Gateway

  I let him go on for a while, all through Monday and halfway through Tuesday. I had not realized he kept such long hours, but then, of course, being a machine he doesn’t really get tired. One or two of the patients look interesting, but there is no one I know, or no one that looks more worth knowing than Yvette, Donna, S. Ya. or about a dozen others. “You can stop that now,” I say, and think for a minute.

  This isn’t really as much fun as I thought it was going to be. Plus my time is running out.

  “I guess I can play this game any old time,” I say. “Right now let’s talk about me.”

  “What would you like me to display, Rob?”

  “What you usually keep from me. Diagnosis. Prognosis. General comments on my case. What kind of a guy you think I am, really.”

  “The subject Robinette Stetley Broadhead,” he says at once, is a forty five year old male, well off financially, who persues an active life-style. His reason for seeking psychiatric help is given as depression and disorientation. He has pronounced guilt feelings and exhibits selective aphasia on the conscious level about several episodes that recur as dream symbols. His sexual drive is relatively low. His relationships with women are generally unsatisfactory, although his psychosexual orientation is predominantly heterosexual in the eightieth percentile…”

  “The hell you say—” I begin, on a delayed reaction to low sexual drive and unsatisfactory relationships. But I don’t really feel like arguing with him, and anyway he says voluntarily at that point:

  “I must inform you, Rob, that your time is nearly up. You should go to the recovery room now.”

  “Crap! What have I got to recover from?” But his point is well taken. “All right,” I say, “go back to normal. Cancel the command — is that all I have to say? Is it canceled?”

  “Yes, Robbie.”

  “You’re doing it again!” I yell. “Make up your fucking mind what you’re going to call me!”

  “I address you by the term appropriate to your state of mind, or to the state of mind I wish to induce in you, Robbie.”

  “And now you want me to be a baby? — No, never mind that. Listen,” I say, getting up, “do you remember all our conversation while I had you commanded to display?”

  “Certainly I do, Robbie.” And then he adds on his own, a full, surprising ten or twenty seconds after my time is up, “Are you satisfied, Robbie?”

  “What?”

  “Have you established to your own satisfaction that I am only a machine? That you can control me at any time?”

  I stop short. “Is that what I’m doing?” I demand, surprised. And then, “All right, I guess so. You’re a machine, Sigfrid. I can control you.”

  And he says after me as I leave, “We always knew that, really, didn’t we? The real thing you fear — the place where you feel control is needed — isn’t that in you?”

  Chapter 20

  When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other’s gut that you can’t find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn’t any romance in it. There wasn’t room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I’d known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara.

  And, like a Klein-bottle yin and yang, she was surrounded by me, too; we each defined the other’s universe, and there were times when I (and, I am sure, she) was desperate to break out and breathe free air again.

  The first day we got back, filthy and exhausted, we automatically headed for Klara’s place. That was where the private bath was, there was plenty of room, it was all ready for us and we fell into bed together like old marrieds after a week of backpacking. Only we weren’t old marrieds. I had no claim on her. At breakfast the next morning (Earth-born Canadian bacon and eggs, scandalously expensive, fresh pineapple, cereal with real cream, cappuccino), Klara made sure to remind me of that fact by ostentatiously paying for it on her own credit. I exhibited the Pavlovian reflex she wanted. I said, “You don’t have to do that. I know you have more money than I do.”

  “And you wish you knew how much,” she said, smiling sweetly. Actually I did know. Shicky had told me. She had seven hundred thousand dollars and change in her account. Enough to go back to Venus and live the rest of her life there in reasonable security if she wanted to, although why anyone would want to live on Venus in the first place I can’t say. Maybe that was why she stayed on Gateway when she didn’t have to. One tunnel is much like another. “You really ought to let yourself be born,” I said, finishing out the thought aloud. “You can’t stay in the womb forever.”

  She was surprised but game. “Rob, dear,” she said, fishing a cigarette out of my pocket and allowing me to light it, “you really ought to let your poor mother be dead. It’s just so much trouble for me, trying to remember to keep rejecting you so you can court her through me.”

  I perceived that we were talking at cross-purposes but, on the other hand, I perceived that we really weren’t. The actual agenda was not to communicate but to draw blood. “Klara,” I said kindly, “you know that I love you. It worries me that you’ve reached forty without, really, ever having had a good, long-lasting relationship with a man.”

  She giggled. “Honey,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. That nose.” She made a face. “Last night in bed, tired as I was, I thought I might upchuck until you turned the other way. Maybe if you went down to the hospital they could unpack it—”

  Well, I could even smell it myself. I don’t know what it is about stale surgical packing, but it is pretty hard to take. So I promised I would do that and then, to punish her, I didn’t finish the hundred-dollar order of fresh pineapple and so, to punish me, she irritably began shifting my belongings around in her cupboards to make room for the contents of her knapsack. So naturally I had to say, “Don’t do that, dear. Much as I love you, I think I’d better move back to my own room for a while.”

