looking control wheels any which way you liked, because nobody had a clue which ways were “right.” You squeezed the go-teat. And then—traveling faster than light, though no one knew how that was done—you were on your way to adventure and fortune. Or to disappointment and frustration, when the chance-set destination held nothing worthwhile. Or, frequently enough, to a horrible death…but that was the risk you had to take for such great rewards.
That was then. It was different now. Over the years, nearly two hundred of the ships that had bravely set off had never come back. Another few dozen of those that remained on the asteroid—particularly the larger ships, the Fives and a few Threes—were now employed in transport duty, ferrying their trickle of colonists to such livable worlds as Valhalla or Peggys Planet, or to exploit the other cache of usable ships that had been found on Gateway Two. When the boys checked the listings they were disappointed. Three or four missions were open, but every one of them was in a One—that is, in a ship that would hold any one person—no use at all to two young men who were determined to ship out together.
They didn’t stop at watching the postings on the screen. They went to see the dispatcher himself, a fat and surly Brazilian named Hector Montefiore. To get to Montefiore’s office you had to go all the way to Gateway’s outermost shell, where the ships nestled in their pods as they waited for a mission. Some of the pods were empty, the outer port closed against the vacuum of space; their ships were actually Out. The boys looked their fill, then shook the curtain of Montefiore’s office and went in.
The dispatcher was idly watching an entertainment screen, eating something that had not come out of the Gateway mess hall. He listened to them for a bare moment, then shook his head. “Fuck off, you guys,” he advised. “I can’t help you. I don’t assign the missions. The big domes do that. When they decide on a flight, the computer puts it up on the board and I just take the names of the volunteers. Next big one? How the hell do I know?”
Stan was disposed to argue. Tan pulled him away. In the corridor outside Stan snarled at his friend. “He’s bound to know something, isn’t he?”
“Maybe so, but he isn’t going to tell us, is he? We could try bribing him—”
Stan laughed sourly. “With what?”
“Exactly, Stan. So let’s get out of here.”
They retired to the common space in Gateway’s central spindle, the place they called the Blue Hell, to consider their options over cups of Gateway’s expensive and watery coffee. Coffee was not all you could buy in the Blue Hell. You didn’t have to pay for your basic meals on Gateway; their cost, like the price of the water they drank, the cubicle they lived in and the air they breathed, was covered by their daily rent. If you wanted more than that, you had to go to the Blue Hell. There was fine food, if you could pay the price, and liquor of all sorts, and the gambling that gave the place its name. The boys jealously smelled the great steaks they saw more fortunate others devouring, and watched the magnetized roulette ball spin around. Then Stan took a deep breath.
He poked Tan in the shoulder. “Hey, man! We’re on Gateway! Let’s at least do a little wandering around the joint!”
They did, almost forgetting that their money was going and the mission they had come for had not appeared. They went to a place called Central Park, where fruit trees and berry bushes grew—but were not to be picked unless you paid their price. They looked at Gateway’s great water reservoir, curling up with the shape of the asteroid’s shell but, to them, mostly reminiscent of the big underground reservoir lakes of Istanbul. And they went, reverently, to Gateway’s museum.
Everything they saw there was halfway familiar to Stan, from the Gateway stories he had devoured in his youth. Being in the museum itself was different. It was filled with Heechee artifacts, brought back from one mission or another: prayer fans, fire pearls, gadgets of all kinds. There were holos of planets that had been visited; the boys admired Peggys Planet, with its broad, cultivated fields and handsome woods; they shivered at Valhalla—habitable, the Gateway authorities claimed, but more like Siberia than Paradise. Even worse were the holos of the murdered planets, the mysterious ones that had once held civilizations of which nothing was left but ruins. How? Why? No one knew. The boys looked at the holos in silence, and turned away.
Most interesting, in a practical way, were the holos of the various models of Heechee ships, the Ones, the Threes and the Fives. (Well, that was what the human beings on Gateway called them, according to the size of the crew they held. What the Heechee themselves called them was more than anyone could say.)
Some of the ships had fittings that didn’t seem to do anything, particularly the few that contained a Heechee-metal dome that, after a few disasters, no one had dared try to open. Many were armored, particularly the Threes and Fives. Nearly all had human-installed external sensors and cameras, as well as racks of food, tanks of oxygen, rebreathers, all the things that made it possible for a prospector to stay alive while he flew; if the Heechee themselves had had anything of the sort it was long gone.
While they were puzzling over these questions they heard a cough from behind. When they turned it was the girl with the lopsided face who had come up from Earth with them, whose name was Estrella Pancorbo. She seemed a lot less pale. Surprised, Stan said, “You’re looking, uh, well.” Meaning, apart from the fact that your face looks as though someone sat on it.
She gave him a searching look, but bobbed her head to acknowledge the compliment. “Better every day, thank you. I fooled them,” she added cryptically, but didn’t say who the “them” was. She didn’t want to continue the conversation, either; had studying to do, she said, and immediately began running through the ship holos and taking notes.
The boys lingered for a while, but then they left because it was clear she preferred to be alone—but not without having had her effect on Stan, who had not been near a girl of anything like his own age since Naslan.
On the way out Tan mused, “I wonder how the folks are getting along back home.”
Stan nodded. He recognized homesickness when he saw it. He even felt a little of it himself, though he hadn’t had much experience of having a real home. “We could write them a letter,” he offered.
Tan shook himself, and gave Stan a grin. “And pay transmission costs? Not me, Stan. I’m not much for writing letters anyway, and besides, what would we have to say? Let’s get some more of that piss-poor coffee.”
II
That day passed. So did another day. A couple of Ones appeared on the mission screen, but nothing better, and even those were snapped up at once by less picky prospectors. The boys spent more and more of their time hanging around the Blue Hell, wondering, but not willing to ask each other, what they were going to do when their money ran out.
They did not lack for advice. Old Gateway hands, many of them wearing the wrist bracelets that showed that they had been Out, were often willing to share their lore. The friendliest was a spry, middle-aged Englishwoman with a drawn face and unshakable views on what missions to take. “Do you know what the Heechee control wheels look like? What you want are settings that show two bands in the red on the first wheel and none in the yellow on the second,” she lectured.
“Why?” Tan asked, hanging on every word.
“Because they are safe settings! No mission with those settings has ever been lost. Trust me on this, I know.” And when she had finished the coff
ee she had cadged from them and left, Tan pursed his lips.
“She may have something there,” he said.
“She has nothing there,” Stan scoffed. “Did you count her bangles? Nine of them! She has been Out nine times and hasn’t earned the price of a cup of coffee. No, Tan. We want something that might be less safe, but would be more profitable.”
Tan shrugged, conceding the point. “In any case,” he said philosophically, “it is true that if any of them did know what to do they would be doing it instead of telling us about it. So let us go eat.”
“All right,” Stan said, and then shook his head, struck with a thought. “The hell with that. I’m not hungry. Besides, I’ve got a better idea. We lugged those instruments with us, why not jam a little?”
Tan blinked at him. “Here? They’d throw us out.”
“So we can go somewhere where nobody would be bothered by our practicing. Maybe Central Park?”
Stan was right, there was nobody there. They picked a corner with plenty of holdfasts, and set up to play.
Stan had no problem with his trumpet, once he was securely hooked to a wall bracket. Tan’s drums were another matter. He had to lash them to each other and to a pair of holdfasts, and then he complained that the sticks wouldn’t bounce properly without solid gravity. All the same they managed “When the Saints Come Marching in,” after a fashion, and did better on “A String of Pearls.” Stan was riffing on “St. James Infirmary Blues” when Tan stopped drumming and caught his arm. “Look there!”
Tarsheesh was hurtling toward them around the rim of the lake. As soon as he came close, Tan called, “Are we making too much noise?”
Tarsheesh grabbed a bracket and stopped himself, panting in excitement. “Noise? No! It is the news that just came! You haven’t heard? The Herter-Hall party has reached the object in the Oort cloud, and it is big, and it is Heechee, and it is still working!”
There hadn’t been that much excitement in Gateway in years. The Herter-Hall mission—the Broadhead-financed human-built rocket ship that had been chugging its way up to the Oort cloud for as long as Stan could remember—had indeed found something that made it all worthwhile. Hanging out there was nothing less than a whole working Heechee orbiter, the size of an ocean liner, of a kind never seen before! The thing was not simply dead in its orbit there, it actually manufactured food! CHON-food, they called it, made mostly out of the basic elements that were in the comets of the Oort cloud, C(arbon), H(ydrogen), O(xygen), N(itrogen). And that antique Heechee creation was still doing it, after all those hundreds of thousands of years. And if they could bring it to a near-Earth orbit, as the Herter-Hall people were trying to do, and if they could feed it with comets and things as they entered the lower solar system, why, hunger for the human race might one day be over!
They speculated enviously on what that could be worth to the Herter-Hall family and to Robinette Broadhead himself, as backer of the expedition. “Billions,” Stan said profoundly, and Tan gave him a look of scorn.
“Only billions? For a thing like that?”
“Billions of American dollars, you cow. Many billions for all of them, so Robinette Broadhead can add more billions to the billions he already owns. So you see, old Tan, what one lucky find can do?”
Tan did see. So did everybody else. When they checked the listings every one of the few missions offered had been snapped up. “Not even a One left! Nothing at all,” Tan complained. “And yet they take money out of our balance every day, even when there is nothing for us to sign up for.”
So they did. And kept on doing it, one day, and then another day, and then another. The boys followed the mission listings obsessively, but without much luck. A One showed up, then two more—both of them also Ones, and taken as soon as they appeared. Tan groaned when he saw the notice that the third ship was filled, because the name on the roster was his friend Tarsheesh. “I was hoping the three of us could ship together,” he said, angry. “He wouldn’t wait!”