  She reached over and patted my arm. “It will be pretty lonely,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette. “I’ve got pretty used to waking up next to you. On the other hand—”

  “I’ll pick up my stuff on the way back from the hospital,” I said. I wasn’t enjoying the conversation that much. I didn’t want to prolong it. It is the sort of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to ascribe to premenstrual tension. I like the theory, but unfortunately in this case I happened to know that it didn’t account for Klara, and of course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for me.

  At the hospital they kept me waiting for more than an hour, and then they hurt me a lot. I bled like a stuck pig, all over my shirt and pants, and while they were reeling out of my nose those endless yards of cotton gauze that Ham Tayeh had stuffed there to keep me from bleeding to death, it felt exactly as if they were pulling out huge gobbets of flesh. I yelled. The little old Japanese lady who was working as outpatient paramedic that day gave me scant patience. “Oh, shut up, please,” she said. “You sound like that crazy returnee who killed himself. Screamed for an hour.”

  I waved her away, one hand to my nose to stop the blood. Alarm bells were going off. “What? I mean, what was his name?”

  She pushed my hand away and dabbed at my nose. “I don’t know — oh, wait a minute. You were from that same hard-luck ship, weren’t you?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Was it Sam Kahane?”

  She became suddenly more human. “I’m sorry, sweet,” she said. “I guess that was the name. They went to give him a shot to keep him quiet, and he got the needle away from the doctor and — well, he stabbed himself to death.”

  It was a real bummer of a day, all right.

  In the long run she got me cauterized. “I’m going to put in just a little
packing,” she said. “Tomorrow you can take it out yourself. Just be slow about it, and if you hemorrhage get your ass down here in a hurry.”

  She let me go, looking like an ax-murder victim. I skulked up to Klara’s room to change my clothes, and the day went on being rotten. “Fucking Gemini,” she snarled at me. “Next time I go out, it’s going to be with a Taurean like that fellow Metchnikov.”

  “What’s the matter, Klara?”

  “They gave us a bonus. Twelve thousand five! Christ. I tip my maid more than that.”

  I was surprise for a split-second and in the same split-second wondered whether, under the circumstances, they wouldn’t divide it by four instead.

  A NOTE ON BLOWUPS

  Dr. Asmenion. Naturally, if you can get good readings on a nova, or especially on a supernova, that’s worth a lot. While it’s happening, I mean. Later, not much good. And always look for our own sun, and if you can identify it take all the tape you can get, at all frequencies, around the immediate area — up to, oh, about five degrees each way, anyway. With maximum magnification.

  Question. Why’s that, Danny?

  Dr. Asmenion. Well, maybe you’ll be on the far side of the sun from something like Tycho’s Star, or the Crab Nebula, which is what’s left of the 1054 supernova in Taurus. And maybe you’ll get a picture of what the star looked like before it blew. That ought to be worth, gee, I don’t know, fifty or a hundred thousand right there.

  “They called on the P-phone ten minutes ago. Jesus. The rottenest son-of-a-bitching trip I’ve ever been on, and I wind up with the price of one green chip at the casino out of it.” Then she looked at my shirt and softened a little. “Well, it’s not your fault, Rob, but Geminis never can make up their minds. I should’ve known that. Let me see if I can find you some clean clothes.”

  And I did let her do that, but I didn’t stay, anyway. I picked up my stuff, headed for a dropshaft, cached my goods at the registry office where I signed up to get my room back, and borrowed the use of their phone. When she mentioned Metchnikov’s name she had reminded me of something I wanted to do.

  Metchnikov grumbled, but finally agreed to meet me in the schoolroom. I was there before him, of course. He loped in, stopped at the doorway, looked around, and said: “Where’s what’s-her-name?”

  “Klara Moynlin. She’s in her room.” Neat, truthful, deceitful. A model answer.

  “Um.” He ran an index finger down each jaw-whisker, meeting under the chin. “Come on, then.” Leading me, he said over his shoulder, “Actually, she would probably get more out of this than you would.”

  “I suppose she would, Dane.”

  “Um.” He hesitated at the bump in the floor that was the entrance to one of the instruction ships, then shrugged, opened the hatch, and clambered down inside.

  He was being unusually open and generous, I thought as I followed him inside. He was already crouched in front of the courseselector panel, setting up numbers. He was holding a portable hand readout data-linked to the Corporation’s master computer system; I knew that he was punching in one of the established settings, and so I was not surprised when he got color almost at once. He thumbed the fine-tuner and waited, looking over his shoulder at me, until the whole board was drowned in shocking pink.

  “All right,” he said. “Good, clear setting. Now look at the bottom part of the spectrum.”

  That was the smaller line of rainbow colors along the right side. Colors merged into one another without break, except for occasional lines of bright color or black. They looked exactly like what the astronomers called Fraunhofer lines, when the only way they had to know what a star or planet was made of was to study it through a spectroscope. They weren’t. Fraunhofer lines show what elements are present in a radiation source (or in something that has gotten itself between the radiation source and you). These showed God-knows-what.

  God and, maybe, Dane Metchnikov. He was almost smiling, and astonishingly talkative. “That band of three dark lines in the blue,” he said. “See? They seem to relate to the hazardousness of the mission. At least the computer printouts show that, when there are six or more bands there, the ships don’t come back.”