Stan couldn’t blame him. He even toyed with the thought of taking a One himself, leaving Tan behind. But then no more Ones showed up, either, so he didn’t have to deal with that strain on his conscience.
There was a little traffic in the other direction. Two or three ships straggled back from their missions. All Ones, and mostly duds of one kind or another. And then a lordly Five made it back, and this one had had success. Well, some success. Not the dazzling kind, but not bad. They had reached an airless moon of a gas-giant planet they couldn’t identify. It had Heechee artifacts, all right. They could see a domed Heechee-metal structure, and things nearby that looked sort of like they had been tractored vehicles, but they could only look. They couldn’t touch. Their ship had no equipment to let them get out and move around in vacuum. The pictures they did come back with earned them enough of a bonus to retire to, respectively, Cincinnati, Johannesburg, Madrid, Nice and Mexico City, and their Five was thus open for anyone who cared to take it.
Not right away, of course. The elderly Englishwoman with the nine Out bangles caught Tan and Stan as they were leaving the mess hall, giddy with excitement. “There’s your best bet, ducks! They’ll clean it up and put in fresh stores, and then they’ll send it right back to make the finds—this time with space suits and handling equipment aboard. Oh, it’ll take a while. A fortnight or so, I imagine, but wait for it! Good color, too—but we don’t want everyone to know, so, remember, softly-softly-catchee-monkey!” And hurried happily off to tell her secret to anyone else with the price of a cup of coffee.
Of course, the secret wasn’t worth much more than that, especially to two young men who didn’t have a fortnight or so to spare.
Then, without warning, a Five did appear on the list. It didn’t do Stan and Tan any good, though. The listing appeared while they were asleep, and by the time they saw it the crew roster was long since filled.
What made it worse was that every day, every day of those few remaining days, there were fresh bulletins from the people who were making it really big, the Herter-Hall party on the Food Factory in the Oort. The Herter-Halls were strapping ion rockets onto the object to nudge it out of orbit and back toward Earth. Then further news: the object wouldn’t be nudged. Somehow it counteracted the force applied, they couldn’t say how. Then they found indications that there was someone else aboard. Then—oh, miraculous event!—they met that someone. And he was a human boy, with the human name of Wan! And he seemed to have a Heechee ship of his own that he used to commute between the Food Factory and some even larger, more complex Heechee vessel. A vast one, stuffed with Heechee machines of all kinds, and still working!
Tan was surly with envy, Stan little better. Snapping at each other, they parked themselves in front of the mission screen, taking turns to pee, refusing sleep. “The very next one,” Tan vowed. “Three or Five, we will be on it!”
Stan concurred. “Damn right we will! We may not make trillions, like these people, or even billions, but we’ll make something out of it, and we won’t let anything get us away from this screen—”
But then something did.
Stan stopped in the middle of his vow, suddenly stricken. His eyes burned. His throat was suddenly agonizingly raw. His head pounded, and he could hardly breathe.
It was the Wrath of God again. Not exactly the same as before. Worse. Stan felt his whole body burning with fever. He was sick. Tan was in equal distress. Sobbing, his hands to his temples and curled up like a baby in the womb, he was floating away, the holdfast forgotten. It wasn’t just sickness, either. Under the malaise was the familiar desperate sexual yearning, the loneliness, the unfocused, bitter anger…
And it went on, and on…
And then, without warning, it was over.
Stan reached out to catch Tan’s flailing arm and dragged him back to a holdfast. “Jesus,” he said, and Tan agreed.
“That was a pisser.” And then, urgently, “Stan! Look!”
He was staring at the mission monitor. Gateway’s computers, una
ffected by whatever it was that drove every human momentarily mad, had been carrying out theirs programmed routine. Something new was posted on the screen:
Mission 2402
Armored Three, immediate departure
“Let’s take it!” Tan yelled.
“Of course,” Stan said, already logging in. In a moment their names appeared on the roster:
Mission 2402
Armored Three, immediate departure
Stanley Avery
Oltan Kusmeroglu
Rapturously the two boys pounded each other’s arms and backs. “We made it!” Tan shouted.
“And just in time,” Stan said, pointing. “Look at that!” Only seconds later another name had appeared:
Mission 2402
Armored Three, immediate departure
Stanley Avery
Oltan Kusmeroglu
Estrella Pancorbo
roster complete
III
The dream had come true. Stanley Avery was actually in an actual Heechee ship, actually following in the footsteps of those immortal Gateway heroes who braved the perils of star travel and came back to wealth unimaginable and fame that would go down through the ages…
“Or,” Tan growled, when Stan ventured to say as much to him, “to some very unpleasant death. I do not care for this shit-struck little ship. Why is it armored?”