  He had my full attention. “Christ!” I said, thinking of a lot of good people who had died because they hadn’t known that. “Why don’t they tell us these things in school?”

  He said patiently (for him), “Broadhead, don’t be a jerk. All this is brand new. And a lot of it is guesswork. Now, the correlation between number of lines and danger isn’t quite so good under six. I mean, if you think that they might add one line for every additional degree of danger, you’re wrong. You would expect that the five-band settings would have heavy loss ratios, and when there are no bands at all there wouldn’t be any losses. Only it isn’t true. The best safety record seems to be with one or two bands. Three is good, too-but there have been some losses. Zero bands, we’ve had about as many as with three.”

  For the first time I began to think that the Corporation’s science-research people might be worth their pay. “So why don’t we just go out on destination settings that are safer?”

  “We’re not really sure they are safer,” Metchnikov said, again patiently for him. His tone was far more peremptory than his words. “Also, when you have an armored ship you should be able to deal with more risks than the plain ones. Quit with the dumb questions, Broadhead.”

  “Sorry.” I was getting uncomfortable, crouched behind him and peering over his shoulder, so that when he turned to look at me his jaw-whiskers almost grazed my nose. I didn’t want to change position.

  “So look up here in the yellow.” He pointed to five brighter lines in the yellow band. “These relate to the profitibility of the mission. God knows what we’re measuring — or what the Heechee were measuring — but in terms of financial rewards to the crews, there’s a pretty good correlation between the number of lines in that frequency and the amount of money the crews get.”

  “Wow!”

  He went on as though I hadn’t said anything. “Now, naturally the Heechee didn’t set up a meter to calibrate how much in royalties you or I might make. It has to be measuring something else, who knows what? Maybe it’s a measure of population density in that area, or of technological development. Maybe it’s a Guide Michelin, and all they’re saying is that there was a four-star restaurant in that area. But there it is. Five-bar-yellow expeditions bring in a financial return, on the average, that’s fifty times as high as two-bar and ten times as high as most of the others.”

  He turned around again so that his face was maybe a dozen centimeters from mine, his eyes staring right into my eyes. “You want to see some other settings?” he asked, in a tone of voice that demanded I say no, so I did. “Okay.” And then he stopped.

  I stood up and backed away to get a little more space. “One question, Dane. You probably have a reason for telling me all this before it gets to be public information. What is it?”

  “Right,” he said. “I want what’s-her-name for crew if I go in a Three or a Five.”

  “Klara Moynlin.”

  “Whatever. She handles herself well, doesn’t take up much room, knows — well, she knows how to get along with people better than I do. I sometimes have difficulty in interpersonal relationships,” he explained. “Of course, that’s only if I take a Three or a Five. I don’t particularly want to. If I can find a One, that’s what I’m going to take out. But if there isn’t a One with a good setting available, I want somebody along I can rely on, who won’t get in my hair, who knows the ropes, can handle a ship — all that. You can come, too, if you want.”

  When I got back to my own room Shicky turned up almost before I started to unpack. He was glad to see me. “I am sorry your trip was unfruitful,” he said out of his endless stock of gentleness and warmth. “It is too bad about your friend Kahane.” He had brought me a flask of tea, and then perched on the chest across from my hammock, just like the first time.

  I mind was spinning with with vi
sions of sugarplums coming out of my talk with Dane Metchnikov. I couldn’t help talking about it; I told Shicky everything Dane had said.

  He listened like a child to a fairy tale, his black eyes shining. “How interesting,” he said. “I had heard rumors that there was to be a new briefing for everyone. Just think, if we can go out without fear of death or—” He hesitated, fluttering his wing-gauze.

  “It isn’t that sure, Shicky,” I said.

  “No, of course not. But it is an improvement, I think you will agree?” He hesitated, watching me take a pull from the flask of almost flavorless Japanese tea. “Rob,” he said, “if you go on such a trip and need an extra man… Well, it is true that I would not be of much use in a lander. But in orbit I am as good as anybody.”

  “I know you are, Shicky.” I tried to put it tactfully. “Does the Corporation know that?”

  “They would accept me as crew on a mission no one else wanted.”

  “I see.” I didn’t say that I didn’t really want to go on a mission no one else wanted. Shicky knew that. He was one of the real oldtimers on Gateway. According to the rumor he had had a big wad stashed away, enough for Full Medical and everything. But he had given it away or lost it, and stayed on, and stayed a cripple. I know that he understood what I was thinking, but I was a long way from understanding Shikitei Bakin.

  He moved out of my way while I stowed my things, and we gossiped about mutual friends. Sheri’s ship had not returned. Nothing to worry about yet, of course. It could easily be out another several weeks without disaster. A Congolese couple from just beyond the star-point in the corridor had brought back a huge shipment of prayer fans from a previously unknown Heechee warren, on a planet around an F-2 star in the end of the Orion spiral arm. They had split a million dollars three ways, and had taken their share back to Mungbere. The Forehands…